vTorrent is the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency client with a built-in bittorrent network, which could make it even harder for ISPs to track and take users to court for  online “pirated” content. 

In 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto first began explaining Bitcoin, he used bittorrent as an example of how the currency network would scale and gain value. 

“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.”

Now in 2015, a new project that aims to bring crypto currencies and torrents together in one place has been launched.

vTorrent which launched in December 2014 aims to create a marriage between crypto and torrents. Currently the project is in early beta testing of its torrent and encrypted messaging features, which users can access from within their crypto wallet.  The project page explains:

“We are not aiming to be 'the next Bitcoin,' but we are aiming to be limewire or kazaa with blockchain at its core.”

The anonymous developer, who goes by the name vTorrent on the Bitcointalk forum, was keen to point out that there are other projects attempting to do something similar, ThePirateBayCoin for example, which has outlined its intentions but is yet to launch.

Torrents have been hugely popular over the last decade with up to 30 million people using them on any given day, but in recent years copyright holders have been actively using the courts to shut down torrent operations.  In a recent test case in Australia, a landmark piracy and privacy case was won by Dallas Buyers Club LLC, the company that owns the rights to the 2013 Hollywood film.

The company wanted the major ISPs in Australia to hand over the names and addresses of 4,726 people that it had identified as illegally downloaded the movie from IP addresses.  Having won its legal battle against the ISPs, the judge, Justice Nye Perram, ordered the ISPs had to hand over their customers contact details but under the supervision of the court.

Since this is a decentralized cryptocurrency client with a built-in bittorrent network and encrypted services, ISPs will have a harder time keeping track of what their customers are doing making projects such as vTorrent potentially very popular and further driving the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies.

But another contributor to the vTorrent project highlighted that the distributed nature of cryptocurrencies could potentially be used to help movie rights holders. In particular, high quality movies and TV shows could be more efficiently distributed over the internet using crypto torrent users, who could become paid local distributors reducing the strain on internet bandwidths, while ensuring that content providers are cannot be censored.

With tens of millions of torrent users around the world, the combination of crypto and torrents could lead to a new wave of mass adoption for crypto, and a new way for copyrights holders to figure out new business model to cut down their costs and work with torrent users instead of taking them to court.

By Ahmed

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