[tomphoolery]

> Users can upload files and begin seeding to earn small, incremental, amounts of money from anyone that downloads from them.

How do you know that the user uploading the file actually owns the rights to distribute the file? Wouldn't this just incentivize those with the infrastructure (e.g., money/bandwidth) to take over the market and suddenly get paid for sharing others' content?

The idea of "let's combine a distributed filesharing system with a distributed currency" is completely sound, and one that I've worked on in the past. But this is a totally backwards way of approaching the problem. You have no way of actually paying the content creators, just the content hosts. It's just more of the same, and at least with Spotify I get some neat analytical tools. But this just seems like it's designed to help the people who run topsites, not the people who actually make the content and NEED the money.

Thumbs down until you figure out the problem of rights management through your protocol.

[neiman]

They're building a software, not a service. They can't control what their users do with their software, in the same way that Microsoft can't control if you use Word to re-publish Harry Potter under your name.

Evaluate them by the software they build, not by how potentially some people will use it.

[saurik]

> How do you know that the user uploading the file actually owns the rights to distribute the file?

While I appreciate that BitTorrent files are technically used to distribute some "legitimate" things, even in those cases the people you are talking to are part of a swarm: like, the premise is that you are paying someone to have helped you get more of a file you are downloading that everyone has agreed shall cost nothing (whether or not it actually does), not that you are compensating them for the file itself (which would have value above and beyond the bandwidth and cpu costs).