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uTorrent Now Includes Tokenized BitTorrent Speed


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A few hours ago, BitTorrent Inc. rolled out a new version of uTorrent with the much-heralded BitTorrent Speed integration. Users who installed the software were given 10 BitTorrent Tokens (BTT) to play around with, alongside a promise that downloads would take place more quickly. Whether that's actually the case is likely to be a question debated for some time.

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More than a year ago, TF revealed that Justin Sun, founder of cryptocurrency TRON, was planning to buy BitTorrent Inc.

The sale was completed in 2018 and was followed by an announcement this January that the company planned to augment the BitTorrent protocol with a method to speed up downloads using a new token called BTT.

The idea is that people can earn BTT by seeding content for longer, thus providing more bandwidth for the swarm. This bandwidth can then be purchased using BTT by those who want faster downloads.

A few hours ago, BitTorrent Inc. released a new version of the Windows uTorrent client – version 3.5.5 (build 45287) – with an early implementation of the promised features. The interface is largely the same as before but with the inclusion of a BitTorrent Speed button on the left pane. Pressing it reveals the following;

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The BitTorrent Speed dashboard

As indicated in the ‘balance’ section, all new users are gifted 10 BTT. An AMA conducted on YouTube by TRON founder and BitTorrent CEO Justin Sun and BitTorrent’s VP of Product Justin Knoll revealed that this was to “bootstrap” BitTorrent Speed. The idea is to reward early adopters and create a little bit of supply so that people are able to use tokens to experience faster downloads.

The next step of the setup is to create a wallet in which to store users’ BTT. The process is very simple indeed and only requires the user to input a secure password.

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Enter a secure password

The process is very straightforward and once complete, it’s then up to the user to load up their uTorrent software with a torrent file of their choice. The fact that BitTorrent Inc. doesn’t get involved in this process was underlined during the AMA, with Knoll indicating that people should simply head off onto the web and find torrents themselves.

Tests shared with TF on a random torrent with several hundred active peers quickly revealed around 9 other peers offering a BitTorrent Speed “boost”, a fact revealed in the dashboard. With the ‘Speed Increase’ toggle turned on, it was claimed that the download was 219.2% faster than usual. Any ‘bidding’ for this claimed additional speed currently takes place automatically.

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Alleged speed-boost

While the torrent speed would no doubt have gained momentum as more seeds and peers were found, switching the toggle back and forth didn’t seem to make much difference to actual download speeds in the client. Occasionally, pressing the button from off to on did increase the download speed but at times, switching the toggle the other way also had the same effect.

Without longer-term detailed network analysis, it is extremely difficult to see whether any positive fluctuations are a result of BitTorrent Speed or just regular peers and seeds ebbing and flowing as they usually do. For now, the new system can only be taken at face value and even then with caveats.

Certainly, sudden claims in the client that a 25,000%+ speed boost was taking place simply cannot be true, unless it suddenly stopped most transfers and then calculated from there. The fact is that not enough information is currently provided in the client to draw any accurate conclusions.

It’s also worth considering that before this feature was made available, the same bandwidth would have been available in the swarm without discrimination, so the only possible boost for uTorrent users this morning would have been obtained to the detriment of others in the swarm using a different client. Unless people were immediately seeding more.

Nevertheless, this is very early days for the system, something that was underlined in the AMA several times. Indeed, some users may notice that their gifted 10 BTT balance doesn’t seem to change in their client, a point addressed by Knoll.

“You’re probably unlikely to see [your BTT run out] with this early build, you’re more likely to see increased download speeds and a balance that stays approximately the same as when you install it. If you do run out, the way you can refill the wallet is by connecting it to another wallet or seeding torrents,” he explained.

Of course, the big push has surrounded the ability of users to earn BTT for seeding. However, that doesn’t seem particularly likely in the version just released.

“In this early build while we’re still evolving the product and getting a larger and larger userbase of BitTorrent Speed users, you should expect to see much more speed improvements and less earning for seeding,” Knoll said.

“The earnings you can expect depend on a variety of factors. Demand for the file is part of it, how many seeds are already available is part of it. It’s easier to earn if you’re seeding a file where you’re one of a smaller number of seeds than when there’s a lot of users who are trying to download it. You want to be in a file where a lot of wallet users are trying to get it.”

Finding those torrents is currently down to the skill of the user but BitTorrent Inc. suggests that in the future there could be a system that is able to “find files that are under-provisioned” in order to assist those looking to earn tokens.

