Peer-to-peer file sharing service BitTorrent, and little brother uTorrent, have now been downloaded greater than two billion instances on varied pl
Peer-to-peer file sharing service BitTorrent, and little brother uTorrent, have now been downloaded greater than two billion instances on varied platforms. Final 12 months the community accounted for 3% of all downstream, and 28% of all upstream, visitors throughout the web.
The corporate attributes the figures to the “longstanding recognition of its basic desktop torrent purchasers, in addition to its new web-based torrent downloader and participant constructed for the streaming age”. It mentioned the Android model of the service on Google Play Retailer is the “hottest torrent downloader”.
Within the announcement, Solar hinted that BitTorrent would quickly be releasing new merchandise:
“We sit up for fulfilling our mission of bettering the protocol and introducing new use instances, equivalent to decentralized file storage and reside streaming merchandise.”
Acquired by Justin Solar’s Tron Basis in July 2018 for a rumoured $140 million, the service was mentioned to have had 170 million customers. In early 2019, it launched its personal token, Bittorrent (BTT), to incentivize customers to carry information on the community, which might enhance general obtain speeds by having extra copies of any file out there.
By March 2020, the token had dropped 90% from the ATH. The present value of 0.000459 continues to be 74% down from the ATH.
The ‘Solar dictatorship’
As with many tasks Solar is concerned with, the platform has been concerned in controversy. Some imagine that file sharing service BitTorrent File System (BTFS) copied parts from the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), which got here to a head after a latest rebranding of the BTFS emblem to one thing strikingly just like the IPFS emblem.
IPFS’s founder Juan Benet known as them out instantly saying “Tron can also’t even consider an authentic emblem.”
In a heated Twitter thread, Benet mentioned “it’s not sufficient to fork all our code, rebrand it and lie [that] it’s theirs” earlier than alleging that Tron’s BTFS has additionally copied, “random chunks of our papers, and defrauded their traders with a nonsensical mishmash.”
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin chimed in, calling out Solar as a dictator that zombified BitTorrent:
“This Tweet is actually painful to learn. It is like taking a look at a zombie: the account *appears to be like like* one thing you’ve got grown up with and identified and cherished for 15 years, however beneath it is simply, properly, now it is simply one other appendage of the Solar dictatorship”