LBRY Credits (LBC) is a new blockchain-based decentralized content-sharing platform geared towards content creators (filmmakers, musicians, writers, or software developers) who want to have full control over their own work. There are no ads, no corporate censors, and LBRY takes no portion of your income as a content creator and consumers can also benefit as there is finally an alternative to the big media stores. It has been in development for a while, but just recently it was launched in Beta, though you still need to request an invitation in order to be able to get early access. The LBRY network uses its own crypto token called LBRY Credits (LBC) that you can already mine, even if you still have not received your early access to the platform for the moment (while waiting to get it). Not to mention that there is also an operational market for LBRY Credits on Bittrex, so that you can also trade them when you mine some.
Currently, you can only join LBRY through invitation:
2. Enter your email to join the waitlist!
And get 10 free LBC, for supporting the project at an early stage .
Introduction
In 34,000 B.C., there were cave paintings. And that’s it. When you came home from a sweltering August day of foraging along the Vézère river, the only form of non-live art or entertainment available was something like the above buffalo.Today, we live in a world of near infinite choices. This is true not just for art but for all kinds of things (like potato chips). Since the era of cave art, humanity has incessantly and progressively trended towards interconnected, more efficient, and increasingly transparent markets. This undercurrent of connectedness and openness has affected everything human beings produce.Nerds like us like to speculate about the end-game of this trend with others on the internet. What will society be like when we have a "Star Trek"-like capacity to instantly and freely replicate anything that exists? The term for this society is post-scarcity1.Generally, post-scarcity is regarded as fantastical; something that will never happen in our lifetimes. Except for one area: digital goods.Art in the internet age is infinitely reproducible and easily shared. This is a sea change from any prior time in history. Previously, vinyl records captured audio in physical grooves; tapes captured data on magnetic strips; compact disks held digital files read by lasers—in each of these cases physical, medium-specific hardware is required to both produce and recover the bits of data that made up the digital content.Today art is just data, a string of 1s and 0s, a number, and we no longer need any specialized hardware to decode and enjoy digital content. We use the same technological methods to access a personal photograph a single time as we do to watch a blockbuster on Netflix.This is a big step forward from the past. As production costs fall to zero, choices go up. Digital distributors provide virtually every song, film, photo or book for purchase and download to any internet enabled device. Technology has decreased the cost of production, too -- it has never been easier for aspirant artists to achieve a following through self-publishing.The digitization of art has added a lot of value to both content creators and consumers, reducing costs and increasing choice. This transition is still in its infancy. With LBRY, we’re going to make it a little more mature.1 Note that post-scarcity does not eliminate the need to create new goods, it just eliminates or reduces the costs of duplicatinggoods to nothing. As long as people desire goods that did not previously exist, there will always be a market demand for creation, even in a post-scarcity world.
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.At the highest level, LBRY does something extraordinarily simple. LBRY creates an association between a unique name and a piece of digital content, such as a movie, book, or game. This is similar to the domain name system that you are most likely using to access this very post.A user searches and prepares to stream and the film It’s a Wonderful Life, located at lbry://wonderfullife, via a completely decentralized network. Try it out for yourself at lbry.io/get.However, LBRY does this not through a proprietary service or network, but as a protocol, or a method of doing things, much like HTTP, DNS and other specifications that make up the internet itself. Just as many different domains owned by many different companies all speak a shared language, so too can any person or company speak LBRY. No special access or permission is needed.LBRY differs from the status quo in three big ways:
While creating a protocol that we ourselves cannot control sounds chaotic, it is actually about establishing trust. Every other publishing system requires trusting an intermediary that can unilaterally change the rules on you. What happens when you build your business on YouTube or Amazon and they change fees? Or Apple drops your content because the Premier of China thought your comedy went too far?Only LBRY consists of a known, promised set of rules that no one can unilaterally change. LBRY provides this by doing something unique: leaving the users in control rather than demanding that control for itself.2If it worries you that LBRY's decentralized nature facilitates infringing or unsavory content, this is addressed in Combatting the Ugly.
Let’s look at a sample use of LBRY, Ernest releasing a film on LBRY that is later purchased and viewed by Hillary.
