BitTorrent: 100 million of our users will be able to earn on the distribution of files

At the end of January, one of the most successful crowdsales from the beginning of this year was held - the BitTorrent team collected 7.2 million dollars in minutes. According to CEO Binance Changphen Zhao, the crowdsale took about 18 minutes due to system problems.

“Without them, this time would be 18 seconds. The demand was astronomical. ”

The chief editor of ForkLog magazine Tanya Otter spoke with BitTorrent product director Pavel Lagutin about what will change for users of torrent clients after the appearance of the BTT token and how they can make money on the distribution of files.

Tanya Otter: OK, you have collected more than seven million dollars. What's next?

Pavel Lagutin: Like what? Grab the money and run to Mexico! But seriously, $ 7 million is a very small amount when you talk about a company with several hundred employees, which invests many times more in technology development. A successful crowdsale just showed the potential of the project, but now they are expecting real products from us. So what's next - just plow!

Tanya Otter: OK, but how did you get into the BitTorrent team, and where did you “plow” before that?

Pavel Lagutin: A standard interview in an American company usually begins with a request to tell about yourself, which implies a kind of pitch, an attempt to sell yourself. I will try briefly and without sales.

In Russia, I was only superficially able to touch the management of IT products, although this area has always interested me. After moving to the United States for a long time I could not find a job because of problems with the language (I confess, I did not learn English) and the lack of connections. For the first few years I managed to work with a couple of startups for a penny, try my hand at SQA, launch and close my project. In general, it was the beginning of immigration, we survived as we could.

In parallel, I launched the Maf Club, which helped form a fairly large Russian-speaking community, and for five years now it continues to add new people to my social circle. In the club, I met a man who, after looking at how I deal with crowds of guests, said that they needed such a manager to join the team. I did not miss this chance and found myself at Upwork (a platform for freelancers), where in three years I created one of the strongest teams and significantly improved the process of working with new clients.

I ran into a blockchain a few years ago, and it was love at first sight. About the way I had with cloud technologies many years ago, I immediately got the feeling that this could change the world. Therefore, when I had the opportunity to join BitTorrent / TRON, I wondered briefly.

I hope my story can be useful to those who doubt that an immigrant in America can build a decent career. For almost five years, from an Associate Product Manager in an unknown startup to a product director at a company that is somehow responsible for 25% of global traffic.

Tanya Otter: You are quite skeptical about the cryptocurrency, but not the blockchain. Why?

Pavel Lagutin: For me, the blockchain opens up such room for improvement in various aspects of human life, that cryptocurrency, as one of the use cases, simply does not cause such enthusiasm. In my opinion, the use of the blockchain in the electoral system, healthcare, education, etc., will have a greater impact on the quality of life of people.

Tanya Otter: What are blockchain projects that seem promising to you?

Pavel Lagutin: Well, for example, Sony and Fujitsu are investing in a blockchain project that will preserve the integrity of education data. Simply put, such a huge problem, as the confirmation of a diploma (the procedure through which every second passed, who changed the country of residence) may eventually become a thing of the past. In addition, with this system, online certification will be valued along with traditional diplomas. The doors will open for people from those countries where a single person can afford a college for the whole village. And these are already tens and hundreds of millions of people around the world. And such innovations delight me more than digital currencies.

Tanya Otter: Recently, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that Bitcoin could become the native currency of the Internet. How do you rate this statement?

Pavel Lagutin: I’m willing to believe a great person from Twitter. I agree that some currencies that will not have conditional boundaries and allow people around the world to get free access to digital services are definitely needed. Traditional financial institutions are too slow and too regulated for the rapidly changing realities of the Internet market. If BTC, ETH, TRX and others can help solve these problems and develop a digital economy, then that's great!

Tanya Otter: What do you think can prevent this?

Pavel Lagutin: At the moment, the Kryptranok still reminds me of the sick Soviet economy of the Perestroika times - this is muddy water, where everyone is at his own risk trying to catch a big fish. Winning units, losing millions.

Improvement involves replacing HYIP with knowledge, getting rid of all sorts of rogues, clearing the crypto market from one-day currencies and the emergence of tools to protect investors in the first place. Only when these conditions are met can we say that cryptocurrencies have the potential to compete with fiat money.

Tanya Otter: As is known, the BTT token will be used to reward users for sharing files in BitTorrent and µTorrent torrent clients. How will this work?

Pavel Lagutin: Absolutely. As a company that has been developing the world's most popular torrent client for the past 15 years, we know the behavior of users and understand their problems. One of them is the lack of motivation to remain on the distribution after the user has downloaded the desired file.

We believe that this problem can be solved with the help of the parties' material interest: the time and resources of the distributors will be rewarded, and the downloads will be able to spend some virtual currency in order to quickly access the necessary files. As they say in America - win-win! More details can be found in our project page.

Tanya Otter: BTT is a utility token with investment potential. Do you agree with this statement?

Pavel Lagutin: We do not consider BTT as an object for investment. For us, this is only a utility-token with specific uses. I would say that the token definitely has a bright future, since BitTorrent offers almost the only option for mass use of cryptotoken in a mass product. No offense to other market participants, but this is not selling virtual stickers, but a set of services with tens of millions of active users who meet real needs.

Tanya Otter: The other day there was information that BitTorrent Token will appear on the largest South Korean stock exchange Bithumb. Do you plan to go to other exchanges?

