LBRY, media distribution done right

This is a thread used to explain what LBRY and LBC is and what it does as well as discuss it's potential as a biz and crypto.

What is LBRY?

>LBRY is the first digital marketplace to be controlled by the market’s participants rather than a corporation or other 3rd-party.
>It is the most open, fair, and efficient marketplace for digital goods ever created, with an incentive design encouraging it to become the most complete.

>To understand LBRY, think of LBRY in terms of two layers: protocol and service.

- Where and how content itself is stored, how payments are carried out and how content is discovered

>The service layer utilizes the protocol to do something that a human being would actually find useful.

- The Apps, how the user interacts with all the data the protocol has. They're also thinking of making hardware

LBRY settles it's payments through it's cryptocurrency: LBC.

Protocol

>The protocol provides a fundamental, underlying technological capability.
>It consists of the LBRY Blockchain and The LBRYNet

Blockchain

LBRY uses it's own blockchain to take advantage of custom uses for what information the blockchain stores whiles also giving content stored some accountability and credibility.

>The LBRY blockchain maintain balances -- in LBC (LBRY Credits)
>But, more importantly, the LBRY blockchain also provides a decentralized lookup and metadata storage system.
>he LBRY blockchain supports a specific set of commands that allows anyone to bid (in LBC) to control a LBRY name, which is a lot like a domain name.

>eg. lbry://wonderfullife

All LBRY content is stored on the protocol: lbry://

The name being bid for is wonderfullife

>Whoever controls a name gets to describe what it contains, what it costs to access, who to pay, and where to find it. These names are sold in a continuous running auction.

> Bids are entered into a trustless escrow, marking the credits as unspendable, but leaving them intact.
>When a user looks up a name, the name resolves to the largest bid made by a party or parties. The ability for any number of people to have a say in where a name resolves is part of what makes LBRY a system controlled by its users.
>As the credits are distributed primarily among users and producers, it is community itself that has ultimate control over the catalogue of what is available.

>It’s possible this system sounds like chaos to you, but we’re betting on a Nobel-prize winning result that predicts the opposite.

>Economist Ronald Coase theorized that in a system with low transaction cost and clear rules, property will be held by those who value it the most.
>Since LBRY names are the equivalent to content storefronts, we believe that LBRY names will hold the most value to rightsholders who produce content associated with a given name.

>As names in demand on LBRY will be more expensive, the names themselves will also serve as a signal of reputation, legitimacy, and quality.

>If a user searches LBRY for Spider Man and sees one at lbry://spiderman and one at lbry://spiderman_russhaxor, there will be little doubt that the latter is less legitimate.

And then the less legitimate name and content will be put on blacklist

More on this later on.

>We’ve also buffed the hashing algorithm, smoothed the block reward function, increased the block size, increased the total number of credits, and prepared for offchain settlement

this is them explaining the blockchain, compared to the BTC's.

LBRY Net

>LBRYNet is the layer that makes the LBRY blockchain useful beyond a simple payment system.

>It says what to do with the information available in the LBRY blockchain,
>how to issue payments,
> how to look up a content identifier, and so on.

>LBRYNet issues a lookup for the name associated with the content.

- If the client does not have a local copy of the blockchain,
- this lookup is broadcast to miners or to a service provider.
- This lookup acquires the metadata associated with the name.

>LBRYNet issues any required payments, as instructed by metadata entries.

- If the content is set to free, nothing happens
- If the content is set to have a price in LBC, the client must issue a payment in LBC to the specified address.
-If the content is published encrypted, LBRYNet will not allow access until this payment has been issued.
-If the content is set to have another payment method, the seller must run or use a service that provides a private server enforcing payment and provisioning accessing keys.

>LBRYNet uses the metadata to download the content itself.

- The metadata allows chunks to be discovered and assembled in a BitTorrent-like fashion.
- However, unlike BitTorrent, chunks do not individually identify themselves as part of a greater whole.
- Chunks are just arbitrary pieces of data.

- If LBRYNet cannot find nodes offering chunks for free, it will offer payments for chunks to other hosts with those chunks.
- This payment is not done via proof-of-bandwidth, or third-party escrow.
- Instead, LBRYNet uses reputation, trust, and small initial payments to ensure reliable hosts.
- If content is not published directly to LBRY, the metadata can instruct other access methods, such as a Netflix URL.
- This allows us to catalogue content not yet available on LBRY as well as offer legacy and extensibility purposes.