From a user's perspective, interaction is extremely similar to those that happen on hundreds of different sites, similar to YouTube, Amazon and Netflix. The key different is that this one happens via a network that is completely decentralized. The data and technology that makes the entire interaction possible is not reliant on nor controlled by any single entity.
To understand precisely what LBRY is and why it matters, one must understand both LBRY as a protocol and the services the protocol enables. HTTP is the protocol that makes web browsing possible, but it would be of little interest without the service of a web browser!To understand LBRY, think of LBRY in terms of two layers: protocol and service. The protocol provides a fundamental, underlying technological capability. The service layer utilizes the protocol to do something that a human being would actually find useful.For a user using LBRY at the service level, the magic of what the LBRY protocol does will be largely transparent, much as a typical internet user sees nothing of how HTTP works. Via a LBRY application, a user will be able to open a familiar interface to quickly and easily discover and purchase a piece of digital content published by anyone in the world.However, such an application would not be possible without the LBRY the underlying layer, the LBRY protocol.
While the protocol is one comprehensive set of rules, it is easier to understand as two parts.
A blockchain, or distributed ledger is the key innovation behind the Bitcoin network. Blockchains solved the very complicated technological problem of having a bunch of distributed, disparate entities all agree on a rivalrous state of affairs (like how much money they owe each other).Like Bitcoin, the LBRY blockchain maintain balances -- in this case, balances of LBC, LBRY’s unit of credit. More importantly, the LBRY blockchain also provides a decentralized lookup and metadata storage system. The 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. 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. We will talk more about this system a little later on.If you’re a programmer, you might recognize the LBRY blockchain as a key-value store. Each key, or name, corresponds to a value, or a metadata entry. Whichever party or parties bid the most LBC gets to control the metadata returned by a key lookup.Here is a sample key-value entry in the LBRY blockchain. Here, wonderfullife is the key, and the rest of the description is the value.
wonderfullife : {
title: "It’s a Wonderful Life",
description: "An angel helps a compassionate but despairingly frustrated businessman by showing what life would have been like if he never existed.",
thumbnail: "http://i.imgur.com/MW45x88.jpg",
license: "public domain",
price: 0, //free!
publisher: "A Fan Of George Bailey", //simplification
sources: { //extensible, variable list
lbry_hash : <unique id>,
url : <url>
}
}A slightly simplified sample entry of metadata in the LBRY blockchain. Whichever party or parties bid the most in an ongoing auction control what a name returns.
A slightly simplified sample entry of metadata in the LBRY blockchain. Whichever party or parties bid the most in an ongoing auction control what a name returns.Other than the usage of the LBRY blockchain to store names and metadata, there are only minor differences between the blockchains of LBRY and Bitcoin, and the changes are generally consensus improvements. We’ve buffed the hashing algorithm, smoothed the block reward function, increased the block size, increased the total number of credits, and prepared for offchain settlement.The LBRY blockchain simply maintains LBC balances and a content namespace/catalogue. The next part, LBRYnet, specifies what to do with this data. To compare to the existing web, the blockchain is like the domain system (it maintains a listing of what is available), while the next piece makes it possible to actually fetch and pay for content.If you’re a Bitcoiner wondering why we don’t use the Bitcoin blockchain, you can read a detailed answer to that question here.
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.To use the LBRY network, a user’s computer needs the capacity to speak LBRY. That layer is LBRYNet. Just as your computer has a library that enables it to understand HTTP, DNS, and other languages and protocols, LBRYNet is the piece of software that allows your computer to understand how to interact with the LBRY network.To understand what role LBRYNet plays, let’s drill a little more into a sample user interaction. Once a user has affirmed access and purchase, such as in step 5 of our Sample Use above, the following happens:
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.While the protocol is determined, open, and fixed, the service layer is much more flexible. It is far easier to redesign a website than it is to revise the HTTP protocol itself. The same is true here.Additionally, just as in the early days of the internet the later direction of web would have been unfathomable, so too may the best uses of LBRY’s namespace or technology be undiscovered. However, here are some clear uses.
