
Lessons from BitTorrent for the Blockchain/Crypto community - talawahdotnet
https://medium.com/@simonhmorris/why-bittorrent-mattered-bittorrent-lessons-for-crypto-1-of-4-fa3c6fcef488
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talawahdotnet
This is a four part series of posts by former BitTorrent Inc employee Simon
Morris. He makes a well reasoned analogy between the P2P revolution and the
current Blockchain/Crypto craze, and provides insight into the powers and
pitfalls of decentralized technologies and communities. There is a pretty
decent TLDR summary at the end of the final post[1]

Key snippets:

> _And this is the main conclusion — decentralization may be great for
> disruption, but if the experience of Bittorrent is anything to go by it is
> not at all clear that it has a role in whatever comes next. Blockchain
> architectures are great for unleashing unstoppable rule-breaking mobs, but
> we shouldn’t mistake the rule-breakers for the winners._

> _Perhaps one of the most far-sighted winners here was Daniel Ek — CEO and
> Founder of Spotify — who preceded his Spotify success with the sale of the
> uTorrent client to BitTorrent Inc. Although early versions of Spotify used a
> Bittorrent-like P2P protocol to try to save money on bandwidth, they quickly
> realized that the main point of Bittorrent had little to do with saving
> money, and decentralization of their architecture was actually counter-
> productive to their aim. Perhaps it was apparent to them way back then that
> leading a revolution is exciting, but it’s far better to build the thing to
> save incumbents from the unleashed mob._

1\. [https://medium.com/@simonhmorris/decentralized-disruption-
wh...](https://medium.com/@simonhmorris/decentralized-disruption-who-dares-
wins-bittorrent-lessons-for-crypto-4-of-4-f022e8641c1a#6c55)

~~~
zzzcpan
I would nominate these as key snippets instead:

> For if there are no rules being broken it becomes tempting to ask why a
> decentralized architecture is the best tool for the job.

> you can indeed build and release a system such that when ‘the man’ comes
> over to compel you to stop whatever it is that you’ve done that annoys him,
> you can actually say “no, sorry, it can’t be done”. But you cannot then turn
> around and easily make changes and updates to that system. Coordination
> costs are high and the timeframe to get things done is extremely long.

> if the objective of the game was to secure billion dollar exits and huge
> returns on capital invested, then every one of them [VC-backed companies]
> failed.

Overall great series of posts.

~~~
talawahdotnet
Yea, there are quite a number of useful nuggets in there. I also liked this
bit on complexity from the third post[1]

> _A second important theme for decentralized systems is a common lack of
> appreciation for just how complex these systems are and how finely balanced
> they need to be to operate correctly.

I originally joined Bittorrent in 2007 to work on a decentralized CDN which
aimed to do something like “tie together all the unused storage and bandwidth
on people’s PCs into a content delivery network which had zero operating costs
(for us)”.

In time it proved there were a number of things wrong with this ambition (most
of which I won’t touch on here), although perhaps the most important one which
we discovered the hard way was the cost of complexity._

1\. [https://medium.com/@simonhmorris/intent-complexity-and-
the-g...](https://medium.com/@simonhmorris/intent-complexity-and-the-
governance-paradox-bittorrent-lessons-for-crypto-3-of-4-1d14ac390f3f)

