LBRY uses a blockchain to store metadata related to digital content and provide pointers to a more traditional decentralized P2P network like BitTorrent. The blockchain also provides publisher identities, human-friendly URLs (e.g. lbry://@MinutePhysics/magnetic-levitation), and a payment mechanism.<p>You can learn more at https://lbry.tech. https://lbry.tech/spec provides a detailed technical description of the protocol.<p>Unlike most blockchain companies, we did no ICO, no token sales to VCs, and have spent zero energy hyping or pumping the price of our coin.<p>Nonetheless, we were able to bank several million dollars at the peak of the cryptocurrency boom (we provide full transparency at https://lbry.io/credit-reports).<p>HN is regularly and rightly skeptical of blockchain. So our questions are:<p>- Do you see this as a promising use of blockchain?<p>- Does https://lbry.tech/spec provide a clear and thorough description of what LBRY is?<p>- How can we make LBRY better?<p>HN users seanyesmunt, lyoshenka and jiggytom all work on the LBRY project.
I strongly recommend this simple flowchart as a first-pass heuristic for whether you've found a good use for blockchain.<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed</a><p>HN discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543454" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543454</a><p>Does it pass that test?
First pass at website:<p>1. the main paragraph on the first page "what if anyone in the world..." describes a problem that not many people have, and I suspect fewer have identified. You're targeting content creators, but, it is unclear if you are a) hosting the content b)helping me monetize it c)tracking content usage d) all/some of that? I suggest you break it up into specific answers to those questions.<p>2. is this really like an "open source DRM"? As in, this can be used to track the hashes of digital content across other platforms to track who reads them, where they get viewed etc? I don't think so, but I can't quite tell.<p>3. why bother with tokens? it is far from clear what purpose they will serve? Gamification? use for payments? Tokens with economic value have exchange problems, consider whether it's really worth that, or do you just want to have transaction blocks that keep track of content?<p>My advice: consider whether the system you've build could work for a more limited use case like Enterprise Content Management, or provide an authoritative content/governance layer on top of one company's content. Can you manage versioning? Access control / retrieval? Or really just pointers? if pointers is all, then can you offer a way to integrated many different datasources, into a single way to deduplicate/manage/report on individual content items across an enterprise?
Depends on what/why you need verification and if you want financial incentives. Forgive me for not taking the time to read into your product deeply. Sounds like you want a distributed DB. The blockchain part assumes you want shared verification via work and give people a reason to stay around and keep it shared. Blockchains just seem to be the distributed DB du jour these days to solve consensus. So I'd say sure, you can use a blockchain as your distributed DB, or you can use another distributed DB (if you can find a decent one) and add simple author verification. But no reason to automatically assume blockchain is the best distributed DB for your use case unless financials are at the core of the product. Hell, for "millions" you could just pin a bunch of data to IPFS signed by the authors.<p>Discovery/search is a whole other problem that blockchains don't help with either, and is not really an easily decentralized problem in current tech.
I had similar idea, but wanted to do it anonymously. I saw a lot of problems with that idea and have given up. So, you stated:<p>LBRY uses a blockchain to store metadata related to digital content and provide pointers to a more traditional decentralized P2P network like BitTorrent. The blockchain also provides publisher identities, human-friendly URLs (e.g. lbry://@MinutePhysics/magnetic-levitation), and a payment mechanism.<p>My questions would be:<p>- Why blockchain and not something else? I had similar idea in mind a while ago, wanted to "revolutionises" piracy My intention was to use BigchainDB for metadata, anonymise version of IPFS for actual storage, make each movie an ERC721 and attach ERC20 to all as rewards method for people who keep files up. There would be only donations, not really a price for watch / download. I still think that it's overcomplicated and that there's no need for it. Especially those days when you can watch on netflix/itunes/amazon/hulu/youtube... for some small amount. None wanna bother with torrents when he can pay $10 and watch whatever he wanna watch.<p>- Why published identity? I guess that idea is that all content is actually legal and there are no pirate movies / tv shows? Even so, how will you control what someone share? You can get into a lot of trouble for doing this?<p>- Payment mechanism for legal and original content is great, but again, how will you control who and what is uploaded? First of all legal movie distributers will not use it because content will end up in P2P, they don't wanna do that and wanna distribute through platforms from where they can get a constant revenue stream. If someone upload illegal content (the one that they don't really own) how will you check that?<p>- There's also a problem with content like child pornography. How are you going to prevent upload of those? You can't really watch everything that's uploaded?<p>Conclusion: I see only big problems and not real value here. This can be also easily accomplished with simple database? Token mechanics, as reward system is also questionable. Who will give liquidity for those tokens?
