I mean, the homepage ( http://tron.network ) has a giant face of the "Founder" / "CEO" of the company... Glorious.
I am dropping my 50 cents here: I would not look at it as if Tron bought BitTorrent... I think it was the other way around: BitTorrent was financially known to not be very "healthy". I bet it was more BitTorrent looking for mo-mo-mo-money as a valid exit!
Yup, Bram Cohen moved on a while ago to his Chia.Network project, and the corporate owners of BitTorrent were just looking for an exit. TRON got a name brand and some tech that seems related to blockchain but not necessarily directly useful to it, and not Bram, and not sure what else.
I am not a TRON fan or investor but you have done some fine mental gymnastics there. They did bought BitTorrent. Source and legitimacy of their funds are questionable
(IMO) TRON fails to distinguish itself from other decentralized storage blockchain tokens/coins.
This move is a clever circular reasoning where taking their hype-driven valuation and using it to invest in a company that will give TRON more credibility.
Can HN help me understand why TRON is better than the sea of competition (Sia/Filecoin/Storj/Maidsafe/etc)?
The beauty of it is that as long as none of the cryptocurrency/blockchain projects manages to really achieve what they're set out to do the only objective metric to judge them is how much money they manage to pull. When everything is a scam it's kind of hard to single out anything. As such I suppose you could say that "TRON" is a pretty cool name, so buy buy buy.
Beyond that it really looks like a rather simple pump and dump. If you click the "technical docs" on the front page you end up here: https://tron.network/resources?name=1&lng=en
There are 3 PDFs here. "What is TRON" is a 7 page marketing brochure that's about as technical as the MacDonald's menu. The "Design Book of TRON architecture" sounds a lot more promising until you see that it's 12 pages long. It's extremely high level and doesn't tell you anything of value. Finally you have the "TRON Protobuf protocol" which is 10 pages long and exactly what it sounds like.
In other words, business as usual in the cryptocurrency world.
> Can HN help me understand why TRON is better than the sea of competition (Sia/Filecoin/Storj/Maidsafe/etc)?
I have been following all those and based on the numerous articles I have read they are pretty much all failed. Blockchain just doesn't make sense for that application.
As someone who has also been following those projects, I actually think this is a great application for cryptocurrency. (Not necessarily blockchain; I'm pretty sure Maidsafe actually doesn't use a blockchain.)
The idea of a trustless, fully decentralized, scalable, redundant, anonymous storage market is pretty alluring, and I see no reason why it's not entirely achievable with current cryptocurrency technology.
I agree many of those platforms have issues, but from what I can tell those issues are mostly a result of the system's immaturity; not an inherent flaw in the idea of a decentralized storage system itself.
Here's my current take on each:
* Filecoin - Doesn't exist (yet). It's just a whitepaper; no actual software.
* Storj - Not actually decentralized (as currently implemented). Users need to go through a federated service (of which only one currently exists; the one run by the creators of Storj) to actually store their files.
* Maidsafe - I'm actually not sure. The developers of Maidsafe seem to be working on much, much more than just file storage, which means the project is very complex. In any case, the software is still too immature to actually use for real.
* Sia - This is actually pretty promising. A couple weeks ago I managed to upload and store a few GB worth of files on Sia for about $2/TB-month. Going to try using it for my online backups via Duplicati once I get a chance to play with it more. The core software is still pretty clunky though, and not recommended for production use.
* TRON - I have no idea. I haven't looked into it.
About Maidsafe: their goal is to build a new descentralised internet, and I think they still are in the alpha phase with testing on a big swarm of VPS's. It is a moonshot project, with all its pros and cons. And yeah, they use Rust ;)
I gave a talk on cryptocurrencies a few weeks back and used Bittorrent as one of several examples of non-blockchain software/protocols that solve an important technological problem and don't require a blockchain.
Then I get home and read the news:
"Bittorrent: Now with Blockchain!!!"
Didn't some futurist warn about the threat of a sophisticated physical replication process getting out of control and turning everything into paperclips? Because it feels like we're already there in the digital domain.
The token use case for BitTorrent is so obvious, however, that this seems more like BitTorrent using Tron’s ICO money to make their own coin. The chances of them integrating all the other Tron BS is essentially zero.
getting JUSTed now means getting scammed... it comes from the Tron founder Justin Sun [1]. All he does is announce partnerships, real or fake (basically all fake up until this point), to pump his coin and quickly sell it off. Looks like this is one of the few real "partnerships" because everyone has caught on by now. He's also plagiarized mostly everything, code, whitepaper...
There is little reason in cryptocurrency markets. Verge is one of the craziest examples, with prices rising after shown 51 percents attacks, and prices falling after announcing a big partnership with Pornhub.
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/the-inside-story-of-bittorrent... has a pretty good summary of the corporate history of BitTorrent Inc.
They had a number of ideas beyond just licensing their tech to other businesses, most of them focused on being some kind of media company.
What is TRON? I've tried reading official materials but there seems to be a lot of contention and misinformation swirling around this company/product.
Does this mean any kind of change in downloading an ISO of fedora or whatever? (Yes, I'm that boring and don't download movies or games via torrents, mostly I just watch stuff on Netflix or similar)
BitTorrent the company has been fairly far detached from the protocol and software introduced in 2001. The original client discontinued, µTorrent is proprietary, and launching various services like BitTorrent Sync and Play that really don't have anything to do with the protocol at all... I'm honestly surprised that the company still survives (though this may be why it's being acquired).
Long story short, no, it won't affect you using the protocol and Transmission or what-have-you to download Fedora ISOs.
BitTorrent Sync did do some smart things with the protocol, which is always why internal politics wound up causing it to spin out of BitTorrent the Company, which has continually tried to be a "media" company more than a tech company (which should explain BitTorrent Play, and kind of but not really explains why BitTorrent the company still exists at all in the same way that RealNetworks or WildTangent still exist in that "media" companies can be cockroaches).
So BitTorrent Sync is now Resilio Sync, and word has it most of the smart engineers jumped to that ship when it spun out.
Resilio Sync is an awesome product. Its amazing to be able to sync my pics from my Phone to my PC wireless over the Internet and to be able to sync Music and Movies from my PC to my phone over a Lan etc.
I especially appreciate the concept of Encrypted Shares where I can have devices participate in the sync, but not be able to read its contents. I don't know of another peer-to-peer sync tool with quite that same option. (There are several cloud storage options like Keybase that are close, but not quite the same as me spinning up a VM or always-on closet PC that I control top-to-bottom.)
TRON is Bitcoin Idiots, LLC, more or less. Yes, they're dragging the name of your favorite computer movie through the mud, just like Zoë Quinn did with Crash Override Network. Can hardly wait to see what kind of grift WarGames, Inc. or WOPR, Inc. will be.
I still have to steal movies from time to time--when after checking all the official, legal ways there is still no way to download it.
However, with Netflix and other studios finally getting their head out of their ass there is a lot less going for BitTorrent nowadays compared to a few years ago.
This is my go to torrent client. Simply delightful to use and very nice UI. Also the tech on webtorrent.io is awesome and not to be overlooked, thank you so much for making it!
I mean, the homepage ( http://tron.network ) has a giant face of the "Founder" / "CEO" of the company... Glorious.
I am dropping my 50 cents here: I would not look at it as if Tron bought BitTorrent... I think it was the other way around: BitTorrent was financially known to not be very "healthy". I bet it was more BitTorrent looking for mo-mo-mo-money as a valid exit!