Blockchain world can learn a lot from p2p file sharing era
Incentive issues (most shared NOTHING, tons of fake files + viruses)
Lots of attempted market mechanisms (from game theory to tokens) to fix incentives
Monetization lessons
Forking vs governance
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Tokens are clearly good for balancing incentives. p2p attempts from 15+ years ago: • Mojo: a liquidatable token to incentivize sharing storage, bandwidth, CPU • eMule credits for upload/download • Lots of research on p2p tokens (PPay, PeerMint, PeerMart) • Kazaa PeerPointspic.twitter.com/AN2VHiqzAV
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If you're building a fat protocol, putting ads in the thin client is a terrible way to monetize! In file sharing days, people created lazy patched clients like "Kazaa Lite" which JUST removed ads. Reputation of bundling "AdWare" and "SpyWare" killed trust of creators.
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3rd party companies building on top of your protocol help you find product market fit. Normal startups iterate sequentially; fat protocols can iterate in parallel
BearShare built features that Limewire users wanted like video preview
eMule improved on bad UI of eDonkeypic.twitter.com/G0CjFBK3NG
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Decentralized fat protocols out live the companies that create them • Nullsoft launched Gnutella protocol but Limewire/BearShare built the apps we all know. Forks like FrostWire live on eternally • OSS eMule built on eDonkey's networks after they died and even improved on it
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While fat protocols compete, 3rd party apps can unify and create a better experience. Popular file sharing app "Shareaza" searched EVERYTHING by implementing Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey, and BitTorrent. Open source giFT project provided generalized backend for thispic.twitter.com/ub0hoW0oNF
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Third party apps provide continuity for users by switching protocols if it makes sense. When FrostWire (fork of Limewire) realized BitTorrent was the winning protocol, they added support. Now it is JUST a BitTorrent client. Users don't care about protocols!pic.twitter.com/QlZArmOw99
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If fat protocols are sufficiently general then thin applications can find product market fit by specializing. PopcornTime (backed by BitTorrent) is a great example where it specializes both by content (movies) and mode of consumption (streaming only)pic.twitter.com/AELPAspUc6
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Replying to @backus
Don't some PopcornTime forks allow downloading? Or no?
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Maybe. I just know that streaming was a main goal of the primary project
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