One of the questions raised in the AMA is whether BitTorrent Speed is anonymous, something that was initially answered by Sun. The quality of his audio on the live stream was particularly weak compared to that of Knoll but he responded as follows;

“Sure, I think BitTorrent Speed isn’t changing anything over our existing product, so for BitTorrent clients and uTorrent clients we don’t collect any people’s name, their data, so we know who they are. So right now BitTorrent Speed is the same, so you can spend (inaudible) your BTT (inaudible) and we don’t have control over your assets and any identity,” he said.

Knoll then chimed in with a more detailed response that more accurately describes what will going on from a technical perspective.

“The BitTorrent protocol, I would say, is not entirely anonymous, in the sense that when you join swarms the other participants in that swarm have knowledge of your IP address. So in designing BitTorrent Speed, we didn’t really change things too much from that point of view.

“The only change being that you connect to another peer and are making a payment to that peer in terms of BTT payment, so there’s additional activity there that didn’t exist in the BitTorrent protocol. Like Justin said, that activity is not connected directly to an email address or other personally identifiable information, it’s just connected to a public key basically, that’s created as part of the BitTorrent Speed creation process.

“If you take it from your Speed wallet and put it on the blockchain, then it becomes subject to the anonymity guarantees of the blockchain which means that things are understood by pseudonyms,” he added.

“So it’s a publicly inspectable ledger and if you tell somebody ‘hey, my public key is XYZ’, then they can go back and look at your entire transaction history and that would start to apply if you take your BTT onto the TRON blockchain and disclose to someone else what your account ID is.”

As mentioned earlier, this implementation of BitTorrent Speed is only available on uTorrent for Windows but there are plans to expand this to Mac and Linux users in the future. Additionally, there’s also a possibility that users of other torrent clients could get involved.

“There are a lot of open source torrent clients that are based on common libraries so if we’re able to get support for BitTorrent Speed into those libraries then you could see support on a number of different clients that are more or less white labels of existing open source torrent libraries,” Knoll said.

Users interested in testing out the new uTorrent can do so here.

 

 
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This is a scam they make money by charging you to un-throttle your pre-throttled DL speed  . Just use a open-source option that don't throttle your speed to begin with.

 

It's snake oil  downloads  want never go no faster , speed is limited to a users  bandwidth , if  a torrent seeded well if you had the bandwidth it will download really fast i see it all the time with my paid download service torrent to direct link . But regardless of how fast it uploads to there service once i get my direct link the speed will not go no faster than my internet connection  allows . :lmao:

 

The owner of this software Justin Sun seems to be involved in another scam as well a Ponzi scheme

 

Justin Sun seems to be involved in everything these days, doesn’t he? From convincing Warren Buffett that the digital assets industry is not a scam, to finding himself at the center of one, the Tron CEO has been in the news a lot.

 

Even if his intentions are not as black and white as the above, Tron’s Justin Sun is now facing the fury of Chinese investors after he was accused of being involved in a million-dollar ‘Ponzi Scheme,’ according to Nuclear Finance, a Chinese cryptocurrency media outlet.

 

The scam not only cost the victims 200 million CNY [$30 million], but also led to one suicide, according to the aforementioned report.

 

https://ambcrypto.com/justin-sun-fails-to-dissociate-himself-after-links-to-million-dollar-ponzi-scheme-emerge/

 

You ever seen the movie The Wolf on Wall Street ?

 

Justin Sun  is  The Wolf on The Shanghai Stock Exchange ! :hehe:

 

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What to expect from tomorrow’s launch of BitTorrent Speed

 

 

https://s7d6.turboimg.net/sp/4ec3d21503e6d33cb3612b6a6c432633/eeb6.jpg

 

Five reasons why BitTorrent Speed is a bad idea—not that it even uses blockchain anyway.

 

If all goes to plan, tomorrow we will see the launch of BitTorrent Speed.

 

BitTorrent is the well-known file-sharing protocol used to legally share copyright-free content to other people around the world—or more realistically, to download illegal content from The Pirate Bay. “BitTorrent Speed” will attempt to make money out of the protocol by adding, shudder, blockchain.

 

It will be one of the biggest examples of blockchainification, that is, the notion of taking a pre-existing product and tacking on a blockchain. Similar attempts at blockchainification include  Long Island Iced Tea pivoting to blockchain—which failed. Digipulse using crypto to strengthen online file storage—which failed. And Agora putting the Sierra Leone voting system on the blockchain—which was just an abject lie.

