Lessons from BitTorrent for the Blockchain/Crypto community

Lessons from BitTorrent for the Blockchain/Crypto community(medium.com)

3 points by talawahtech 7 years ago | 3 comments

This is a four part series of posts by former BitTorrent Inc employee Simon Morris. He makes a well reasoned analogy between the P2P revolution and the current Blockchain/Crypto craze, and provides insight into the powers and pitfalls of decentralized technologies and communities. There is a pretty decent TLDR summary at the end of the final post[1]

Key snippets:

> And this is the main conclusion — decentralization may be great for disruption, but if the experience of Bittorrent is anything to go by it is not at all clear that it has a role in whatever comes next. Blockchain architectures are great for unleashing unstoppable rule-breaking mobs, but we shouldn’t mistake the rule-breakers for the winners.

> Perhaps one of the most far-sighted winners here was Daniel Ek — CEO and Founder of Spotify — who preceded his Spotify success with the sale of the uTorrent client to BitTorrent Inc. Although early versions of Spotify used a Bittorrent-like P2P protocol to try to save money on bandwidth, they quickly realized that the main point of Bittorrent had little to do with saving money, and decentralization of their architecture was actually counter-productive to their aim. Perhaps it was apparent to them way back then that leading a revolution is exciting, but it’s far better to build the thing to save incumbents from the unleashed mob.

1. https://medium.com/@simonhmorris/decentralized-disruption-wh...

zzzcpan 7 years ago | |

I would nominate these as key snippets instead:

> For if there are no rules being broken it becomes tempting to ask why a decentralized architecture is the best tool for the job.

> you can indeed build and release a system such that when ‘the man’ comes over to compel you to stop whatever it is that you’ve done that annoys him, you can actually say “no, sorry, it can’t be done”. But you cannot then turn around and easily make changes and updates to that system. Coordination costs are high and the timeframe to get things done is extremely long.

> if the objective of the game was to secure billion dollar exits and huge returns on capital invested, then every one of them [VC-backed companies] failed.

Overall great series of posts.

talawahdotnet 7 years ago | | |

Yea, there are quite a number of useful nuggets in there. I also liked this bit on complexity from the third post[1]

> A second important theme for decentralized systems is a common lack of appreciation for just how complex these systems are and how finely balanced they need to be to operate correctly.

I originally joined Bittorrent in 2007 to work on a decentralized CDN which aimed to do something like “tie together all the unused storage and bandwidth on people’s PCs into a content delivery network which had zero operating costs (for us)”.

In time it proved there were a number of things wrong with this ambition (most of which I won’t touch on here), although perhaps the most important one which we discovered the hard way was the cost of complexity.

1. https://medium.com/@simonhmorris/intent-complexity-and-the-g...