A Tale SOLD By An Idiot: PART I “Troll Early, Troll Often”

Hello Steemians!

This is the first post in my series about putting my own skin in the game to invest in the creative economy of the future. I’ve been inspired by the last week of learning about the community here as part of the mission with Tron to “ultimately enable all ecosystems to form a mutually beneficial connection.”

I’m going to be too honest with you. The “business” of an indie content creator sucks. Don’t get me wrong, we live in the most empowering time to be an artist with unparalleled tools to create and share your work with the world. But every time someone (or a platform or company) receives money on your behalf, they get to determine your value and worth.

I’m not going to sling mud or name names, but you should know that literally every single project I’ve produced has not ultimately paid me all the money I was owed. Sometimes the company went out of business. Sometimes there was fine print I missed. Sometimes there was “creative accounting.” Sometimes the money wasn’t actually real. And sometimes they just straight up stole it.

The first couple of times, you blame yourself. You promise to get smarter, savvier. But when you swallow your shame and start asking around, you discover: This is just how the business “works.” There is a fundamental flaw in creating a thing of value and then handing that thing to someone else to oversee its revenue. And then trusting that person - a person with no skin in the game - to play fair.

Does this mean you can’t trust anyone? No. I meet people with integrity every single day, especially in the artistic community. But we are all drawn to sandboxes like Steem and Tron because we don’t subscribe to the societal norm of putting our trust, or our money, in the hands of a centralized gatekeeper. It’s simply too easy for strangers to not do the “right” thing.

As an early investor in several projects ($TRX, $BAT, $STEEM, $ADA, $LTC...) I was extremely excited about what I presumed was “turning the entire internet into Patreon.” I don’t use Brave’s browser or dApps to get rich or HODL. (Wasn’t I clear above I don’t have any money?) Instead I believe in the underlying technology to experiment with a new economy of people and transparency. I try my best to learn about what new projects are out there and participate in those transactions to help build reliable case studies.

I’ll admit when Justin Sun announced the purchase of BitTorrent and later Justin Knoll gave a speech on BitTorrentSpeed to “tokenize file sharing,” the cynic in me got real sassy. “Oh great, the torrent community is going to start paying each other to pirate other people’s content?” Years of bad bets and bad faith made me feel the way most of Hollywood feels about torrenting. Forbes recently reported $71B in lost revenue and up to 560,000 in lost jobs every year due to piracy.

So I did what most people do when they’re feeling snarky. I tweeted.

I figured if the largest peer sharing community in the world was going to introduce a token to pay multiple Seeds, why not go one extra step and offer that token to everyone? And I mean everyone, literally. Why not let every single person who participates in the creation and distribution of original content also participate in the revenue stream it creates? Instead of trying to decrease the victims of piracy, what if every single user became invested in protecting the revenue of, say, a movie…because they participated in the revenue of that movie?

My proposal is based on the single assumption that the easier it is for people to do the right thing, the more likely they are to do the right thing...especially if the right thing also benefits them.

At this point, I have to name names, because the community deserves all the credit. I went to sleep with a subtweet at Justin Sun. I woke up to dozens of comments and retweets, most notably from @MikeNerdUK who got the attention of @BitTorrent a few hours later. Then @redpillblue1 gave me his Telegram info and shared my open letter with the Tron Community. And @alwayshayleym connected me with @ryandennislive to set up marketing meeting with Tron. Serendipitously, this also coincides with the rolling out of new functionality for BTFS (BitTorrent File Share) and BTS (BitTorrentSpeed) which hopes to integrate a payment/escrow layer on its peer to peer sharing.

This series of posts will follow my attempt to release my next feature film as a tokenized “dMovie,” to calculate and pay real-time residual payments to everyone who participates in the seeding, creative, labor, promotion, and financing of independent media content.

I hope you’ll follow along and share your thoughts, ideas, (and, yes, even your snark) early and often.

Thank you for your time and talent,
@brendanAbradley