
Project Atlas - humbfool2
https://www.bittorrent.com/project-atlas/
======
anc84
> Project Atlas will connect the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network and the TRON
> blockchain network via a set of bittorrent protocol extensions, a custom
> token, and an in-client token economy to address existing limitations and
> open a new borderless economy for exchanging value for computer resources on
> a global scale.

I prefer the currencies of goodwill, altruism and data hoarding to provide
humanity with access to media.

~~~
jypepin
I agree, but isn't this the current system, which flaws (too many leechers not
enough seeders) this project is trying to solve?

~~~
badge
It's been a solved problem in private tracker communities - where users leach
bandwidth is on a credit system and they need to maintain a ratio of
upload/download to keep their access.

What TRON is trying to do is sell tokens to users to be able to access
bandwidth. Where do these tokens come from to begin with? TRON just whips them
up for free.

If I remember right, a famous Bittorrent group based out of the UK called Oink
was shut down because they took donations for running the site. One can
imagine the same fate would await TRON once the tokens are found facilitating
pirated MPAA and copyright IP works.

~~~
DavidNielsen
I’d posit that such a setup will lead to users with low speed connection or
connections which aren’t online constantly to be banned or required to buy a
pardon from the site when not fulfilling the seeding requirement (as every
site policy I’ve seen required maintaining a ratio over time).

This happens because users with high speed connections are incentivized to
seed well beyond 1:1 and thus there is rarely any demand for seeding.
Downloading is super fast which just exasperates the problem as your share
ratio drops below the acceptable rate quickly.

Thus such sites tend to make their money off the people who can likely afford
it the least, while rewarding people with the disposable income required to
live in a neighborhood with unlimited high speed internet and pay for said
service.

There’s also the matter of keeping content alive to consider. I’d consider it
much more valuable to keep content with no or relatively few seeders alive
than incentivizing seeders to add additional bandwidth to already popular
torrents. I has not seen an site policy which encourages this, rather it
likely punishes such activities as it bans users who are trying to reach a
required share ratio without constant demand thus taking the content offline
rather than keeping it available.

Whether or not Project Atlas will enable incentives for all users and multiple
scenarios or if it will simply perpetuate a similar system to what is seen in
the private torrenting communities remains to be seen.

------
hakanito
TRON is the greatest scam the world has seen. Justin Sun hyped the price to
unreal levels without a product, then sold at the height around new years
’17/18\. Bought BitTorrent with the money. I’d stay far away from TRON

~~~
MrEldritch
I wouldn't say "greatest scam the world has seen"; that's really selling the
grand history of scams short. TRON may have been _profitable_ , but it was not
terribly clever or high-effort; the crypto-speculation space was just
abnormally high in unreasonably-enthusiastic suckers.

~~~
hakanito
Fair enough, but TRON created $14B out of thin air.

~~~
badge
"$14B" on paper - but the real value of what could be extracted from market
sells would be immensely less.

Those numbers are based on the market spot price, and not the order book
support from real world buyers. Cryptocoin exchanges are mostly bots and the
order books are mostly loaded with spoofed bids that are pulled away once real
buyers and sellers start pushing one way or the other, hence the volatility.

------
koalalorenzo
What happened to IPFS and Filecoin? Project Atlas seems to be bad copy of that
since it is very much connected with TRON scam:
[https://twitter.com/juanbenet/status/950142785373405184](https://twitter.com/juanbenet/status/950142785373405184)

~~~
sschueller
And Filecoin is not a "scam"? So far there has been no proof that "proof of
replication" and "proof of spacetime" is even possible.

~~~
konschubert
Can you point me to some resources on this topic. Would be quite interesting
for me.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Here's Proof of Spacetime:

[https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf](https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf)

and here's Proof of Replication:

[https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf](https://filecoin.io/proof-of-
replication.pdf)

------
sktrdie
"Project Atlas will connect the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network and the TRON
blockchain network via a set of bittorrent protocol extensions, a custom
token, and an in-client token economy to address existing limitations and open
a new borderless economy for exchanging value for computer resources on a
global scale."

How did we get to the point where words simply don't mean anything anymore?

~~~
snaky
You mean proactive award winning innovative solutions leveraging state of the
art leading technologies don't engage with industry standard customer
expectations on value proposition, or what?

~~~
berbec
I paradigmed in my pants.

