The cryptocurrency community has expressed noted negativity surrounding the details of Tron’s acquisition of BitTorrent and the subsequent plans to issue the so-called BTT Token.
TRON (TRX) acquired the software company BitTorrent back in July 2018 for the reported $126 million. The chances are that you’ve used BitTorrent at least once in your life if you’ve ever downloaded a movie, audio album, or something else through a torrent on the internet.
Six months later, and somewhat unsurprisingly, Tron announced the issuance of the so-called BTT token, which is supposedly going to increase support for BitTorrent’s network.
However, the event has been received with a severe dose of overwhelming negativity from proponents of the cryptocurrency community.
An excellent outline by Alex Kruger points out that Tron Foundation – the company behind the platform Tron, is owned by Justin Sun and kept 60% of all TRX tokens, while the rest 40% were sold through TRON’s ICO. The tokens are currently worth around $1.44 billion.
Since Tron announced the plans for BTT’s token issuance, the price of TRX has increased with roughly around 20%.
Those gains are equal to about $270 million. Keep in mind that Tron Foundation retains 60% of the tokens, meaning that its share of the deal is roughly equivalent to $126 million, making BitTorrent’s acquisition completely “free.”
Soon after the announcement of BTT, the cryptocurrency community reacted in a somewhat negative way. Jackson Palmer, the creator of the popular Dogecoin, is amongst the many to share his opinion:
“The BitTorrent Brand is going to die the slow, painful death of becoming a scammy ICO token. Perhaps the open source community can rename the protocol itself to dissociate with this nonsense.” – Tweeted Palmer.
The “BitTorrent” brand is going to die the slow, painful death of becoming a scammy ICO token. Perhaps the open source community can rename the protocol itself to dissociate with this nonsense. pic.twitter.com/5zyyNMEOQx
— Jackson Palmer (@ummjackson) January 14, 2019
It’s worth noting that Tron’s network is supposedly utterly incapable of supporting the transactional demand of the BitTorrent client, according to the company’s former CSO David Z. Morris.
“It was very clear when I was (at BitTorrent) that there was no way the transaction capacity of Tron would (work),” says Morris, sounding more bemused than angry. “The transactional capacity we (were) looking at was needing hundreds of transactions a second just to get started. It’s simply not there. You hear all the bullshit out there, oh, this does 10,000 transactions a second. It’s all crap. We were going to melt Tron. Literally, destroy it. – Said Morris in late November 2018.
CryptoPotato recently reported that Binance Launchpad would feature BitTorrent’s fundraising as one of its two first 2019 projects launched through the Launchpad platform.
This article was first Published on: Jan 14, 2019
