Decentralization is part of a larger legal playbook. More doesn't always help: BitTorrent was less decentralized than Kazaa but more legally resilient. Their use of OSS, marketing, PR, and implicit reliance on 3rd parties (The Pirate Bay) mattered morehttps://twitter.com/backus/status/1016428419674882048 …
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BitTorrent won the legal war by being thorough: • Website talked about hosting not downloading •
@bramcohen only talked about legal uses. Claimed no profit motive • Prominent free speech defense on website • Redundancy via OSS clients • Outsourced liability to Pirate Baypic.twitter.com/iHEznYJ4Ba
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Decentralized protocols don't absolve the company of responsibility, it just shifts to the client: • Limewire had a copyright filter, disabled by default. Court reaction: "What? Make it mandatory!" • Kazaa had a NSFW filter. Court reaction: "So you could filter copyright too!"
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Passing the buck to activists buys room to decentralize. While Hollywood fought Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent community added • Multitracker support (takedown resilience) • DHTs (decentralized torrent metadata storage) • PEX (peer discovery w/o trackers) Helping The Pirate Bay!pic.twitter.com/zB98rEZTzv
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Some look at the file sharing movement and say "BitTorrent didn't win, Netflix+Spotify did!" Decentralization exploits legal boundaries, exposing rent seeking in anti-competitive industries. BitTorrent created the conditions that allowed Netflix and Spotify to exist We all won!
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The political framing for decentralization is "censorship resistance." The market framing is "anti-competitive market resistance." P2P file sharing corrected anti-consumer markets for music and movies. Imagine what we can unlock with Bitcoin and Ethereum!
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The chronology of the "most popular file sharing app" is roughly: Napster Limewire Kazaa eDonkey BitTorrent Reflecting "minimum viable decentralization" over time. Limewire was early, Kazaa more usable. BitTorrent's UX was bad, but won legal long gamehttps://medium.com/@jbackus/minimum-viable-decentralization-d813dcf653fc …
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When decentralizing, half measures bite you in the ass:
Aimster obscured searches and user IPs from its protocol
BitTorrent disowned search and left IPs in the clear
Courts argued Aimster's conduct was "willful blindness." BitTorrent's choices made its position strongerpic.twitter.com/wAsLArkhWT
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Boiling down decentralization movements, we build technology to resist governments installing filters:
Copyright (BitTorrent)
Anti-money laundering (Bitcoin)
Content/communication (Tor)
Legal battles and tech evolution continues until its too hard to install a filter5 replies 12 retweets 45 likesShow this thread
Finally, a motivation for building a blockchain product that I can confidently say to VCs
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