------
patrickaljord
With cheap music streaming services such as spotify, apple music and google
play as well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon, does anyone need
bittorrent anymore? At least in first world countries? Besides, bittorrent
works great as is, if people start making money on seeding, they will be way
easier targets in court when sued by majors. What's the advantage here?

~~~
PostOnce
Let's talk purely about piracy for a second, as a legitimate use for
legitimate owners, based on something that happened to me a couple of days
ago:

I own two copies of this game, From Dust (which is fantastic, by the creator
of Another World), one of them on disc and one of them on Steam, separate
keys.

I installed it from Steam because I don't have an optical drive handy and the
key is not on the case for some reason. So the game makes me sign up for a
UPlay account (in addition to having the Steam stuff), which apparently I did
in the past, and not with my primary email. So I can't play because it's
already activated... and installing it from Steam doesn't tell UPlay that I
own it on Steam.

So then I go and email Ubisoft tech support and say I have this key and
haven't played in 5 years how can I swap it over to my new email.

A day later I get a reply that they want me to go screenshot my transaction
history and my CD Key (which I already sent them) in the Steam UI.

...meanwhile, I was able to download ("pirate") and install the game in 5
minutes, and it doesn't require either the Steam or the Uplay account to work.
AND it'll keep on working 50 years after Steam and Ubisoft are both bankrupt
(or keep working on your OS/vm/whatever when Steam and Ubisoft discontinue
support for it).

So yeah, there's a use for bittorrent & piracy, since DRM ruins your ability
to archive any-damn-thing now. Without bittorrent, playing that game would be
a terrible ordeal, if it is even possible at all. Paying for it (twice) only
made it worse.

~~~
m_eiman
This is one of the reasons I make efforts to buy games via gog.com rather than
Steam (the other reason is that Steam is dangerously close to a monopoly, and
that never ends well).

~~~
djsumdog
Gog and the Humble Bundle (if they offer a DRM free version; these days a lot
of titles just have Steam Keys).

You do lose the save game/cloud sync, but you gain copies of your game that
will always work without needing to verify your licence over the Interwebs.

~~~
WorldMaker
> Humble Bundle (if they offer a DRM free version; these days a lot of titles
> just have Steam Keys)

I've been griping lately that Humble Bundle seems increasingly watering down
their principles. Early Humble Bundle made it a big deal that they always
included DRM free copies and more often than not full soundtracks or
soundtracks at a discount. Today's Humble Bundle seems much more and more to
"just" be a Steam Key reseller, without DRM free copies of many games, and
without access to nearly as large of a percentage of game soundtracks.

(I realize that last is a weird gripe, but there were a lot of games I picked
up for their soundtracks because of artists I enjoyed, and sometimes I'd be
surprised and really enjoy the associated game, but even if I didn't like the
game I still got my money's worth from the soundtrack. I've now switched to
buying from the artists more often directly from Bandcamp and rarely if ever
buying the associated games, or just waiting for a direct Steam or Microsoft
Store sale.)

It certainly feels from Humble's emails that they are very deeply focused on
their Monthly Pass, and it feels almost to the detriment of everything else,
but then Monthly Pass things don't really appeal to me in general.

------
qwerty456127
I've waited for about half a minute and the page still doesn't display
anything but just loads my CPU (I have retried a number of times with no
luck).

~~~
mabbo
I can load it on mobile, but it won't let me scroll down to read more than the
first half sentence.

~~~
superasn
Yeah same here on android chrome. How can something so simple as a blog post
can have so many problems just rendering?

~~~
giancarlostoro
Any marketing blog posts / pages should always be (cached) static HTML.

Helps a lot if you don't have to render content that will remain mostly static
to thousands upon thousands of visitors instead of just fetching a file and
returning that.

------
self
Back in the day, Mojo Nation (one of Bittorrent's ancestors -- sort of)
incentivized people for sharing their disk space and network bandwidth. You'd
earn "mojo" for doing that, and could trade it for faster downloads.

An interview:
[https://www.salon.com/2000/10/09/mojo_nation/](https://www.salon.com/2000/10/09/mojo_nation/)

------
NPChar
The entire page must be an advertisement... it is rendered as blank white page
(uBlock Origin).

------
xori
Nice, not even 4 months after releasing this.

[http://blog.bittorrent.com/2018/06/19/user-
message/](http://blog.bittorrent.com/2018/06/19/user-message/)

------
vijay_nair
Looks similar to [http://joystream.co](http://joystream.co) which has been
paying users with BCH for the past few months.

~~~
dylkil
would much rather use bitcoin cash over a tron backed token.

Tron is nothing more than a pump and dump with a pagiarised whitepaper.

------
capdotnet2
It avoids saying pay for files, I feel like the music/media industry’s lawyers
would have a fieldday with anyone using this to “share” music files

------
pmontra
Firefox doesn't like the site:

> The resource at “[https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.mailchimp.com/js/mc-
> valid...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.mailchimp.com/js/mc-
> validate.js”) was blocked because tracking protection is enabled.

------
ndnxhs
Is it just me or is scrolling broken on mobile?

~~~
fazilakhtar
Works fine in the in-app browser of “Hacker News” on iOS

~~~
chupasaurus
The only browser engine allowed on iOS is Safari's.

------
holstvoogd
Great website, doesn't load with an ad blocker enabled. Fucking late stage ad
tech..

~~~
algorithm_dk
cannot scroll on chrome (android) either

~~~
nevi-me
Use Desktop mode, someone didn't check whether the website loads properly.
Also had the same problem with Chrome on Android

