Introduction

TRON Foundation and BitTorrent Foundation are introducing a new cryptographic token called BTT along with an extended version of the BitTorrent protocol in order to create a token-based economy around the usage of networking, bandwidth and storage on hundreds of millions of computers on the internet. Our initial entry point is to introduce token-based optimizations to the existing BitTorrent protocol providing a way for the value of sharing bandwidth and storage to be captured by network participants beyond the point at which the current protocol no longer values it. The Dev Team's longer-term vision is to broaden the usage of BitTorrent far beyond current use cases to provide a distributed infrastructure platform to third party app developers and to enable consumers to continuously distill small amounts of value from their devices by allowing others to make use of their spare resources.

The first step in the project will create a market-driven mechanism to enable consumers to collaborate to optimize and prolong the lifespan of existing BitTorrent swarms. Using additional extensions to BitTorrent will subsequently open up opportunities for distributed app developers to launch new apps making use of infrastructure provided by existing BitTorrent clients which already constitute a distributed networked storage platform of unprecedented scale. These new apps will be able to offer incentives (BTT) to users in return for access to cost effective platform resources comprised of an incredibly broad collection of already-deployed network endpoints. The position of these endpoints at the very edge of the Internet will have the additional appeal to developers of being extremely difficult for net-neutrality adversaries to interdict. Finally, the ability of consumers to capture the value of their contributed computing resources within a cryptographic token will give rise to a completely new transactional mechanism for internet consumers that is distinct from either their attention or their credit card.

With over 100 million monthly active users and millions of additional new installs every week, BitTorrent already manages one of the largest distributed computing ecosystems on the Internet. By integrating BTT tokens and transaction processing we will both address existing limitations of BitTorrent and open up a whole new borderless economy exchanging value for compute resources on a global scale.

Background

BitTorrent is a pioneering distributed communication protocol invented by Bram Cohen in 2001. As a peer-to-peer protocol, it facilitates the transfer of large, highly demanded files, eliminating the need for a trusted central server.

The BitTorrent protocol enables client software endpoints (“clients”) to collaborate with each other to enable reliable simultaneous distribution of large files to multiple clients, reducing reliance on any single weak point (such as a server connection). It does this by attempting to make efficient use of every client’s upload and download bandwidth to balance peer-to-peer

content delivery across all clients.

To find a peer that has a file or portion thereof, peers either “announce” to a tracker, a server that keeps track of which peers have which files available, or find them via the DHT, a distributed database of peers. Through this process, all peers are naturally segmented into “swarms” of users, with every user in each swarm having a common interest in exchanging pieces of a specific file.

Before an exchange begins, files are cut into pieces. Clients advertise which pieces of a file their user has available, and those pieces are uploaded by users who have them and downloaded by users who need them. Cryptographic hashes, or “info hashes,” of the pieces are used to verify

that the pieces being shared are the pieces that were requested.

The more pieces a peer receives from another peer in exchange for pieces sent, the more productive a peer-to-peer interaction is considered to be. The most productive piece exchanges are rewarded with further pieces, and the clients with the least productive exchanges are deprecated, disconnected or banned.

Once a user has completed a download, they may allow their client to continue to upload pieces despite no longer needing any download in return; this is called “seeding.” The default for most clients is to “seed” to other downloaders. This activity, however, is entirely altruistic. There is no

economic penalty for users closing their BitTorrent client once a download has finished.

The BitTorrent Ecosystem

BitTorrent Inc., which maintains the BitTorrent protocol, also created two of the most popular BitTorrent clients: BitTorrent and μTorrent (“uTorrent”). The open protocol has also been used to create dozens of independent clients, and there is healthy competition among the companies and volunteers that maintain those clients.

Independent BitTorrent infrastructure providers offer additional services, such as trackers that introduce peers, and torrent sites that index file metadata and provide access to their associated torrents.

BitTorrent Tokens (BTT) and the Blockchain

BitTorrent Inc. is introducing a TRON TRC-10 cryptographic token called BitTorrent Token (BTT). BTT will act as a general purpose mechanism for transacting in computing resources shared between BitTorrent clients and a liquid market of service requesters and service providers. BTT will be the unit which denominates transactions for the provision of services in the BTT-enabled BitTorrent ecosystem. It will be made available as a divisible token, allowing for granular pricing.

Binance Smart Chain Contract Address:

0x352Cb5E19b12FC216548a2677bD0fce83BaE434B