The co-founder of the hugely popular peer-to-peer file sharing program BitTorrent is revealing how Tron can take advantage of its new acquisition.
Tron founder Justin Sun bought BitTorrent last month for a hefty price tag of more than $100 million. In a new interview with Cheddar, Ashwin Navin says Tron is likely to leverage the collective computing power of BitTorrent’s hundreds of millions of users.
“I would say that BitTorrent for a lot of reasons was a pioneer in distributed computing. And we know that the crypto space is built around decentralization and creating incentives for consumers to do certain things. In the case of Bitcoin, they’re mining and providing a computing fabric for all kinds of transactions that are happening with Bitcoin.
In the case of BitTorrent you’ve got hundreds of millions of people who have made their computers available for making files available. And so, what I imagine you could do if you’re a blockchain company is you could then incentivize people with more than just free content. But maybe there’s financial incentives for making your computer available for people who want to pay for it.”
According to Navin, Tron can utilize BitTorrent to push the barriers of decentralization to new levels. In the process, Tron could create an entirely new peer-to-peer form of media.
“In the earliest days of BitTorrent there was this ethos that the inventor’s father came up with, which is that the printing press is great because it provides freedom of expression, freedom of the press, which we enjoy in many modern societies. But the freedom of the press is only limited to those who can afford to have the printing machine.
What decentralization did is it reduced and lowered the barrier to make yourself a producer of content. And before there was Facebook Live and YouTube, peer-to-peer computing became the distributed computing fabric for making files available that would have been cost prohibitive otherwise. Today, we have great channels like Cheddar which have a very low barrier to make media available, but there are still computing challenges that require lots of computing power, and I think that’s going to be the next chapter for BitTorrent.
If I was in the driver’s seat there, I’d be thinking about how do I turn what is a very large file sharing community into a group of people willing to do more with their computing resources.”