How do you Seed and Download Files in Upfire?
A Tutorial to get you started on the File-Sharing Revolution
Upfire is a unique project that combines familiar and popular torrenting with crypto. The possibility to earn cryptocurrency not only by creating torrents for desirable files but also earning cryptocurrency by seeding is what makes this app unique.
Upfire rewards not only people who created the original torrent file but also the seeders. Seeders are users who owns the file and make it available to download for others. In order to be a seeder you just have to download the files with the app and be online. It is that simple.
Tech Raj did a great video explaining what torrents are and a short demonstration on how Upfire works. Lets check it:
Tutorial
Table of contents
- Download and install Upfire dApp
- Set up a Wallet
- Download/seed files
- Make a upr torrent file
- Share upr torrent file
At the time of writing of this article the breakdown of the decryption price is:
- 50% goes to the original upr file creator
- 45% is split between seeders (note: seeders who have decrypted the file get 3x the reward of the seeders who have not decrypted the file)
- 5% goes the Upfire platform as a tax
Summary
So, you have a file(s) that you think other people might find desirable or you just like torrents and cryptocurrency. Regardless of the reasons, in this article we will walk you through the process of creating your own UPR torrent files, sharing them on UPR file-sharing site uprfiles.com and using Upfire Desktop dApp.
To create a UPR file that you can share you have to complete some steps:
- Download and install Upfire dApp
- Create or add a wallet to the app — don’t worry, we will go through the process of creating a cryptocurrency wallet using the dApp
- Create a .upr file using the file(s) you want to share
- Uploading this .upr to sharing website where other people can download it
1. Download and install Upfire dApp
To get the Upfire app you need to go to upfire.com and download the dApp according to your operating system. The app is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux.
By installing the application you will get warnings and popups about allowing the dapp to accept incoming internet connections. These are perfectly normal, you need to allow incoming connections to download and upload files, so these need to be allowed for the dApp to function properly.
2. Create or add a wallet to the dApp
!!! This is a very important step !!!
Your wallet will store the BNB you get from people decrypting or seeding files. For the purpose of this article we will create a brand new wallet using the app.
Click on the ‘Create wallet’ button
Choose a password for your wallet:
Save the wallet file.
Important: if you lose your wallet file or forget the password you will lose ALL ACCESS to the wallet!
3. Seeding UPR files
Seeding files is what makes torrenting and by extension, Upfire a decentralized application. Seeding means making a file available for download by other users. To download a file there should be at least one seeder online who provides it. Some files can have more than one seeder and that makes the download faster and more reliable.
Upfire allows seeders to earn BNB for keeping their computers online and making the files available for others to download.
In this section, we will use uprfiles.com, so make sure to register and log in, then we proceed to downloading a couple of UPR files and seeding them:
First we select a file to download, in this case we will use the second file in the list, Chad Pepe:
Go to the download tab of the dApp and click ‘Start Download’. You will be prompted with a window to select the UPR file. You can also drag the file there if you prefer:
After adding the UPR file you will be asked where you want to save the downloaded file(s). I chose the ‘Downloads’ folder in this example.
Click ‘Start Downloading’:
Active downloads will be displayed in the ‘Downloads’ tab:
After it is concluded the file will show up in the ‘Completed downloads’ tab, the status of the file will be ‘Seeding’. This means that other people can now download this file from you:
That’s it. As long as the app is open on your computer and your are connected to the internet you will be seeding the files you have downloaded. If the files are not free, every time someone downloads this file and decrypts it you will receive a share of the decryption fee.
Notice that if you click ‘Get’ on the right hand side and decrypt the file you will receive 3x the decryption rewards because you would be providing not only the file but also the decryption key.
4. Create a UPR file
Now that we have downloaded/installed the app and setup the wallet it is time to move to the fun part, creating your own UPR files!
When you create a UPR torrent you end up with 2 file: a UPR torrent file and a encrypted archive that contains the items that you want to share.
Click the first tab ‘Uploads’ in the dApp and then ‘Upload files’:
Now you will need to fill out the name, description, and price (in BNB) fields. You also need to specify where the encrypted archive containing your file(s) will be stored. Remember where you chose to save the UPR file because it will be important for future steps.
Once it is done you will need to select file(s) to be included in this UPR torrent.
Note: it is possible to add more than one file to theUPR torrent that you want to share.
Verify the information and click ‘Start Uploading’, larger files will take longer to encrypt, so be patient if you are using large or multiple files:
When encryption is done you will you see your newly created UPR torrent file in the ‘Uploads’ tab:
5. Share your UPR with the World!
Remember the location of the file you chose when you created upr torrent file? After creating a UPR torrent you will find 2 files in that location: a file that contains an encrypted version of the file (may end with .enc) and another that you can share with users and allow them to download and decrypt your UPR torrent file (may end with .upr):
In order to share your UPR torrent choose the file that ends with .upr
Next we will upload this file to uprfiles.com so that other people can find and download it!
Go to uprfiles.com
Click ‘Upload File’ button at the top of the page:
Fill out the form with the name, category, info, (optionally a picture) and select the UPR file you want to share, remember you are using the .upr one.
Click ‘Submit’ when you are done.
That’s it! Now people can find your torrent file and download it!
