Peer2Politics

BitTorrent, a purveyor of file-sharing technology that is widely used to gain free access to music and films, has come up with a bold proposition for its tens of millions of daily users: Spend $9.95 to help finance a planned new science fiction series and gain viewing rights to its eight episodes. Or fail to pay up, and the shows will never be made.

Nick Chowdrey is a business and technology writer and proud digital native. Currently based in Brighton, UK, he is a technical writer at Crunch Accounting and co-founder of Brighton-based bitcoin community Bitcoin Brighton. Here, he explores how bitcoin can play a part in the business of online content.

If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according toClay Shirky, it won't exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you're probably already reading this on your computer screen. "And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds."

Clay Shirky is one of the most revered and respected thinkers on the impact of the web on culture and media. He’s also a very vocal critic of micropayments—one-time payments for individual pieces of web content. Why? Because consumers don’t like them, he says. “Small payment systems don’t survive contact with online markets because we express our hatred of small payments by switching to alternatives,” he reiterated in a much-cited 2009 blogpost. “Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want.”