Well...

It’s been a busy month on-boarding the cast and crew of my movie for real-time royalty payments, but for better or worse, most folks in the entertainment industry are stuck at home. This afforded me the opportunity and excuse to call the entire #IdiotTale team and walk them through the process of setting up a BTT wallet, one by one.

These wallets are a crucial component of my first smart contract to allow everyone to participate in a my “decentralized Waterfall” when I release my next film as a Loss Leader to experiment with tokenizing media files on BitTorrent.

Each team member has their own unique experience and concerns about the dMovie idea, so in this post I’m going to unpack some of these.

I’m happy to report that while conversations with BitTorrent corporate have been slow, we are progressing positively and productively. So for the release of A Tale Told By An Idiot, audiences will seemingly download the film using BTT. This requires a Tron wallet to receive these funds.

Onboarding

There are many ways to create a wallet for this purpose. Those familiar with cryptocurrency may already hold a TRX wallet on an Exchange that supports BTT token. A wallet can be created inside BitTorrent itself. But the most common suggestion from the community was to create a wallet using TronScan or TronLink.

During my phone call, I had each team member:

• Ask any questions about the history of BitTorrent and Tron’s recent attempts to tokenize the platform.
• Review my “Waterfall” for payouts and share their questions and concerns.
• Set up a wallet using their preferred method.
• Send me their wallet address to receive funds.
• Pick a random amount of BTT that I sent to their wallet and confirm successful receipt.
• Input their wallet address into the smart contract.

Elevator Pitch

Most calls began with an over-simplified explanation of my experiment: BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing platform (many fellow millennials are familiar with Napster or Limewire) with around 100M active users and is best known for the illegal sharing of digital video files of popular film and television. Users store these files on their personal computers and use various “clients” to connect, search and share either entire files or pieces of files (known as file hashes).

Users who host these files/hashes are known as “Seeds” and there is a proud culture of curation between users. BitTorrent was acquired by Tron in 2018 and for the last two years, the company has unveiled two payment models using peer to peer sharing.

• BitTorrentSpeed integrates a Tron wallet onto the platform to “tokenize” file sharing for the purpose of incentivizing faster and more reliable downloads.
• BitTorrentFileSystem allows users to rent their surplus storage space to other users who wish to backup their files. (Imagine if Dropbox and Airbnb had a baby).

Last year, I began snarkily tweeting that the company was essentially allowing users to now pay each other to pirate content they didn’t own. If a payment model was being introduced, why not consult decades of standards and practices for media distribution. To my surprise, BitTorrent’s leadership responded, essentially saying, “okay kid, how would you do it?”

Traditionally, when audiences pay for content, a single entity receives revenues on behalf of the project and is responsible for reporting and paying team members. Using a smart-contract (computer code) on the Tron blockchain (essentially an operating system), a user can deposit tokens that are automatically distributed to individual wallets of all team members. Using BitTorrent’s integrated payment protocol, instead of paying a distributor fee to a sales agent or platform, a film could pay this fee directly to the BitTorrent users who host and share the media file.
This gives independent creators access to a robust, active user network and de-incentivizes piracy by including those users in the tokenization of original media content.

In talking to the cast and crew of my film, they posed some fantastic questions and concerns...

"What if I don’t want to?”

It is understandable that not everyone is comfortable with cryptocurrency or new technology. In my earlier posts, I proposed A Tale Told By An Idiot was a unique film property in that it was produced under a micro-budget contract for digital distribution. Therefore, I have already paid everyone an appropriate day rate for their work on the film. I am under no obligation to offer any additional compensation so long as the film is released online. A few team members elected not to participate in this case-study and potential revenue stream. That is their right and I have received written confirmation of their refusal to participate. The smart contract is calculating Labor Compensation based on PERSONAL LABOR HOURS ÷ TOTAL LABOR HOURS. For the sake of this contract, I am not including non-participating team members in the Total Labor Hours, so the final calculation is more like: PERSONAL PARTICIPANT LABOR HOURS ÷ TOTAL PARTICIPANT LABOR HOURS.

"Can I transfer my royalties in the film?”

This was a teachable moment for me, personally. One of our team members has a partner who works with A-list talent in Hollywood and revealed that sometimes royalties or “backed” are leveraged or transferred as collateral in securing other deals. I had never heard of this, but some quick research suggests that anyone may give their wallet login credentials to another person. Some smart contracts can be designed with pre-determined triggers or conditions so it may be possible to submit a certified change to a contract to re-assign a wallet’s payout down the line.

"What if I owe the production money?”

Unfortunately some of our team members have costs that I personally absorbed upfront to prevent the film from being postponed or cancelled. The smart contract allows me to set an earnings threshold so that I may recoup these funds before that team members begins receiving their payouts. For example, if they owed me $100, my wallet would receive their payouts until their cumulative payout exceeded $100.

"How do I verify I’m getting paid correctly?”

Every deposit made to the smart contract will create a unique transaction report on Tronscan. This report will show the payouts to every wallet in the contract. Anyone can view or download these reports to assess the revenue of the entire film and/or each individual wallet. Wallet addresses do no provide any personal information so only team members will know which address belongs to them.

"How do I get my money?”

This is the big one. Obviously, everyone wants access to their tokens. By individually helping each person set up their wallet in their preferred method, I have ensured everyone can comfortably access their balance at any time. But transferring and withdrawing cryptocurrency can be a difficult process, requiring multiple platforms and tax implications.
Honestly, I do not anticipate a scrappy independent film I made with my friends to make a lot of money. (Global averages suggest around 3% of independent films are ever considered “profitable.”) So for now, I have advised my team that I intend to HODL my BTT earnings, either using them to “stake” or as my personal spending budget on the BitTorrent platform to support other dMovies or store my files.

In the event the film performs beyond expectations, there are a few interesting methods we can explore to access the funds.

• Recently, the adult performer community has been receiving payments in crypto currency that are withdrawn using a payment card solution that works with local ATM machines, online and store purchases.
• Similarly Tron has partnered with a company called GRID and their own Poppy Payment System to integrate their own TronCard and BitTorrent cards for cold storage and retail payments.
• TronLink has its own browser extension to deposit and withdraw Tron tokens online.
• Tokens can always be transferred to an exchange and sold/exchanged to USDT to withdraw as FIAT currency. This requires linking a bank account and to my knowledge USA withdrawals are only permitted on Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini and Cash.app. These withdrawals are subject to limits, fees and taxes.

Now the only addresses I don’t have belong to BitTorrent and its users. First, I want to establish a “platform fee” to include BitTorrent in the transaction. I need their corporate office to provide an authorized address to include in my contract.

Next, we need to get under the hood so the contract can retrieve the addresses of the Seeds who share the media file. Interestingly, the most recent version of BitTorrent includes BitTorrentFileShare allowing anyone to set up a BTFS node, attach a wallet, and adjust their host settings. So there is already infrastructure to support internal payments. For example, if I want to buy storage space on BTFS, I attach my wallet and set my price. Meanwhile, another user has attached their wallet and allocated the storage space they are willing to rent out. I can only assume this means BitTorrent can take my tokens and pay them to another User it verifies hosts my files.

So it should be possible to accept a payment from one user to initiate a download and offer another User (or multiple Users) to receive a payout for seeding the download. Currently, when I set up BTFS, it opens my web browser, so we should be able to send prospective downloaders to a “web portal” where they could deposit tokens from their own wallet into the smart contract - thus seamlessly paying all participants.

Let me know if you have experience transferring and spending BTT and ideas for how to simplify the payout process.

Thanks for your time and talent,
-@brendanAbradley