It was discussed here before, but now downloads are available (Win, Lin, OS X, on x64) and runs on testnet.
I haven’t tested it yet, and I don’t think I will (seems like a race to the bottom - you can seed something until someone else downloads and starts doing the same).
I find it hilarious how they say “earn BTC if you have some rare content”. How the hell can it be rare after you’ve seeded it to the world?
The list of current torrents is listed here (https://joystream.co/TorrentList/) - mostly Linux ISOs - but I doubt it will work like that on mainnet because the vendor would probably bet itself in trouble that way.
seems like a very nice solution actually. I find it almost funny that that has not been built before. Arguably only now micropayments with bitcoin are starting to become feasible
Well you know there’s that streaming site (I posted it here before as well), but their problem currently is they can’t pay “precisely” enough because Bitcoin is slow (they’ll be able to do better once sidechains come out).
And there was a P2P site, but centralized, where you could post a bounty and get paid for uploading a file. I thought about doing such a site that’s decentralized, but that doesn’t save you from legal troubles - if you market or promote it, you probably still have to deal with lawsuits and lawyers. You may be able to not lose, but it’ll still cost you a ton of money, so it’s not for anyone with thin pockets.
Try downloading an ebook that isn’t a best-seller, without jumping through hoops to join a private tracker. I dare you. Torrenting obscure files is freaking nightmare and I’d legit consider paying to not have to deal with the headache if I knew the creator was getting a cut.
But it doesn’t technically do that. It simply rewards one for having rare torrents. Now true if you own content and distribute it then yes you would be rewarded as it would be rare until it took off. However strictly speaking the system doesn’t explicitly reward content creators.
However this is not to say one could not be created to do so.
I am not into books, but in the past I suffered looking for some vintage porn so I know the feeling.
My point is, once there’s 2 people seeding a torrent, the cost for the uploader (aka creator, in SAFE speak) is zero.
I can put 1.5 million “rare” ebooks on my 8 TB disks and seed them for $0.001 (in BTC) each, I don’t care how much anyone else charges as long as I can cover the cost of h/w, power and management. If after deducting these costs I make just $10/year, that’s about as much as I could get by “putting my savings to work” in the bank (in the EU or Japan).
Clearly anyone else can do the same, so the “creator” can make about 10/1,500,000th of the dollar from seeing his “rare” book.
If torrents are published on Tor, it might be easy, but profits will be pathetic. That, by the way, is the new sharing economy that some “new economy” thinkers have been celebrating here.
Yes, something like that. You scan a book, sell the first seeding for say $3, I buy it from you and immediately cut the price to $0.3 (or $0.01, just so that I don’t have to come back and adjust the price later). In fact I wouldn’t even pay $3, I’d just wait couple of hours until the price drops to $0.01. The economy of abundance
Makes you wonder why would one want to scan a 100 page book for $3 knowing he’ll sell just one copy .
I don’t know, maybe some guy from Burundi would.
I agree that one wouldn’t be able to make much money from a single title, unless you just happened to have Google level of infrastructure and you could just pwn the hell out of everybody latency and bandwidth wise, but clearly that’s riding ponies into the sunset type thinking. I’d imagine the way you’d have to go about it through torrents, would be to make it a business of finding underseeded/bad file quality torrents and making well seeded/good file quality versions, but obviously you’d have to go crypto for that to work (the art business still wants to do business as if bittorrent doesn’t exist), and people willing to go crypto would likely have better options.
Blatant Nitpick: To clarify, that’s the “end of capitalism” type of sharing economy, and I’m not a fan of it either. That, and the “we’re all freelancers now”/user provided resources type of “sharing” economy, where companies mix/match/combine/transfer/store/blow-up/whatever physical goods and services similar to how current day companies do the same with data are two completely different things.
I get it, but with a single 8 TB drive I can store 1.5 million 5MB books. How many rare books are there?
For anything that’s being seeded by more than say 5 people, I can write a script to delete the file and the seed, etc.
I can see how this may work for the first “Scan & Seed”, but not for the 2nd guy. It would work for the readers, obviously.
Or, let’s say there are 10 million rare books at T0, and that most exist in more than one copy. Total revenue for the first “scan and seed” might be $50 million, and that’s it. In T0+1 year, how much revenue will be generated?
I wouldn’t necessarily call it that, but I’d agree it’s the end of intellectual property rights as we knew them.
In another topic I mentioned how artists and writers will probably have to get more of their paycheck from personalized performances (e.g. private concerts for the top 0.1%) and use various other ways of making money.
My reference to the “new economy” is at the claim by socialists that not paying for content will somehow generate abundance, which is intellectual breakthrough on the same level as our central bankers and certain Nobel Prize winners’ claims that money printing “puts the economy to work” and such nonsense. The new alchemy.
I think asking what’ll happen after all of the books have been scanned and are well-seeded is like asking what will the gold miners do once all the gold has been mined. Granted, the first ninety percent of books will be easy, but that last ten or so percent is gonna be a bitch. At some point, you get to the point where you have a real life national treasure type scenario where people are fighting congress to read national documents for clues and going full indiana Jones for long lost ancient scriptures for several million dollars, paid by wikipedia.
To be less silly, the seeding part is not something you’d do as a business, since the people with enough bandwidth and speed to win the automated seed battles could do better in the financial industry, where their data centers would allow them to only lose half of their money. There’s alot of ill-advised happenings in the media business so I’d imagine scanners could get by with some money for a while on exploiting that. Note that I never said that this would be a business that I would want to get into.
Oh, so you mean the idea that donations can fuel content creation. In that case, there are content creators who make high five/six figures off donations. Problem is, these are highly skilled individuals who’ve been at their respective game for a while and they’re not creating AAA video game titles that have eight figure budgets before marketing/advertizing. So, no disagreement there.
Gold is a finite resource. Books continue to be written. When all books are scanned you just write more.
Really? Step 1. Write a good rare book. Step 2. Upload it as a torrent. Step 3. Get paid until it gets excessively popular and loses it’s worth. In short this system doesn’t make being creative less profitable it simply changes the dynamic and the emphasis. Instead of being rewarded for being excessively popular it rewards artists who are rare and obscure. Now combine this with donations and crowdfunding for when an artist DOES become popular and develops a following and you’ve got yourself a system. You upload your book or art or whatever, you get paid by the system for being a rare torrent, then as your work gets around and your name gets out there you have people go to your social media page and/or crowdfunding page and you develop a relationship with them and/or have them donate to you. If you remain obscure then you make funds off releasing rare works. If you become popular you make funds of crowdfunding and donations.
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