And yet his invention led in a fairly straight line to that destination.Īs a result of its innocent objectives, even though Bittorrent technology found such spectacular popularity in illicit sharing of media files that at times it risked swamping available ISP bandwidth, the step that ISPs might have taken to eliminate it never actually arrived. Bram’s objective was never to enable copyright infringement or make obsolete a decades-old multi-billion dollar industry around selling copies of media files. Further specifics of how it works don’t matter here, but its worth mentioning that the very technical design objectives were important later in protecting the founders and the company from direct attack. Unlike cryptocurrencies, there is no ‘token’ involved - instead the economics behind the system rely on transient barter relationships where peers choose to share more with counter-parties which have already shared with them. It was designed to enable the distribution of large and popular files across the internet without the need for provisioning very large servers with huge available bandwidth. Bittorrent technologyĪt its heart Bittorrent technology is a file distribution protocol. In describing Bittorrent I have always tried to differentiate between three different things: Bittorrent technology - an ingenious p2p file transfer protocol invented by Bram Cohen in 2001, BitTorrent Inc - a company co-founded by Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin in 2004 to pursue commercial applications of Bram’s invention, and the Bittorrent ecosystem - a huge and leaderless community of users and entities which coalesced around the largely illicit sharing of popular files online which were often media files protected by various copyright laws. But many people are surprised to learn that there is a company called BitTorrent Inc. Over the years many people have heard of Bittorrent, and most who have think it has something to do with illegal online file-sharing. It’s worth starting with a little background on Bittorrent. Having spent so much time close to what was perhaps the most broadly deployed decentralized technology yet, I’d like to share some thoughts on how the world of Bittorrent played out and what the lessons may be for the world of Bitcoin and the wider ‘crypto’ or ‘blockchain’ industry. In the Fall of 2017 the company started work on a project to develop a cryptocurrency integrated into the heart of the protocol - work which led, somewhat unexpectedly, to the company’s acquisition. In that time the company pioneered many R&D projects to deploy decentralized technologies for use cases such as content delivery networks, folder synch, file sending, p2p communications, web publishing and live streaming. for almost 10 years working at various times in product, data science, strategy and general management. Remaining employees are all now ‘TRON employees’ and the mission is now identical to TRON’s.Īll told I worked at BitTorrent Inc.

Thus vanished the company most closely associated for almost 15 years with the Bittorrent ecosystem. BitTorrent Inc was wrapped into the TRON organization. When BitTorrent Inc was sold earlier this year to Chinese cryptocurrency organization TRON (or, more precisely, to Justin Yuchen Sun, TRON’s founder) it was truly the end of an era.

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