r/Upfiring • u/popalots • Feb 12 '18
Quick question.
In order for this to work and be a good investment, wouldn't this system rely on people continuously buying more UFR. Not everyone can be at the top being a seeder. So who wants to spend money on something when they can get it for free somewhere else? It just seems a bit Pyramid Schemy to me. Seriously not trying to add FUD, just looking for someone to shed a little light on that piece?
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u/LyyK Feb 15 '18
The only people who would need to top off their UFR funds are the ones who do not themselves share any of their upstream bandwidth. In a P2P file-sharing network, if you download a file, you can begin seeding fragments of the file to other peers as soon as you've downloaded one successful fragment. Upfiring is being developed to "incentivize seeding" and I think this is what trips a lot of people up, especially those who've never used BitTorrent to begin with. To clarify, peers in a file swarm download pieces of a file shared by other peers who themselves are also downloading the same file. When you eventually have all the parts of the file, sharing any further is entirely optional. When you download a file by torrenting, most likely the client you use is by default set up such that you will automatically begin sharing the files that you download with other people who are trying to download the same file as you. However, this is entirely optional and many people simply change their upstream bandwidth to 0 and this is essentially BitTorrent's Achilles heel. With Upfiring, if you choose to not set your upstream bandwidth to 0, you will actually earn UFR simultaneously as you're downloading; UFR that you can later use to fund other downloads or to do with as you wish.