JoyStream Allows Users to Sell Bandwidth for Bitcoin

The bitcoin-based BitTorrent client, JoyStream, has Alpha clients ready for download. Founded by Dr. Bedeho Mender, the service adds incentives to downloading and seeding torrent files. Mender’s creation adds micropayment support to a BitTorrent client that offers faster-streaming content by improving increased bandwidth and a reward-based infrastructure. The client provides users with the ability to charge a higher value with better quality material such as lossless audio.

Also read: An Interview with BitProof Creator Louison Dumont

JoyStream hopes to provide more sharing incentives in the torrent world with Bitcoin micropayments. These additions to the new environment mean the service adds a faster rate of download speed, more content availability, and increased bandwidth to the network by users selling their unused bandwidth. Paid file-sharing networks have been tried with various protocols, but many feel that BitTorrent and Bitcoin would make the market more consistent by offering an incentive to those who give and those who take. Dr. Bedeho Mender told Bitcoin.com:

“BitTorrent is an example of a market which lacks prices, and therefore any way to properly use the limited bandwidth resources available. The presence of prices is what makes a lot of our everyday life well organized, reliable and effective, and that is what JoyStream will do for peer to peer content distribution online. The practical effect of this is that the open BitTorrent system will be able to support much faster download speeds and content availability, in particular for long tail content.”

BitTorrent allows the practice of peer-to-peer file sharing and offers the wide distribution of documents, audio, film and files. Programmer Bram Cohen released the software in July of 2001; since then, it has become the most-used service in the world to download online material. Dr. Mender wants to change the atmosphere of the torrenting space by adding extra incentive to help nourish these networks. The organization released a video explaining its “Proof of Concept,” and offers a demonstration of its P2P-ecosystem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=uj8di5KkoMw

JoyStream wants to be the first decentralized crypto-client to change the BitTorrent network. In Satoshi’s 2008 description of Bitcoin, he described BitTorrent as a system very much like the cryptocurrency, saying,

“For transferable proof of work tokens to have value, they must have monetary value. To have monetary value, they must be transferred within a very large network – for example, a file trading network akin to BitTorrent.”

Dr. Mender feels that Bitcoin can help the network of torrenting scale upwards, bringing superior volume to file-sharing. Mender got into Bitcoin in late 2013, and started seriously thinking about applications for the technology in early 2014. BitTorrent seemed like an obvious use case right away for him; at the time he was finishing his PhD in computational neuroscience at the University of Oxford.

“I knew I wanted to do something in the technology and startup space, so the timing was perfect. I quickly designed the protocol, and then I’ve spent about a full year just developing the basic implementation available today.”

Many believe that Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology can change the file-sharing paradigm forever. Micropayments are a great way to offer an incentive to those leeching and seeding in the torrent-space. Bitcoin.com will follow this project as it develops and will keep our readers updated.

What do you think of Bitcoin implemented with a BitTorrent client? Let us know in the comments below!

Images courtesy of Pixbay and Redmemes.