The Service

>Services are what actually make the LBRY protocol useful. While the LBRY protocol determines what is possible, it is the services that actually do things.

I've already explained what the LBRY does for and with content on it's protocol. How the content is stored, the payment system and how it can be acquired has been touched on.

The following is an explanation on what the user can do and develop.

> ...a LBRY client can allow users to passively participate in the network,

>allowing them to automatically earn rewards in exchange for contributing bandwidth, disk space, or processing power to the overall network.

Obviously it need these resources to run with little to no costs to the devs and you.
And in case you don't know this system is in kin to Maid and Sia.

>Applications beyond a traditional computer based browser are possible as well.
>A LBRY television dongle, a LBRY radio, and any number of existing content access mechanisms can be implemented via an analogous LBRY device.

> ...the LBRY protocol content comes from anywhere and everywhere, and is therefore not so easily stifled.

Stifled in terms of bureaucracy

>the market mechanisms of LBRY create a strong incentive for efficient distribution, which will save the costs of producers and ISPs alike.
>These properties, along with LBRY’s infringement disincentivizing properties, make LBRY an appealing technology for large existing data or content distributors.

I will explain it's content rights terms more later.

> ... rather than issue a transaction to the core blockchain, transactions are issued to a 3rd-party provider.
>These providers have a substantial number of coins which are used to maintain balances internally and settle a smaller number of transactions to the core chain.
>In exchange, these providers earn a small fee, less than the fee required to issue the transaction directly to the blockchain.

LBC aspect

>LBRY Credits, or LBC, are the unit of account for LBRY.

>Eventually 1,000,000,000 LBC will exist, according to a defined schedule over 20 years.
>The schedule decays exponentially, with around 100,000,000 in the first year.

>some credits are awarded on a fixed basis. The total break down looks like this:

- 10% for organizations, charities, and other strategic partners.
Organizations like the EFF, ACLU, and others that have fought for digital rights and the security and freedom of the internet.

- 20% for adoption programs.
We’ll be giving out lots of bonus credits, especially in the early days of LBRY, in order to encourage participation.
We will also look to award credits broadly, ensuring the marketplace is egalitarian.

- 10% for us [LBRY team]. For operational costs as well as profit.

- 60% earned by LBRY users, via mining the LBRY cryptocurrency.

Discretions

>...we acknowledge that LBRY can be used for bad ends.

>The downside to LBRY is that it can be used to exchange illegal content.
>However, several factors of LBRY make illicit usage less likely than it may seem at first consideration.

>LBRY is an improvement over BitTorrent in combatting unsavory content in at least five ways:

More records.

> LBRY contains a public ledger of transactions recording name purchases and content publishings.
> As many purchases make it onto the ledger as well,
>this means infringing actions are frequently recorded forever, or are at a minimum widely observable.

Unilateral Renewal

> The LBRY naming system allows for quick, unilateral acquisition of infringing URIs.
> Once a BitTorrent magnet hash is in the wild, there is no mechanism to update or alter its resolution whatsoever.
> If a LBRY name is pointing to infringing content, it can be seized according to clear rules.

Blacklists

> LBRY will publish and maintain a blacklist of infringing names.
> All clients we release and all legal clients will have to follow our blacklist, or one like it, or face substantial penalties.

Penalties

> Penalties for profiting off of infringement are far stronger and involve can involve jail time,
>while infringement without profit only results in statutory damages.
> This serves as a far stronger deterrent for all infringing uses than BitTorrent provides.

Expensive/Impossible
> Offchain settlement will be a requirement for efficient purchases at any significant network size.
> Settlement providers, ourselves included, will be able to block purchases for infringing content.
>At significant traffic volume, if infringing content can’t be outright removed or blocked, transaction fees will make it prohibitively expensive.

> LBRY users are still subject to the DMCA and other laws governing intellectual property.

> Users who publishing infringing content are still subject to penalties for doing so in exactly the same way they would be via BitTorrent.
> LBRY only adds to the suite of options available.
> This makes LBRY a strict improvement over BitTorrent with regards to illegal usages, which provides none of the mechanisms listed.

Bump

Great, it's more shit we don't need.