From Plagiarism To Piracy: Why Tron BitTorrent Makes Sense
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After nearly two months of waiting, Tron (TRX) has finally confirmed to the world it has acquired BitTorrent.
Justin Sun, the CEO of Tron, announced the news yesterday. The acquisition means BitTorrent will become part of the Tron ecosystem, with the two San Francisco-based teams being merged together; reportedly making “the largest decentralized internet ecosystem in the world.”
A peer-to-peer file sharing network, Sun said BitTorrent and Tron shared the same vision for a “decentralized web” and argued that BitTorrent would “gain new life” from becoming a part of the Tron network.
“BitTorrent is the genesis of the decentralization movement”, Sun said in a Medium blog post. “Developers, entrepreneurs, and the decentralized Web community regard BitTorrent as the original pioneers of decentralization technology. It is the foundation of an open, transparent, shared Internet protocol.”
Tron BitTorrent: A meeting of minds?
Tron wants to create the first free, decentralized entertainment hub through decentralized applications. You might be thinking that this sounds similar to Ethereum, which is also a platform for the creation of use of dApps…and you couldn’t be closer to the truth.
Tron has been controversial almost since it started, over accusations that parts of its code, and even its whitepaper, have been copied from other projects.*
A report from Digital Asset Research has previously said that parts of Tron’s codebase have been copied “verbatim“ or with slight modifications from that of Ethereum; its whitepaper includes whole pages that have seemingly been lifted from Filecoin and the Interplanetary File System without any credit given.
BitTorrent’s founder Bram Cohen has previously claimed that he didn’t intend his creation to become a “pirate ship”. The sharing network was supposed to speed up video game updates or specific files used by developers, but within in a year of operation BitTorrent became synonymous for illegally downloaded films and television episodes.
Now that the world knows Tron owns BitTorrent, it will be interesting to see whether video piracy on the site will continue as it has previously.
Sun likes to entertain the notion that Tron’s acquisition of BitTorrent is a meeting between similar minds in a hostile wilderness. The digital, 21st century equivalent of “Dr. Livingstone I presume?”.
But the truth is, this is simply a company with a track record of plagiarizing code, buying out a platform notorious for video piracy.
Happy Wednesday.
Disclaimer: The author is not invested in any cryptocurrency or token mentioned in this article, but holds investments in other digital assets.
*Editor’s note: we do not tolerate plagiarism, we pay our writers, we pay for our images (except when granted with no fee required, in which case we tip) and in fact, we pay for everything we do. Justin case you’re wondering why we occasionally seem a little down on the Tron project.
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