I agree, but isn't this the current system, which flaws (too many leechers not enough seeders) this project is trying to solve?

It's been a solved problem in private tracker communities - where users leach bandwidth is on a credit system and they need to maintain a ratio of upload/download to keep their access.

What TRON is trying to do is sell tokens to users to be able to access bandwidth. Where do these tokens come from to begin with? TRON just whips them up for free.

If I remember right, a famous Bittorrent group based out of the UK called Oink was shut down because they took donations for running the site. One can imagine the same fate would await TRON once the tokens are found facilitating pirated MPAA and copyright IP works.

I’d posit that such a setup will lead to users with low speed connection or connections which aren’t online constantly to be banned or required to buy a pardon from the site when not fulfilling the seeding requirement (as every site policy I’ve seen required maintaining a ratio over time).

This happens because users with high speed connections are incentivized to seed well beyond 1:1 and thus there is rarely any demand for seeding. Downloading is super fast which just exasperates the problem as your share ratio drops below the acceptable rate quickly.

Thus such sites tend to make their money off the people who can likely afford it the least, while rewarding people with the disposable income required to live in a neighborhood with unlimited high speed internet and pay for said service.

There’s also the matter of keeping content alive to consider. I’d consider it much more valuable to keep content with no or relatively few seeders alive than incentivizing seeders to add additional bandwidth to already popular torrents. I has not seen an site policy which encourages this, rather it likely punishes such activities as it bans users who are trying to reach a required share ratio without constant demand thus taking the content offline rather than keeping it available.

Whether or not Project Atlas will enable incentives for all users and multiple scenarios or if it will simply perpetuate a similar system to what is seen in the private torrenting communities remains to be seen.

Ok I stand corrected, thanks for the detailed answer.

I have not seen that flaw in ages as I am part of communities where giving and taking is rewarded with nothing but meaningless points and merit. It works fine.

I'm sure. I personally never been part of communities more or less because of laziness, but I could see that if this is something getting embedded into the clients directly, it could be a solution.

Adding money to this would easily kill the good intentions of people involved. I don't think it is a right idea.

but it's not money tho. You get tokens that you can only use on the torrent network, I think to have more seed powers. Kind of like if you could use your karma you've accumulated on your torrent community to get better seeds.

I don't think it'd be a bad idea, as it would push more people to seed. I know I'd seed more :)

That already exists with bonuspoints within torrent communities. It works well.

This Atlas thing is all about extracting real money. The owner of BitTorrent Inc is a cryptocoin scammer.

In demand content always has plenty of seeders. The stuff that dies is obscure content or large archives. Someone only cares about the data once a year when doing research or something. This network won't solve this because there is no profit in storing data that is very rarely archived. Its a hard problem because you need to rank data on how valuable it is.

A dump of GeoCities is rarely used but has great value. A 1tb archive of videos of me counting grains of sand is also rarely used but worthless.

And how would this crypto coin thing help here? Nothing in the announcement deals with obscure, large content.

I don't think it will. What it will do is stop people seeding content just for others benefit and not expecting a reward.

private trackers have been implementing a solution for over a decade that this project seemingly does on a rudimentary level: 'bonus points' for seeding a file after snatching it, which accrues the longer you help seed. the points can be spent however the tracker software is written, be it profile/forum customizations, additional access, or reclaiming ratio.

They are not exclusive to each other.