BitTorrent Founder Bram Cohen Has Left the Company (theverge.com) 53
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Bram Cohen, a co-founder of BitTorrent, the company which oversees the development of eponymous P2P protocol, has left its board, he told TorrentFreak. The revelation comes weeks after the file-sharing service provider said it had been acquired by blockchain startup Tron. It remains unclear exactly when Cohen, who also served as a lead engineer at the firm for years, made the decision to part ways with the company. He hinted to TechCrunch last year that, as of August, he was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company. The departure of Cohen underscores BitTorrent's long battle to find a lucrative business model. The company, the services of which are used by more than 100 million customers, has long struggled to find new applications of its platform and avenues to bring home some cash. In 2016, the company announced a mobile music and video streaming service [called] BitTorrent Now, which it abruptly shut down months later while also firing its co-CEOs. Last year, the company shut down its much hyped live streaming service BitTorrent Live, which Variety described as a brainchild of Cohen.
This is really exciting! (Score:1)
I think the combination of BitTorrent and blockchain is exactly what I need to power my new space elevator. I'm contacting Elon Musk right now over Twitter to get his thoughts on the matter but I think this could be the greatest technology since project Xanadu.
Technology killed by the media industry (Score:1)
Of course P2P lives on, but the threats from the media industry have made it impossible for legitimate businesses to profit from it.
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If I remember correctly, both WoW and Microsoft used (still using?) P2P in order to reduce bandwidth on patches sent to users.
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What, exactly, is the "news"? (Score:2)
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Still no amoled in 2018.
The iPhone X says hi from 2017. Want to try again?
Re:What, exactly, is the "news"? (Score:5, Insightful)
'Quasi-influential' might be overstating it.
BitTorrent (the company) was not responsible for BitTorrent (the protocol). It was founded two years after the protocol was solid and most (if not all) further development of the protocol came from the community and third-party BT clients.
The company was founded by Cohen and some guy with an Indian name, presumably to monetise the BitTorrent name. Apparently they succeeded, since they amassed enough money to buy uTorrent and launch a good handful of services. But they don't hold (and never have held) any influence in the BitTorrent community.
(Bram Cohen wrote the original BitTorrent client in Python.)
Re:What, exactly, is the "news"? (Score:5, Informative)
Incidentally all the good versions of uTorrent also pre-date it's acquisition by BitTorrent (Inc. or whatever).
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uTorrent version 2.2.6 its the last one usable whitout all the bloat the next ones started adding.
I am still using it, just setup to never update and works like a charm. If something works dont touch it :P
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Why are you using utorrent anyway? There's a bunch of clients far better like qbtorrent, transmission, deluge.
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To make you butthurt. I even use the latest version with all the ads.
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To make you butthurt. I even use the latest version with all the ads.
Wait, it makes me butthurt because you're making a bad decision? Okay. So when you make a smart decision then I guess that means I'm also responsible? Living rent free in your head too, I guess.
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Why still using utorrent? Because I've yet to find a client that easily handle RSS feeds on Windows.
And qbtorrent handles RSS feeds with no problems and just in the same way as utorrent? So, how is it not the better option when it comes in at half the memory usage.
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Because it works. And none of the clients you listed seem better to me.
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Because it works. And none of the clients you listed seem better to me.
Really? Please explain how qbtorrent isn't better then utorrent, especially since even it's UI is based off of it.
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Re: What, exactly, is the "news"? (Score:1)
Bram Cohen is a white dude who invented BitTorrent. So, yeah, I imagine he was trying to make money from his work.
TIL the torrent protcocol somehow needs a company (Score:2, Interesting)
Question: Why does the company even need to exist?
From an outsider's point of view: The protocol is already implemented, so what does the company do, and where does it get its income? BT users don't exactly seem like the paying type to me, nor the type to tolerate advertisements, so does the official bittorrent client contain a coin miner or something?
How does this company get paid?
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Unrelated only if you ignore that it was co-founded by the creator of the protocol.
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It is 2018. We now have to justify "illegitimate" protocols. "Illegitimate" because they work better, take so much less electricity, and are utterly democratic. Because the tiny book, movie, music, and TV industries didn't like it.
We nuked the protocol because it worked too well and it couldn't be easily surveilled.
We are idiots led by liars.
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The lawyers who took down Napster would like to have a word with you about illegitimate protocols, defined as a protocol whose nontrivial uses, percentage-wise, are to avoid royalty payments for intellectual property.
It is perhaps fitting the guy who invented the protocol struggled to find a way to profit from it given all the clones.
Chia Network (Score:5, Interesting)
Bram founded a new company, https://chia.net/ [chia.net] which is making a new bitcoin-derived crypto-currency based on Proof of Space and Time. Basically it fills the unused space on your drive with entropy, and uses this like a set of lottery tickets instead of Proof of Work mining. They're also focusing on features of the crypto-currency that will enhance "Layer 2" (like http://lightning.network/ [lightning.network]) to enable scalability. In an economic sense this construction shifts the costs of mining toward capital expenditure (for storage) instead of electricity consumption.
He and a collaborator recently won Best Paper at Eurocrypt 2018 for a Zero Knowledge Proof of Time https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1... [iacr.org] (presentation: https://cyber.stanford.edu/sit... [stanford.edu] )
Interesting things are coming from Bram.
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i agree. a smart guy.
however "bit-torrent" and "blockchain" are still not implemented "at the right place".
bit-torrent should be used for a decentralized name-addressing scheme:
example: removing domain-dealers from the picture will make the whole house-of-online-advertisement come crashing down.
block-chain should be used in the world of brokerage house: looking up (spying) on orders should leave a block-chain record.
for example: spying on forward-orders, like stop-loss, trailing-stops, etc.