BitTorrent (and uTorrent) reportedly sold
A Variety report suggests that BitTorrent Inc, creators of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol and owners of uTorrent and BitTorrent (client), has been acquired by blockchain entrepreneur Justin Sun.
According to TechCrunch, Sun agreed to pay $140 million for the company after he signed a letter of intent to acquire the company in January 2018.
Justin Sun is best known for the Tron platform, which describes itself as one of the largest blockchain-based operating systems in the world. One of Tron's missions is to build a "truly decentralized Internet and its infrastructure" and part of that mission included the creation of TRX, a cryptocurrency with a current market cap of $4.517 Billion USD and the value of a coin at $0.045 at the time of writing.
The deal has not been announced by Sun or BitTorrent Inc at the time of writing, and it is unclear therefore how Sun plans to integrate or use the technology and what will happen to uTorrent and other company applications in the process.
TechCrunch suggests, based on unnamed shareholders the tech blog spoke with, that Sun may have two plans:
- To "legitimize" the business.
- As a potential network to mine coins using P2P technology and the large number of users.
While it is certainly too early to tell how this will pan out once the acquisition has been confirmed by Sun and BitTorrent Inc, it could have a big impact on the torrent community.
The past couple of years have been rocky for BitTorrent Inc. The company tried to diversify its portfolio by launching a live streaming business, sync service, and media distribution business but these efforts did not work out as intended.
BitTorrent Sync was moved to another company and most media operations were shut down as well. The company claims that more than 170 million users use its products per month and that its protocol moves up to 40% of all daily Internet traffic.
Closing words
It is too early to tell what will come out of this and whether the acquisition will be positive for the torrent community and users of uTorrent or BitTorrent, or not.
Now You: What's your take on this?
“acquired by blockchain entrepreneur Justin Sun”
I go with #2:
“As a potential network to mine coins using P2P technology and the large number of users.”
No better time to switch to qBittorrent.
Every aspect of the internet seems to get gobbled up by the usual barons looking for profit.
… “mine coins using P2P technology” .. the greedy tumor continues to proliferate and turns the internet into a purely capitalist system.
@noe, how appropriate I say this since we are discussing something related to torrents, but the plants for this market shift were ….[wait for it] …. seeded a long time ago! :p
I have a hard time understanding what this guy’s company purpose is, really. I guess it’s safe to say that you should expect things to become even worse in the uTorrent land. I just downloaded the latest sane version uTorrent v3.5.3 build 44428, which I’m going to use in portable mode.
Maybe I’ll find a better client in the meantime. Maybe. I don’t like qBittorrent and Deluge, they are so heavy. uTorrent is 1,9MiB. qBittorrent x86 is almost 19MiB (x64 is 22). That’s 10x the size of uT. And I honestly can not see why, from a user pov.
Btw, this is how my uTorrent looks like: imgur.com/eya1G4s
The last sane and safe utorrent is version 2. Version 3 is full of spyware and ads, really not recommended.
My utorrent is only 300kb but it has all the torrent functions. I honestly wonder what utorrent 3 can do but 2 can’t.
Magnet handling is improved in v3. It’s why I moved from v2.
What’s improved? I can download Magnets without problem in v2.
Still wondering what’s great about v3 than v2..
I have both, and v2 is slow at connecting when using magnets and it doesn’t allow you to choose what to download before starting the download. Only after you start it you go and uncheck what you don’t need. It is problematic because it already creates the zeroed file by the time you uncheck what you don’t need.
See this how they both work on magnets: imgur.com/a/l2QdlD8
Personally I don’t like this behaviour. It is also bad for an SSD, resulting in huge writes for no reason. And at the end of the day, what for? v3 also doesn’t have any ads, I don’t get to see anything unsolicited, even if I enable all those toolbars and sidebars, there’s no trace of an ad or even a placeholder for one. You can disable everything from the advanced section.
See this how they both work on magnets: imgur.com/a/GNK68ey
*wrong link in my post*
qBittorrent is open-source, see for yourself. A Qt-based application, also uses the Boost library and libtorrent-rasterbar, so it carries some of this baggage, it’s total footprint is a bit larger than a purely native exe, but in this case it’s also more stable and better supported.
No tears here, ad serving platforms the both of them. Good riddance.
How great! I’d have to share my cpu power with others.
crypto currency is not only consuming cpu time, but also bandwidth and disk space – what a disgrace.
I’d never agree to run a program that uses my cpu and bandwitdh to other purposes that it is not meant to.
Napster (yes i am old!) died, so will bittorrent. They’ll have to come up with something new soon.
The largest known organism in the world is a honey fungus in Oregon, USA. It’s over 10 square kilometers in size. Honey fungus is pathogenic, it slowly eats tree roots, often killing many trees as its massive hidden below ground creeping tendrils advance. Occasionally, mushrooms, a tiny portion of the organism, appear and reveal its presence.
Often software companies grow mushrooms similar to the announcements in this article, giving the wise opportunity to implement preventive measures against the coming infection. I doubt they care or can even accurately measure the number of lost users, there are so many unprotected devices whose owners can’t identify mushrooms, lost users disappear in the noise.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus/
I have been using Tixati for some time now.
https://www.tixati.com/
Transmission, qBittorrent, Deluge, Tixati…
Meanwhile nobody cares about actual ANONYMOUS and PRIVATE i2p-based torrenting and clients (like i2psnark) and the i2p project itself :’-( ‘ ” ‘ ” ” ‘ ”’ ” ” ‘ ” ‘ ” ” ” ”” ” ” ”
Lmao uTorrent will become even worse. I’m glad i replaced it with qBittorrent after they started including ads.
This Sun guy is smart…imagine how much hashing power he’ll get from ~150 million users that run it almost 24/7 because they want to keep their ratio near or over 1.
End with the lies. Now as it seems it’s goona be the best moment to switch to qbitorrent. Althought I never like it’s archaic UI, but I certnaily can live with it.
The problem I faced with the latest version was something to face long time I go. While donwloading, my powerful PC and Internet Connections seemed to be stalling. Loading websites were becoming nightmare etc. I hope they’ll fix this bottleneck qbitorrent causes. At least the last 4 years never experienced such a thing with μΤοrrent.