A LBRY application is how a user would actually have meaningful interactions with the LBRY network. A LBRY client packages the power of the LBRY protocol into a simple application that allows the user to simply search for content, pay for it when necessary, download and enjoy.Additionally, 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.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.
Although the namespace provided by the LBRY protocol is helpful towards discovery, much as the web would be much less useful without search engines or aggregators, LBRY needs it’s own discovery mechanisms.Search features can be constructed from the catalogue of metadata provided in the blockchain as well as the content transaction history available in the blockchain or observed on the network. All of this data, along with user history, allows for the creation of content recommendation engines and advanced search features.Discovery on LBRY can also take the form of featured content. Clients can utilize featured content to provide additional visibility for new content that consumers might not otherwise be looking for.
Digital content distributors with server-client models are subject to the whims of internet service providers and hostile foreign governments. Traffic from the host servers can be throttled or halted altogether if the owners of cables and routers so choose. However, in case of the LBRY protocol content comes from anywhere and everywhere, and is therefore not so easily stifled.Additionally, 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.
While payments can be issued directly on the LBRY blockchain, the LBRY protocol encourages a volume of transactions that will not scale without usage of offchain settlement.Essentially, 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.
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.Additionally, some credits are awarded on a fixed basis. The total break down looks like this:
LBRY names are one of the most unique aspects of LBRY and one that we believe will play a big role in helping it succeed.Control of a LBRY name is awarded via a continuous running auction in LBC. 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 controls over the catalogue of what is available.Additionally, bids can also be retracted at any time, even if you’re the current winning bidder. To prevent a name from rapidly switching between multiple resolutions, the parties that have existing control of a name have a reasonable period of time to respond to counter bids before a name’s resolution switches.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.It is also worth noting that in the event that LBRY received notice that either name contained an illegitimate copy of Spider Man, LBRY would dutifully and quickly put that content id on a blacklist, blocking discovery or purchase via any legal services. LBRY and users of LBRY are still subject to the DMCA and other relevant laws of their respective countries.
As neither naïfs nor knaves, we acknowledge that LBRY can be used for bad ends. Technology is frequently this way. Encryption protects our privacy -- as well as that of terrorists. Cars allow us to travel marvelous distances -- and kill millions per year.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. On the whole, as with the car and encryption, the benefits of LBRY clearly outway nefarious uses.To evaluate a technology’s effect, we must consider where it moves us from the current state of affairs, not judge against a Platonic ideal or past eta. In assessing LBRY, we must compare it to a world in which BitTorrent already exists and is quite popular, not the 1950s. LBRY is an improvement over BitTorrent in combatting unsavory content in at least five ways:
And of course, let’s not forget that 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.
We want to be the first digital content marketplace to:
Digital art is one of the first goods to evolve beyond scarcity. This evolution is changing the way content is discovered, publicized, paid for and delivered. Heretofore, the lack of transparency and monetization mechanisms in peer-to-peer sharing networks has largely enabled piracy. By equipping a peer-to-peer protocol with a digital currency and transparent decentralized ledger, the LBRY protocol opens the door to a new era of digital content distribution making peer-to-peer content distribution suitable for major publishing housing, self-publishers and everyone in between.If LBRY succeeds, we will enter a world that is even more creative, connected, and conservatory. We will waste less and we make more. We will create a world where a teenager in Kenya and a reality star in Los Angeles use the same tool to search the same network and have access to the same results -- a world where information, knowledge, and imagination know no borders.Build our dream with us.
Github:
Block Explorer:
How to Mine:
https://lbry.io/faq/mining-credits
Windows .exe GPU Miner:
https://github.com/lbryio/lbrycrd-gpu/releases/tag/v0.0.1
Poloniex Market:
https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_lbc
Bittrex Market:
https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-LBC
Pools:
https://lbry.suprnova.cc/index.php?page=statistics&action=pool
AMD GPU Miner:
https://github.com/lbryio/lbrycrd-gpu - Big thanks to wolf0 for the miner!
NVIDIA GPU Miner:
Let me know if you want this miner we have to pay developer bounty for it.
Developer Interview:
Twitter:
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/lbryio
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