My impression after reading your answers in this thread - you're trying really hard to come up with a use case for blockchain. You didn't start with the goal to create a good publishing platform and naturally get to blockchain as the best solution. And this shows in your product, on your website and in the language you use here.<p>And this is obviously speculation, but I really don't think your product will be used by any significant number of people. They just won't have a good enough reason to.
You asked HN about the blockchain in 2019. The answer will reflexively be that you are doing something wrong.<p>I think LBRY is exploring one of the more promising use-cases for blockchains, which is users selling their original content to each other.<p>My suspicion is that some combination of scaling+ux improvements to core blockchain tech + some kind of interop with the growing fediverse + some catalyst mistake from big tech, and we'll see a big migration.
Walk me through the process. Lets assume I made a film.<p>1) where does the film get uploaded to?<p>2) how do I get $$ out of this process so I can pay rent?<p>3) how do you pay your investors back?
A related company that uses the blockchain in an interesting way for DRM (which I have my own views on) that was in the same Cape Town startup program as my startup: <a href="https://custostech.com/" rel="nofollow">https://custostech.com/</a>
This is reverse logic.<p>Normal logic is:
First you have a problem, then you look for a solution. If blockchain comes out as a best solution, then it might be the best solution.<p>Most blockchain use cases reverse logic:
We have a blockchain, so lets find problem that we can solve with blockchain.<p>This is a cognitive bias.
- Why would content creators choose to use this service over youtube or twitch?<p>- And why would users choose it over the other platforms?<p>- And if they did, how would the experience be different for each party?
LBRY sounds like some kind of combination of cryptocurrency and P2P file sharing. Notably, cryptocurrency has been used as a money payment system by criminals, and P2P file sharing has been used as a content distribution platform for illegal content like child pornography. I know that this may come as a shock to some who are deep into the cryptocurrency rabbit hole, but common sense dictates that combining these two technologies in an irresponsible way can and will get you into trouble with the law.<p>I don't think that you have clearly answered how LBRY would or even could address this problem. Worse still, you have admitted in writing that "The LBRY protocol is fully decentralized and censorship-resistant ... infringing content may be stored on our servers, by the uploader and by anyone else who may have downloaded it." [1] I understand that you plan to have some kind of censorship, but you cannot realistically monitor all of the data in your network. YouTube has resources to monitor what people are uploading to their content platform, you do not and you will have a hard time proving to the law that you did. Even if could you do this monitoring effectively, your product is <i>designed</i> and <i>advertised</i> to be "censorship-resistant."<p>Walk me through this ... you find child porn on LBRY and you "censor" it in your "app," but you know that LBRY is censorship-resistant, and you know that the child porn is still out there, you even know which IP addressed might have it. What would you do then? At that point, you should get a lawyer. A lawyer would likely encourage you to contact law enforcement authorities, after taking your money. Either that, or you do nothing until the FBI knocks on your door.<p>It appears that the FBI might not be the only three-letter agency you could be dealing with. You mentioned that you "banked millions in the cryptocurrency boom" and you provided a link to a page on your website which provides "Quarterly Reports" which imitate the Investor Relations web page of a publicly traded corporation. [2] Your "Q2 2016" report states that, "Depending on fundraising over the next 3 months, we may entertain private placements via structures that align with the long-term interest in LBRY and minimize market impact." [3] The "Q4 2018" report has statements like "118,635 operational credits were used for the LBRY employee LBC purchase program." [4] In other places you refer to your organization as "LBRY <i>Inc.</i>" It is conceivable that the SEC could take an interest in this as well, after they hear from their pals at the FBI.<p>[1] <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y5l7kpc7" rel="nofollow">https://tinyurl.com/y5l7kpc7</a>
[2] <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y2utrfn3" rel="nofollow">https://tinyurl.com/y2utrfn3</a>
[3] <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y4kuww83" rel="nofollow">https://tinyurl.com/y4kuww83</a>
[4] <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y4e4dnqd" rel="nofollow">https://tinyurl.com/y4e4dnqd</a>