Soulseekqt windows will not resize1/7/2023 ![]() Slogans materialized: “information wants to be free,” “open culture,” “sharing is caring.” A new political party called The Pirate Party was formed, championing online freedom and copyright reform, winning multiple political appointments across Europe. Successors like Gnutella (LimeWire) and eDonkey2000 (eMule) would have decentralized architectures that would be much more difficult to take down.Īs the children of Napster proliferated, a philosophy began to solidify around internet piracy. If the file sharing revolution were to continue, it would have to decentralize and become resilient to legal injunctions.Ī traditional war had to evolve into guerrilla warfare.ĭecentralized alternatives to Napster gradually arose, intentionally designed around this legal constraint. Despite all downloads being peer-to-peer, Napster operated a central server, primarily used for search indexing and peer discovery. To the digital revolutionaries, the lesson of Napster was obvious. But Napster’s surrender was only the beginning of this war. Napster was driven to bankruptcy and forced to clamp down on all illegal file sharing. This legal doctrine, known as vicarious infringement, was the death knell of Napster and of any file sharing-based business model. The RIAA took notice.Īfter a lengthy court battle with the RIAA, a judge ruled Napster liable for all of its users’ copyright infringement, despite the fact that Napster’s servers didn’t host any copyrighted content. At its peak in 2001, the service had more than 80M registered users. Dre would thrust Napster into news headlines. Soon, legal challenges from Metallica and Dr. Entirely via word of mouth, Napster spread across America like a riot, clogging up bandwidth on college campuses and dialup lines. ![]() It was like a bank vault of music was propped open, free for anyone to plunder. Jay-Z? Smashmouth? Or maybe J-Lo? Every purchase was a careful tradeoff. Remember what it was like to purchase music in 1999: standing in a CD aisle, surrounded by rows of disc jackets, debating in your head which album to spend your $20 on. It sounds simple, but it’s hard to describe how large of a paradigm shift Napster was. On its face, Napster was straightforward: log in, search for a song you want, double click, and it’s yours. The P2P file sharing revolution began in 1999, with a little application called Napster. They also share a philosophical lineage - Lawrence Lessig, the intellectual godfather of piracy culture, is the originator of the phrase “ code is law.” Many P2P barons were foundational to the crypto movement: Jed McCaleb of eDonkey2000, Zooko Wilcox of Mojo Nation, and Bram Cohen of BitTorrent to name a few. Bitcoin’s gossip-based networking model was inspired by Gnutella, the protocol behind LimeWire. File sharing protocols became the world’s first global decentralized networks. The file sharing revolutionīitcoin shares deep roots with the P2P networks. History does not repeat, but there are a few refrains it loves to come back to. The second is the penny stock boom of the 90s, which explains the casino of shitcoin gambling, market manipulation, and fraudsters that comprised the long tail of ICOs.Īnd the third is the dotcom bubble, which explains the mass of speculators, the new paradigm of decentralized companies, the VC coins, and the redistribution of wealth.īy exploring these episodes, I hope to show you how the ICO bubble recapitulated well-known patterns of human behavior. The first is the peer-to-peer file sharing revolution in the late 2000s, which explains the ideology of decentralization, the proclamations of revolution, and companies trying to circumvent securities laws. In this blog post, I’ll examine three major moments in history that illuminate three separate social dynamics that were at play in the ICO bubble. ![]() ![]() Thus, blockchains enabled multiple social forces, all interacting in the same network, all reified under the name “the ICO bubble.” The open and permissionless nature of blockchains allows anyone to co-opt them. The technologies that enable bubbles are always new, but the underlying social dynamics are not. It’s easy to believe that the ICO bubble, having taken place on uncensorable public blockchains, was a fundamentally new phenomenon. In this essay, I just want to answer the simple question: There’s already been enough hysterics and I-told-you-sos. The media gawked at this collapse, and as usual, proclaimed this was the nail in the coffin for cryptocurrencies. When the bubble finally popped last year, the “market cap” of all crypto fell over $700B, an 85% drop from its peak in January - steeper than the dotcom bubble’s 78% crash.
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