Topic: Will Bitcoin Meet Napster’s Fate? (Read 1531 times)

We might even complete the square with "E-gold".  This centralised, US-based, alternative currency was killed in 2009 with a "market cap" of the equivalent of about 20 million USD.

you cannot kill the blockchain!! you can only kill businesses and websites that use the blockchain

I think they are too different to compare.   I don't think there were big time investors pushing money into Napster, and building businesses on top of Napster to bring it to the next level.  Napster had way more conglomerates pushing to shut it down than BTC does..

Napster = Centralized
Torrents = Decentralized
bitcoin = Decentralized

Since torrents have not been shut down in many years, i have no fear of bitcoin being shut down as there is no central authority. It will take someone to bribe the bitcoin foundation to implement changes where it breaks the code. Its all over my head but im with some social engineering the US government can pull some strings.

Also, i have been downloading music for over 15 year and have never paid for a song.  

Well it's a posibility but think about it, something like the blockchain is unparalleled, trust = network effect, age of the blockchain, number of transactions processed... that gives possible buyers trust to put their money there and feel safe. This is unprecedented, so I cant say if this will end up like napster, or myspace, or will go to 0... I think there are bigger chances from something huge like Twitter, to go out of fashion and be replaced by something else, than posibilities bitcoin has to be replaced by something else.

this was by far the DUMBEST article since months  

like a user wrote under the article:

Major differences. Napster was server-client. Bitcoin is peer to peer. Napster was located in the US. Bitcoin is located nowhere and everywhere. The peer to peer version of Napster which is Bit Torrents is still thriving today. Napster was simple to shutdown as you were shutting down central server Bitcoin has no central server.. Other then both things were revolutionary and both had money put into them, there's not much similarity.


i love the end! a masterpiece:

"Bitcoin could potentially be replaced by something else, something more favorable to governments and banks worldwide – something like Apple Pay, ..."

  yeah...

More likely we will end up like a technology like Bit-torrent, albeit vastly superior to centralized file distribution it is not wirely used because the technology was entirely discredited by the recording industry.

All the above posts are true.  If you stop one source, one developer, one node, one exchange, one website, one mining pool, one country etc.. Bitcoin may take a hit.

But there's no way you can stop them all.  That's the beauty of it.

But Napster was centralized. A better analogy would be bittorrents.

You might be able to shut down the tracker, but not the software or seeds or peers.

Similarly, you might be able to shut down the core developers, seize the main website and domain, but you won't be able to stop all the working peers and the full nodes that have the complete blockchain. The bitcoin network itself will survive, albeit stuck on the last version of bitcoin core.

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 biggest stories around.

The company’s peer-to-peer technology enabled users to connect to vast music libraries stored on hard drives around the globe, and then download those files with the click of a mouse. More than a decade later, the music industry hasn’t been the same since.

Of course, even at its peak, there was widespread agreement among market observers that Napster had changed the face of music. But, besieged by lawsuits, Napster today survives only as a shadow of its former self. Instead, business interests took advantage of its legal troubles, legitimized the technology and profited from it.

The result could provide an interesting history lesson for bitcoin, illustrating what happens to incumbents when rivals look for ways to innovate a novel idea out of existence.

The streaming model

While Napster provided a revolutionary way for people to use peer-to-peer connections to download music, the problem was that it essentially freed published works from record label control.

Napster allowed anyone to obtain music – that others previously had to pay for – absolutely free. It’s demise ultimately helped Apple dominate the music downloading industry, and later gave rise to streaming music platforms like Pandora and Spotify in what has become an increasingly important model for the sector.

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