Pavel Lagutin: I will not be original and will send your readers back to our site, where you can already find about a dozen different Crypto Exchange, on which our token is addressed. Almost every day, my colleagues add a new name to this list. Demand is big, and it only grows.

Tanya Otter: If the price of a token will grow exponentially, will this not interfere with its use by customers? In addition, it may be of interest to speculators who can manipulate its price.

Pavel Lagutin: The value of the token for users will be determined by the balance of supply and demand, like any price in a free economy. All options for using BTT are real services, where some users “pay” to others for some services or resources, so any bias in price cannot be significant or long-term.

In general, it is difficult for me to comment on this problem, because I am not very familiar with the features of gambling. In theory, you can play on everything that is in free float, but in fact I cannot remember reading about such precedents with more popular and profitable currencies, so I see no reason to worry ahead of time.

Tanya Otter: A card has recently been released to store and use the BTT token. What does she give?

Pavel Lagutin: This project is very fresh, still smelling of printing ink. The first few hundred cards were issued last week. In fact, cardholders have the opportunity to either store their tokens on the card at almost 2% per annum, or dispose of them in our or partner services just as they do with regular cards.

This project has a tremendous potential, and if you are interested in the details, go to the project site and follow the details and new use cases.

It is difficult for me to say now what physical use cases will be available in Russia or other countries, but in the USA there are already a number of partners with whom we are working on various options for using the card - from large online purchases to everyday situations such as ordering a cup of coffee.

Tanya Otter: What is the auction system that you plan to implement?

Pavel Lagutin: This question concerns the service BitTorrent Speed, that is, the use of tokens to improve the speed of downloading torrent content. I will try to answer in simple language, and technical details can again be found in the documentation.

The number of slots for distributing any client file is limited, and an auction is held to determine who should get access to these slots. In fact, this is an illustration of the free market: the one who can offer more gets faster and more. This does not mean that someone will not be able to download the file. Just those who are not ready to reward the distributors may have to stand in line for longer.

Tanya Otter: How exactly will the auction work?

Pavel Lagutin: The principle of the auction is simple: all customers who want to access a certain fragment of the file, make bids, and N users who have placed more pay the minimum winning bid and get access to N open slots (the number of available slots is individually dependent from the client and settings).

For example, there were 5 slots, and 100 willing. There was an auction. The rates were distributed as follows: 10000, 1000, 100, 10, 1, 0.5, and less. Therefore, access must be obtained by everyone who has set 1 or more tokens. All winners will pay 1 token, regardless of the bet made.

The system is designed to maximize the chances of all participants in the torrent world to access the content and at the same time encourage people to provide access to files as long as possible.

Tanya Otter: Wouldn't such a system create a situation in which users can pool into more efficient access to content? After consolidation, these pools can become a group of add-on services over the protocol.

Pavel Lagutin: The situation with pools is theoretically possible, but does not make economic sense. The essence of the torrent protocol is that if there is a torrent-file, any client can connect to the distribution. This means that after a very short period of time, the “exclusive” file that people agreed to distribute in the pool will be available to many other non-pool clients.

And partner services that will distribute legal content, for example, stream video or audio, accepting payment in BTT, are only welcome. We will be only happy if we build the torrent version of Netflix or Soundcloud with our help.

Tanya Otter: In a previous interview, you said that your team is directly involved in developing a BTT wallet. When will the approximately full launch take place, and what will change for users of torrents with the advent of the wallet?

Pavel Lagutin: There are two separate topics - interfaces for BitTorrent Speed ​​and what we call the onchain and offchan exchanger. Purse can be called only to simplify the understanding of the principles of work. Initially, the BitTorrent Speed ​​management system will include BTT balance control, information about tokens spent on downloading and information about tokens earned on content distribution.

The on-line and off-exchange exchanger will allow you to transfer BTT from TRON Blockchain to BitTorrent Speed ​​balance and back. Free BTT conversion to other cryptocurrencies so far in the distant plans, we will tell about it later.

Tanya Otter: Tell us about the new product BitTorrent Live and work on creating a decentralized file storage. Are there any new projects?

Pavel Lagutin: BitTorrent Live is a tangible product that will be ready to enter the market in the near future. This will be a live broadcast with the possibility of rewarding producers of high-quality video content using BTT.

Decentralized file storage (DCDN) is still under development. At its core and at the base of a number of services we are working on is the concept of a sharing economy, where people earn money by providing their computer resources: capacity, energy, computing power.

The idea of ​​what the 100-million-strong army of our users around the world is capable of inspires us every day with new ideas! We believe in this decentralized world with a new economy, and we want to be among its creators.

Tanya Otter: It is known that in torrent systems pirated content is often distributed, and sometimes even worse - up to child porn. Do you plan to deal with this?

Pavel Lagutin: To answer this question, you need to explain a little how torrent technology works. Neither the protocol nor the torrent clients that our company is developing do not know what kind of files the network members exchange. From the word at all. That is, people know that this particular torrent belongs to a particular film or music album.

But all that the torrent client sees is the set of characters in the unique hash of a particular file that is used to detect those who distribute or request this file. The client does not have any information about the actual distribution content.

Therefore, we, as a company, with all our law-abidingness, simply physically cannot restrict or prohibit anything. We believe that our task is to provide the community with the most effective tools for file sharing, and ethics and compliance with the law is the task of each individual user.