Let's talk purely about piracy for a second, as a legitimate use for legitimate owners, based on something that happened to me a couple of days ago:

I own two copies of this game, From Dust (which is fantastic, by the creator of Another World), one of them on disc and one of them on Steam, separate keys.

I installed it from Steam because I don't have an optical drive handy and the key is not on the case for some reason. So the game makes me sign up for a UPlay account (in addition to having the Steam stuff), which apparently I did in the past, and not with my primary email. So I can't play because it's already activated... and installing it from Steam doesn't tell UPlay that I own it on Steam.

So then I go and email Ubisoft tech support and say I have this key and haven't played in 5 years how can I swap it over to my new email.

A day later I get a reply that they want me to go screenshot my transaction history and my CD Key (which I already sent them) in the Steam UI.

...meanwhile, I was able to download ("pirate") and install the game in 5 minutes, and it doesn't require either the Steam or the Uplay account to work. AND it'll keep on working 50 years after Steam and Ubisoft are both bankrupt (or keep working on your OS/vm/whatever when Steam and Ubisoft discontinue support for it).

So yeah, there's a use for bittorrent & piracy, since DRM ruins your ability to archive any-damn-thing now. Without bittorrent, playing that game would be a terrible ordeal, if it is even possible at all. Paying for it (twice) only made it worse.

This is one of the reasons I make efforts to buy games via gog.com rather than Steam (the other reason is that Steam is dangerously close to a monopoly, and that never ends well).

Gog and the Humble Bundle (if they offer a DRM free version; these days a lot of titles just have Steam Keys).

You do lose the save game/cloud sync, but you gain copies of your game that will always work without needing to verify your licence over the Interwebs.

> Humble Bundle (if they offer a DRM free version; these days a lot of titles just have Steam Keys)

I've been griping lately that Humble Bundle seems increasingly watering down their principles. Early Humble Bundle made it a big deal that they always included DRM free copies and more often than not full soundtracks or soundtracks at a discount. Today's Humble Bundle seems much more and more to "just" be a Steam Key reseller, without DRM free copies of many games, and without access to nearly as large of a percentage of game soundtracks.

(I realize that last is a weird gripe, but there were a lot of games I picked up for their soundtracks because of artists I enjoyed, and sometimes I'd be surprised and really enjoy the associated game, but even if I didn't like the game I still got my money's worth from the soundtrack. I've now switched to buying from the artists more often directly from Bandcamp and rarely if ever buying the associated games, or just waiting for a direct Steam or Microsoft Store sale.)

It certainly feels from Humble's emails that they are very deeply focused on their Monthly Pass, and it feels almost to the detriment of everything else, but then Monthly Pass things don't really appeal to me in general.

Lots of the games I've bought have cloud synced saves on gog too.

Related, Gog recently started https://fckdrm.com/

No it would not, the analogy doesnt even make sense

You're falsely assuming bittorrent is only good for piracy. It's ideal for distributing larger - legitimate - files, such as games and game updates, which can easily be 50 - 100 GB. While those could be served by e.g. a cloud edge provider, the publisher would still have to pay per GB. Offloading that load to multiple host locations and clients will save a lot of money and network capacity. Imagine a game on launch day that has been bought a million times - not a stretch of the imagination. That's a hundred petabytes of data that has to be distributed across the world on launch day for a 100 GB game.

For large legitimate files, services like WeTransfer or Dropbox have made BitTorrent not really that useful anymore. Cloud storage prices keep going down, as well. As for games, it's uncommon to solve distribution this way. Usually your game will be in one of the big platforms, like Steam. Use cases for BitTorrent have narrowed quite a bit. There are still some uses, sure, but it's not like it used to be.

In 2016 Netflix only offered 31 of the top 250 IMDb movies. Don't know where we are now, but in my country I am surprised when a movie I want to watch is available on Netflix. People do not make money on seeding, they gain internet points, aka coins.

The advantage here is that the protocol itself will incentivise people to seed instead of doing a hit & run, and will thus increase the value of the network.

Not sure it will work, but the experiment is interesting.

Not to mention that it gets worse with the old publishers all wanting to start their own streaming services and having made Netflix block VPNs.

It's as if they saw a drop in piracy and asked themselves how to make it rise again.

> With cheap music streaming services such as spotify, apple music and google play as well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon, does anyone need bittorrent anymore?