 

 

So will BitTorrent Speed buck the trend?

 

In July, 2018, Justin Sun, CEO of Tron—which raised $70 million in an ICO—purchased BitTorrent Inc., after a messy legal battle. Then, in January this year, he managed to raise a further $7 million selling BitTorrent tokens, promising that they will have a real-world use case.

 

Tomorrow that may well be the case. And if it works, it’s a major deal—one that could bring cryptocurrency to many more people. According to BitTorrent, the protocol is used by 170 million people a month, and accounts for four percent of daily Internet traffic.

 

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer network of computers that share files between them. When someone downloads a file, they are encouraged to “seed” it, by continuing to share the file to other people on the network. However, any user may choose to not do so, a practice known as “leeching.” If everybody did this, the network wouldn’t function.

 

The purpose of a BitTorrent token is to give people an incentive to seed files. And in theory, this should make the network stronger and make more resources available, which could make the network faster. Hence, BitTorrent Speed.

 

But there are a few problems with this.

 

First, it isn’t really using blockchain—at least, from a purist’s perspective.

 

Due to a lack of sufficiently fast and scalable public blockchains, BitTorrent Speed will instead use a high-performance private ledger. This off-chain blockchain (or database, to most people) will record transactions. This centralized service will then upload the transactions to the Tron blockchain periodically.

 

Second, the service isn’t free.

 

One of the reasons BitTorrent has been successful is that it was free. By contrast, BitTorrent Speed is a service where users bid to get faster download speeds. That means they will be paying to ensure continued access to that seed. Which means they’re paying for the ability to download the file again and again. A feature that seems kind of pointless.

 

 

Third, the token is highly inflationary.

 

BitTorrent plans to regularly hand out rewards to encourage people to start using the paid service. The funds that pay for the reward will come through inflation of the BitTorrent token. Currently, about 20 percent of the total supply is circulating—which will increase to 80 percent in under four years. That means unless many more people enter the market, everyone holding and using the token will watch their token’s price sink.

 

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TheEmpathicEar

Just this technology compromise security/privacy at all?

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3 minutes ago, TheEmpathicEar said:

Just this technology compromise security/privacy at all?

Who cares  ? BitTorrent itself is a risk to privacy  why you think so many users use a VPN  and Torrent to Direct  download services its because your ip is exposed the every law enforcement and BitTorrent troll in the world .

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TheEmpathicEar
6 minutes ago, steven36 said:

Who cares  ? BitTorrent itself is a risk to privacy  why you think so many users use a VPN  and Torrent to Direct  download services its because your ip is exposed the every law enforcement and BitTorrent troll in the world .

I have been using a VPN, TorGuard, for a long time now. Is a VPN alone not sufficient protection when downloading torrents?

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23 minutes ago, TheEmpathicEar said:

I have been using a VPN, TorGuard, for a long time now. Is a VPN alone not sufficient protection when downloading torrents?

Along as you use a killswitch  with it you should be fine . Only reason i download torrents is because it part of the package that comes  with my download  service they upload it  and seed  for me  so really i don't need a VPN  .A lot of people don't use one that  have my service and its used a lot  for kodi  streaming   , Android apps and normal downloading you can even stream from there site or use mpv ,vlc or your favorite player . 16 bucks for 6 months  with lots of file host  and safe torrenting . before I was just using Filehost as a free user before to download . I've not been a heavy torrent client  user since 2012 and  that was at a private site . I have 2 vpns  and i never use  a torrent client anymore . I have another p2p program  i use sometimes  to download music that is  not BitTorrent  and use it with a vpn. But i no longer install any torrent client software at all.

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TheEmpathicEar

The main reason I use Bittorrent these days is for "Full BD" downloads from RARBG [sometimes other smaller video files]. I don't know of any other way to get this content? 

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8 hours ago, TheEmpathicEar said:

The main reason I use Bittorrent these days is for "Full BD" downloads from RARBG [sometimes other smaller video files]. I don't know of any other way to get this content? 

The service i use you can  upload / dl up  to 2000GB torrents and if someone else have done uploaded your file before you do to there system  you will get it instantly no wait, its called a cached torrent , My friend who encodes dl full BDs for years with it from RARBAG  and others. I only use it  to dl smaller things but all i have is a coumpter to watch stuff  on and  my internet not very fast ,  some people with fiber and tv boxes  stream full bd  with my service and kodi even they don't even have to dl it. If you think using a client is the only way there is to dl full bd you must not know much about kodi .:P

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