Will Bitcoin Meet Napster's Fate?
Seemingly out of nowhere, a technology appears that changes the way people think about an established industry. Vested interests see it as a threat and become determined to ensure it does not undercut existing profit structures. Sounds like the synopsis of the story about bitcoin up to this point? Well, yes, but digital currency isn't the first technology to meet the resistance of incumbent parties. The music industry, for example, faced a signifcant threat from peer-to-peer technology in the late 1990s. In fact, 15 years ago, controversial file-sharing service Napster was one of the....
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In a strange article posted on CoinDesk yesterday, Daniel Cawrey asked the CoinDesk audience if Bitcoin could end up running into the same problems as Napster, the pioneering P2P file sharing service created by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. While this may seem like a legitimate question to some, the reality is that Bitcoin and Napster are structured in two very different ways. Although Napster was used to share files between separate individuals around the world, it actually had a central server that listed who owned which files. This was a weak, centralized point of attack for law....
Entrepreneur and YouTube celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk recently tweeted about NFTs, saying they will be more disruptive to the music industry than Napster was. Adding “technology always squeezes the middle,” and that he’s excited for what lies ahead. And they thought Napster was disruptive … wait to blockchain / NFT hit the music industry Shits about […]
Does Bitcoin encourage criminal activity? No more than a Does Bitcoin encourage criminal activity? No more than a £20 note does. The position bitcoin finds itself in today is similar to where Napster and other peer-to-peer music services were 13 years ago. There's much shouting right now about how the digital currency is apparently sometimes used for criminal purposes. Those quick to level those accusations might want to ask, "Have you seen what the big banks have been up to?" Banks have been found guilty of deliberately mis-selling insurance products, fixing some interest rates and....
OpenBazaar, the decentralized marketplace, released it’s beta 2.0 on September 30, and will be releasing a new beta at the end of each month until the end of the year when the full release will go public. OpenBazaar is an open source, peer-to-peer, and decentralized online marketplace. The developers intend the creation of a truly free marketplace where anyone may sell goods using peer-to-peer technology. But doesn’t that mean that even illegal goods can be sold on here? Exactly. The OpenBazaar developers claim that they envision an uncensored eBay with no middlemen, but they have received....
Bitcoin startup Bitshares is on a quest to make peer-to-peer music sharing profitable. The company intends to do so through the application of the blockchain technology to music file sharing. Peer-to-peer music file sharing is not a new concept. The original iteration of P2P music sharing, Napster changed music forever through its use. BitShares Music extends the ideas pioneered by bitcoin and Napster into issuing trust-free digital assets. These digital assets have the potential of fluctuating in value through sales of the artist's music. They can also be used to fund the artist and....