Yes people need bittorrent, first of all "cheap" is subjective, not everybody can afford to pay each month to watch movies/series and listen to music. Then there is a limit to what can offer Netflix or Amazon for example: I love movies and I watch a lot of them at the theater and at home but I can't find any Cronenberg's or Lynch's (yes I like Davids) movies on Netflix/Amazon. Even finding them on DVD/Bluray is difficult sometimes even with classics.

And there I am talking only about big directors movies, I am french and watch a lot of french movies but when I try to find old ones or just some with low budget it is nearly impossible besides torrents.

So yes we need bittorent/stremio but I wish we don't and that culture will be available to everyone someday.

Americans often fail to realize that catalogs of these services are usually smaller (often much smaller) in other countries. You can actually watch, say, Eraserhead on many platforms - if you're in the US. But try that in a small country, even in the EU, and you're out of luck.

Yes, not only for people that want things for free, but also people that want control over their media. If artist X decides to blacklist spotify/google play because they don't like it or whatever, or they make some deal with a competitor, etc. You can no longer listen to it on spotify.

This scenario already exists with netflix, you now have to have netflix, amazon prime, hulu, youtube premium and whatever disney's new streaming service will be called. Because each contains their own exclusives, and with some cases they won't contain the same products forever.

So now you have to juggle between different apps to get whatever media you're trying to access. As for bittorrent, if you're tech literate, you can setup an automatic downloading/streaming setup in 1-2 afternoons and have all the stuff you want, in one place, forever, at the low cost of $25 per terabyte.

What.cd had over one million unique releases (albums), whereas Google Music, Spotify and Apple Music usually claim to have around 30-50 million songs. The most common complaint about Netflix I hear is that their selection is quite pathetic as well. The advantage I see is the user-friendliness, organization, and community that comes out of having a huge library that isn't restricted to just mainstream material predominantly from a few countries.

> With cheap music streaming services such as spotify, apple music and google play as well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon, does anyone need bittorrent anymore?

When it's about music/video, although I still listen/watch Spotify/Netflix, I actually prefer to have the tunes I love stored in bare audio files, DRM-free, and play them without using an Internet connection, I also prefer to watch movies on my non-smart internet-detached TV by just putting them on a USB flash drive. But I hardly ever download music or videos from BitTorrent actually (although I have indeed downloaded rips of some albums I have legitimately bought on CDs in the past), BitTorrent is not only about pirating this kind of content. I also doubt there would be much progress in ease of access and affordability in the recording industry without competition with the file-sharing world.

> With cheap music streaming services such as spotify, apple music and google play as well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon, does anyone need bittorrent anymore?

Covering just the "evil, bad" piracy angle: very much yes. If you're not in the US, you can usually stream some small subset of movies and TV shows, often months after their release (which means you've missed out on participating in global comentary, which happens immediately after release). Then, streaming services like to remove titles at random, without notice. So the movie you streamed legally last year and want to show to your SO today might no longer be available (happens to me frequently with Netflix).

> well as video streaming such as netflix and amazon

And about a few hundreds of other services worldwide with each their silos. Even for Netflix or Amazon Prime, it’s not the same catalog in the different regions they’re supported.

It’s of course made worse by the fact that any new entrant needs exclusives to lure people in, so every new service comes with its new silo.

It’s still a huge mess with no simple way to watch something legally from a simple search, even with a credit card in hand.

Music has become better (still super messy, spotify/apple music/Google cover a huge base, but it’s still only a fraction of what’s commercially sold in my experience)

I think the services still have some way to go. I subscribe to Netflix, Now Tv and Amazon Prime in the UK. There are still things I can't find, quite a few things that disappear from Netflix or NowTv when we're not done watching, only to reappear as paid content on Prime. There are a lot of movies just not available on either.

I don't know how this can be solved, but at present whilst there is definitely more than enough good tv content to keep me happy, there are definitely still holes and edge cases.

That said, this all sounds like a way to monetise piracy using cryptocurrency, not something I'd want to encourage.

(Spotify basically took over all music listening years ago, I no longer bother adding to my own collection, bar very infrequent CD purchases for some of my very favourite bands)

> Besides, bittorrent works great as is, if people start making money on seeding, they will be way easier targets in court when sued by majors. h

Only until we have implementations of anonymous private and metadata resistant DHTshttps://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=18111479

I love bittorrent. I control the quality, the availability, the (lack of) DRM and the price of any media (books, music, movies, series). The only thing that comes close is bandcamp.com but that's only for music AFAIK.