BitTorrent’s Sketchy Background Makes It a Less Appealing Cryptocurrency

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BitTorrent (CCC:BTT-USD) is an up-and-coming cryptocurrency, presently selling for less than one cent per token, that could be poised for lift off. As of Friday, April 23, according to Coinmarketcap.com, it trades for 0.6773 cents per BTT and has a market capitalization of $4.4 billion.

A concept image of the BitTorrent (BTT) token.

Source: Shutterstock

More importantly, the token and blockchain technology related to BitTorrent is all about making file sharing on a peer-to-peer basis easier. For example, the byline on its main website says, “Tokenizing the world’s largest decentralized file sharing protocol with BTT.”

It is based on the blockchain used in the many popular decentralized protocols and apps. BitTorrent has developed both iOS and Android-based apps.

Hype Man and Piracy Background

San-Francisco-based BitTorrent Inc. was started by Bram Cohen. It was later acquired in 2018 by a Chinese uber-millionaire named Justin Sun, through his cryptocurrency company, Tron. He apparently paid $140 million for the company. After that, in 2019, the company launched BitTorrent token in 2019, to great fanfare.

The Verge published a deeply skeptical article on September 20, 2020, about both Justin Sun and BitTorrent’s development under him. It was entitled, “Hype Man of the Century.”

Among several of the allegations: he plagiarized the white paper for BitTorrent. Another allegation is that he “embraced” BitTorrent’s association with piracy schemes.

For example, BitTorrent technology is notorious for facilitating the downloading of large files on a peer-to-peer basis. This includes pirated music and movie files. It used a decentralization technology on the internet to do these large downloads using numerous users or nodes.

The company took a “laissez-faire” attitude about the piracy aspect. Moreover, when Sun took over, The Verge claims his idea was to “pump” the BitTorrent token to make himself wealthy.

After all, Justin Sun, a protégé of Jack Ma, of Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) fame, graduated from a school started by Ma was used to being called a “whiz kid.” The Verge article, based on in-depth interviews with 18 insiders at Sun’s company, goes into quite a bit of detail on Sun’s character. Anyone interested in buying the BitTorrent token should read the article.

Where This Leaves BitTorrent

This Verge article casts a long, deep shadow on the BitTorrent token. As CEO of BitTorrent and Tron, which is the parent company, Mr. Sun, who is only 30 years old, has started doing interviews. The idea is to counter the awful impression that The Verge article has left on BitTorrent. He also did a YouTube interview with The Scoop to try and change his reputation.

The problem is that no major corporation is using the BitTorrent blockchain technology. This is the hallmark of useful blockchain technology. Wikipedia provides the names of some companies, but none of these are major corporations that any typical internet user would recognize. However, the site does list three global broadcasters that have used BitTorrent or are considering using it.

What to Do With BitTorrent Token

Despite how cheap the token is right now, in the sense that it is still trading below one U.S. cent, there is little reason to buy it. This is because the technology has been around for a good while yet it has not yet caught on in a massive way. It could also be overtaken by other tokens that appear to have more utility, such as Ethereum (CCC:ETH-USD), or even VeChain (CCC:VET-USD).

Therefore, most investors in the cryptocurrency space will be better off looking at other, more accepted, up-and-coming altcoins. Some of which include altcoins like Ethereum (CCC:ETH-USD), Cardano (CCC:ADA-USD), Litecoin (CCC:LTC-USD), Dogecoin (CCC:DOGE-USD), ChainLink (CCC:LINK), Stellar Lumens (CCC:XLM-USD) and VeChain.

On the date of publication, Mark R. Hake held a long position in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH.)

Mark Hake writes about personal finance on mrhake.medium.com and runs the Total Yield Value Guide which you can review here.

Mark Hake writes about personal finance on mrhake.medium.com, Newsbreak.com and Beehiiv.com.


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2021/04/bittorrent-has-a-checkered-background-even-though-it-is-cheap/.

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