so dlive got acquired by tron today, why this COULD be a big deal for decentralised hosting in 2020.
Ok, so this kinda messed up my whole schedule of recording today but that’s ok because it’s another part in my decentralised video hosting course that I’m putting out on skillshare — https://smarturl.it/decentralized-video — this is a free part I’m putting out because I think it frames where we might potentially be going in 2020.
If you felt this adds value to the decentralised video conversation please feel free to comment, upvote, resteem and do all that good stuff.
So to understand how this is a perfectly strategy play out there internet land we need to look at two places of least resistance.
bittorrent lack of adoption mainstream > bought by tron relatively cheaply for $126 million, BTT token created on tron as a tx10 token (still higher up the chart than steem is today)
AND
dlive > steem philanthropic incubator > moves ‘experiment’ to lino blockchain that has tx capacity but aint worth anything (was it ever out of a testnet anyway?) > somehow onboards ‘pewdiepie’ (nice pay cheque that pays for a wedding maybe > tron acquires dlive.
So the thing is here is that tron no matter how well they are doing in the market cap chart territory really does not have a killer app, it’s all shitty games as I can tell (please, correct me if I’m wrong) so they need to have something to plug in to the collection of acquires they have done recently.
could we be on the edge of crypto napster?
Napster worked as a peer-to-peer network, you spoke to a centralised id system that has all the people connected to it and everyone become a node/mesh like sharing their available shares with the centralised server, then people could download from their nodes, they were often really damn slow unless you bookmarked a good one that back then had a great t1 or t3 line, those in the know will know the score here :)
anyway, what tron are basically doing is building in support into popular torrenting clients, namely the popular ones like utorrent (yes bittorrent owned that so now tron does effectively) and they are going to build in support for their super easy to integrate (their words) tx10, a compatibles erc-20 style of token.
BitTorrent Inc announced that it has acquired the popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent. uTorrent will continue to have its own website and community for now, and the uTorrent code base will remain closed source (this was in 2006)
Now where this get’s interesting to me is two fold, you have the side of the content creator who might want to purchase tokens to be able to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth at a certain amount of speed ratio for people to be able to access that content 24/7 — imagine being able to use some of your other blockchain funds from a side chain network to fund the upkeep of your data storage requirements
So the other side of this is like a highway, you have speed lanes, slow, medium and fast (or mission critical) — imagine if you were Tesla or a similar company that wanted to make sure that they did not have any issues whatsoever streaming a big event, they bought an Akamai styled package from the bittorrent (btt) network and then people watching that actually became part of the viewer party that were also earning (micropayments) of btt wallet integrated into the utorrent client.
instant crypto onboarding into a token, just for watching a video, sure it would be small amounts but it would get people used to the notion of being paid for their time.
in fact I don’t know why the steem blockchain is not smart enough to start making gateways to sia, blockstacks gaia so that people can get an account, use our commenting and smt token around the content part and be privy to the upvoting/downvoting pool concept (maybe it’s because of the power struggles, dunno)
but where does dlive fit in?
Well for now I can’t see it being for the streaming side because I’m not sure (maybe bittorrent had something going) how you would really be able to move data around fast enough (with low latency, needed for live streaming) as streamers require — in fact, I’m not sure how you ‘chunk’ and rely on your network when it’s got nodes coming in and falling away. ..
imagine it like a power grid of different energy technologies, you can’t just add wind, solar etc to an existing grid system because those inputs fluctuate, you need incredibly dynamic switching to offset the loads.
So yeah, I think it’s gonna be more about the file storage side of the VOD’s (video on demand) after the fact and that the network of users, and the people who watch also have the utorrent client running — which means, maybe what they are building is the dlive experience as the portal frontend to their whole system, once you have enough people running the app or having it open in the tray bar you have lots of people concurrently hosting content on a world wide network of machine — just allocate a bunch of space and then you have nodes in the network serving those things up.
You would only need a global network of core machine at first (think DNS root level servers) and you could provide a little bit of redundancy depending on where your viewing public are around the world, but the masterstroke is the token (BTT) because it incentives you to keep your machines running and utorrent (or their client) running because you are earning the token, it’s like mediamining(tm) — you heard it here first folks.
where does ifps come into this?
Well, it’s just another technology looking to get integrated into the mix, if a number of these decentralised projects could come together and support each other you would have failover and redundancy and you would suddenly have centralised projects quaking a little bit that their attention matrix would be getting a little less eyeballs than usual ;)
__humble x
SOURCES:
Blockchain company Tron buys BitTorrent
https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/25/blockchain-company-tron-buys-bittorrent
Tokenizing the world’s largest decentralized file sharing protocol with BTT.
https://www.bittorrent.com/btt
The TRC10 Token
https://developers.tron.network/docs/trc10-token
Project Atlas
https://medium.com/swlh/blockchain-torrent-tron-project-atlas-internet5a6bfc0b5e89-5a6bfc0b5e89?
Tron Acquires DLive Blockchain Streaming Platform
https://cryptobriefing.com/tron-acquires-dlive-blockchain-streaming-platform
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