from Hacker News

Lessons from BitTorrent for the Blockchain/Crypto community

by talawahdotnet on 1/13/19, 10:42 PM with 3 comments

• by talawahdotnet on 1/13/19, 10:43 PM

  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...