TRON’s Financial Incentives for Torrent Users Will be Private by Design

[Matrix]

There has been a lot of talk about BitTorrent and TRON's plans to add financial incentives to the torrent ecosystem. Today, TRON founder Justin Sun answers a few of our questions, emphasizing that any protocol extensions will be implemented with user privacy in mind. Sun expects that the first features of Project Atlas will be available early next year.

When the relatively new cryptocurrency TRON acquired BitTorrent a few months ago, there was ample speculation on the future of the company.

As the main developer of both uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline, future decisions will impact a userbase of roughly 100 million people.

After a brief period of silence, TRON’s founder Justin Sun assured the public that BitTorrent was not going anywhere. Instead, he proposed a new project that aims to make it even better.

The idea behind Project Atlas, as it’s named, is to add ‘currency’ to the BitTorrent protocol through a series of extensions. This makes it possible to financially reward seeders, or to speed up torrents by paying for faster access.

While many TRON investors praised the idea, with some claiming that it will revolutionize the Internet, BitTorrent users tend to be more skeptical of this type of change.

At TorrentFreak, we had some questions as well, and luckily TRON’s Justin Sun was willing to fill in some blanks.

We already knew that the Project Atlas would be open for other clients to use and would be backwards compatible. This means that it can handle all existing torrents and talk to clients which choose not to implement it.

TRON’s founder confirmed this, adding that uTorrent and BitTorrent users won’t be forced to use it.

“There will be a setting to allow turning the feature on and off,” Sun told TorrentFreak.

“It will work with all existing torrents. The clients which do not have this optional protocol extension will function as before, similarly to a Project-Atlas-compatible client with the setting turned off.”

BitTorrent already uses a “tit-for-tat” scheme which rewards people for sharing and vice versa. TRON’s founder sees the new financial incentives as a logical extension of that.

“We see the Project Atlas system as an extension of this design decision — one that can persist across time and across swarms, and one where bandwidth contribution is rewarded whether you are actively downloading or seeding,” Sun tells us.

 

The goal
 

 

Another question that was on people’s minds is how it will all work, privacy-wise. Are users’ downloads tracked in a database? Can these be tracked back to individuals?

According to TRON, this is not the case. The protocol extension will be compatible with any and all torrents, but the rewards cannot be linked to specific files. The torrent client merely rewards people for how much they share.

“We know that privacy is very important to people, especially in the digital age, so we are designing the system with privacy in mind and an ability to opt-out of this new feature,” Sun says.

“The incentive system itself is not related to individual torrents. It tracks only that a certain number of tokens were transferred from one peer to another, and the details of this token transfer will not be publicly visible.”

It’s also important to note that Project Atlas will first be rolled out in desktop clients. This means that the new uTorrent Web and the similar BitTorrent Web, which came out this week, are in the queue for now.

Before the TRON acquisition, BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen suggested that these web clients could eventually replace the company’s desktop versions. However, Sun stresses that there is absolutely no plan to phase out the desktop products.

We also asked Sun about his thoughts on the frequent associations that are made between BitTorrent and piracy. Previously the RIAA sent a letter to BitTorrent Inc, asking it to add a hash filter to block pirated content, for example. Sun, however, chose not to comment on whether this is an option or not.

While BitTorrent already functions very well, TRON hopes to make it even faster with its protocol extensions. Ideally, the rewards should also ensure that files are seeded for a longer period, which increases the overall availability.

This is also Sun’s long-term goal.

“We would like to see more users, more seeds, and a protocol that represents an even faster technology. With Project Atlas, we plan to make torrenting in general faster and easier for novices and experts alike,” Sun says.

For now, it’s a priority to get the first version of Project Atlas out to the public. While no hard date is mentioned, this is planned for the next few months.

“We expect the first features of Project Atlas will be available around early 2019,” Sun concludes.

Whether Project Atlas will be well received by the community and if it will indeed bring about the changes TRON and BitTorrent envision, will become more clear then.

 

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[straycat19]

Paying for seeding illegal content, the sure way to go to jail and have all their cyber currency confiscated.  I am willing to bet there is a group of FBI agents just waiting for their opportunity to take them down and pave their way to better positions within the FBI.

[steven36]

1 hour ago, straycat19 said:

Paying for seeding illegal content, the sure way to go to jail and have all their cyber currency confiscated.  I am willing to bet there is a group of FBI agents just waiting for their opportunity to take them down and pave their way to better positions within the FBI.

Good luck with them ever putting Justin Sun in jail he lives in Beijing, China and how much paper have the DOJ have done wasted on useless indictments of people they will never catch  from countries that don't have extradition agreements  with the USA? Lol  filehost outside the USA have been paying people to upload  for years and the USA  has been able to do very little  about it . Every year they be on the USA  bad web sites list along with torrent sites  and still they remain in business.

 

Former   director of the FBI Louis  Freeh said the other day trying catch someone from Russia or China is like trying to  catch Osama bin Laden. They can't even catch state hackers they indicted so why would they waste time on Justin Sun?  The  Stock market is going to kill his business with the crypto market  collapsing  and nobody is going to have do nothing hes a bullshiter who lives in denial  of the markets . He bought utorrent in a day and age were serious BitTorrent users ether use and really old version or open source .