One-time online “pirate king” Kim Dotcom is poised to launch a new version of his file-sharing service Megaupload. It’s not only going to revolutionize encryption and security when sharing your files in the cloud, he promises, but it’s going to solve a problem that has vexed the smartest minds in cryptocurrency as a bonus.
The blockchain limitation Dotcom speaks of is the bitcoin network’s ability to process a larger quantity of transactions than it’s currently capable of. It’s a question that has turned the bitcoin world’s top developers against one another, leading to paralysis over how best to scale up the bitcoin network’s capacity, and even public apostasy by one of the digital currency’s earliest contributors. The battle over the open-source protocol has been described as a “civil war.“
Dotcom is vague about how he will solve the scaling problem. But he’s already decided on a name for the solution—Bitcache. He says all will be revealed at the launch of his new platform, Megaupload 2.0, on Jan. 20, 2017. In the meantime, he promises Bitcache will do something else: boost the price of bitcoin fourfold to over $2,000.
The new platform will link every file transfer to a bitcoin micro-transaction. Megaupload had 150 million users at its peak and was responsible for $500 million in pirated material, according to an indictment from the US Department of Justice. Dotcom is currently in New Zealand appealing extradition to the US. If the relaunched Megaupload gets even a fraction of that popularity, it could result in millions more new transactions flowing over the bitcoin network. With that in mind, this is his investment advice:
While Dotcom’s promises may simply be the bluster of an internet raconteur, he has been tinkering with radical payment ideas for years. In 2012, he brainstormed ideas for payments systems on Twitter, attracting prominent bitcoin advocates to the discussion. Last month, he seems to have cracked the puzzle, announcing this on his social network: