Atomically purchasing digital files with digital currency is an idea that has a long history in this space. Digital goods, digital money, the two seem like a perfect pairing together. Digital goods, i.e. information, are also massive markets. Think about all the video, audio, text, games, and other forms of digital content that people purchase and consume on a regular basis. These are markets worth billions and billions of dollars that people interact with on a daily basis.
Most of the serious attempts at implementing paid file sharing have gone down bad roads. Filecoin was an attempt to do this on top of IPFS, but ultimately the project is absurdly over engineered. BitTorrent (the company, not the protocol) was bought by Justin Sun and integrated its own cryptocurrency and blockchain. Both of these projects have effectively gone nowhere productive, with extremely overengineered systems on the technical side, and very dubious incentives on the economic side.
BitStream is a proposal by Robin Linus (ever consider slowing down and taking a break Robin?) to attempt to address the requirements of atomicly purchasing data without the pointless addition of altcoins and over engineered…
