
Ask HN: Before We Spend Millions, What Do You Think of This Blockchain Use Case? - kauffj
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:&#x2F;&#x2F;@MinutePhysics&#x2F;magnetic-levitation), and a payment mechanism.<p>You can learn more at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lbry.tech. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lbry.tech&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;lbry.io&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;lbry.tech&#x2F;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.
======
SilasX
I strongly recommend this simple flowchart as a first-pass heuristic for
whether you've found a good use for blockchain.

[https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed](https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed)

HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543454)

Does it pass that test?

~~~
jiggytom
Check out this simpler one (even hosted on LBRY!!):
[https://spee.ch/doyouneedablockchain](https://spee.ch/doyouneedablockchain)
lbry://doyouneedablockchain

~~~
rb808
I have a simpler one [https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*5aEzSYyVZ9pJk5Y5m...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*5aEzSYyVZ9pJk5Y5mRIrNw.png)

~~~
jiggytom
And now it's on spee.ch! [https://spee.ch/4/blockchain-
flow](https://spee.ch/4/blockchain-flow)

------
abakker
First pass at website:

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.

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.

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?

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?

~~~
kauffj
1\. That's good feedback though to be clear this portal is specifically for
developers/engineers not creators. The spec available at lbry.tech/spec should
provide answers to those questions.

2\. Depends on what you mean by DRM. It's DRM-like in the sense that LBRY can
provide proof-of-purchase of digital content. It's not DRM-like in the sense
that our focus is not on providing you with crippled versions of a digital
media file.

3\. A public blockchain does not work without tokens. We believe the idea of a
shared registry of information (digital content) that exists in the world that
is not owned or controlled by a single party is an extremely powerful and
beneficial idea. It's why the company is called LBRY, in fact.

Your advice is useful in that it tells us we have more work to do in our
introduction of this technology, but what you advise is not what we are trying
to do. The central goal of LBRY is to provide a globally accessible, robust
listing of digital content that anyone can contribute to but that no one party
controls. We are considering extending it to support additional datasources.
De-duplication can be done but only if the duplication is non-malicious.

~~~
jpkiser
#3 is an extremely important point that most people just gloss over when
looking at blockchain use cases. A blockchain should only be used if
immutability is essential. If immutability is essential people will pay a
premium for that service. Thus a token becomes necessary because it is the
tool which users interact with the immutable ledger while simultaneously the
tool that creates the profit incentives for nodes to secure the chain.

~~~
abakker
Yes, that is true, but, remember that financial/profit incentives are not the
same as economic incentives. Profit incentives tend to be necessary when the
work needs to be done, but the utility of doing that work is not symmetric.
I.e. mining on the bitcoin blockchain provides me no utility, but is needed to
generate transaction blocks, and so the tokens provide me a financial
incentive to mine. However, if I just buy a bitcoin, I have a speculative
financial investment if the value of bitcoins goes up and that is my only
purpose in holding them. If I plan to actually transact in bitcoins, then
owning a bitcoin gives me an economic benefit: the ability to transact with
it.

If the financial incentive of this blockchain is to create tokens that are
meant to generate either financial incentives for nodes/miners and the tokens
themselves are held as equity, then that's fine, but, those tokens don't seem
to be a huge financial incentive right now. The alternative is that this
blockchain offers economic incentives for developers because it solves
problems in a useful and functional way. if it is useful and functional then
it is not clear that it needs a separate financial motivator, and it is also
not clear that having a financial motivator that has a value susceptible to
speculative investment is even a good thing.

In short, why add a financial motivator if there can be an economic motivator?
We do not expect separate financial motivators to use mySQL. In fact, I'd say
a lot of the benefits of open source are that there are only economic/utility
based motivators and not financial ones.

------
kodablah
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.

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.

~~~
jiggytom
Hey, thanks for the comments! We don't think it's a matter of verification /
financial incentives for the blockchain use case, but instead, it's the
censorship-resistant, permissionless, and spam prevention factors that count.
If we had a centralized database, we could potentially limit access or
overwrite records.

As far as discovery goes, we've developed a product that helps with exactly
this problem - it's called Chainquery. It digests all the metadata from the
blockchain into SQL tables that can be easily queried. Check it out at
[https://github.com/lbryio/chainquery/](https://github.com/lbryio/chainquery/)

------
altairiumblue
Can you explain what your product does without using the word blockchain?

~~~
seanyesmunt
LBRY uses a database, that everyone has access to, 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.

This decentralized db allows anyone to access the data without relying on one
source.

~~~
Canada
Okay, so for a use case like The Pirate Bay, which is a popular database of
magnet links and related metadata (Description, who added to the database,
when added, etc). Users search this data in various ways.

Can you explain how the same would be implemented on your system? As in, how
would a user search it or find popular torrents? What would the components be
and how would they fit together?

Obviously the vast majority of users (> 99.9%) will never consider running
their own node, they won't need to store data on chain, they only want to read
it, and they will not pay anything in order to do so.

How would your solution be better than doing it with an existing system such
as EOS? It also provides publisher identities, human friendly account names,
and a payment mechanism. In addition it also supports smart contracts or dapps
or whatever you want to call them, which could be used to facilitate
moderation.

edit: BTW, I like your demo

~~~
jiggytom
Hey, thanks for the question! Give our app a try and I think you'll answer
some of these questions for yourself:
[https://lbry.io/get](https://lbry.io/get) \- it uses an SPV wallet, so no
need to host blockchain data.

There is very basic (to be improved soon!) search functionality in the app -
it searches through lbry:// urls and content metadata from publishes. Any type
of data can be published to lbry, including videos, images, pdfs, and more!

In terms of how it compares to EOS, I'm not sure, but our tech is specifically
designed to content publishing, disovery and monetization. It also includes
publisher identities and a payment mechanism in LBC.

~~~
Canada
I installed the client and searched. Did the results come from the blockchain
directly as seen by my client or did they come from a HTTP request to a server
you run?

~~~
seanyesmunt
They went through a search server we own that runs chainquery.
[https://github.com/lbryio/chainquery](https://github.com/lbryio/chainquery)

It parses the blockchain and syncs it with a SQL db. Anyone can run their own
search server and adjust it as they see fit.

~~~
Canada
Right, so nothing stops you from altering the search results at will, which is
the most critical part of the system in my opinion.

Why bother with a blockchain then? Instead of letting content creators be
tipped in bitcoins or something, is there any reason other than getting to be
the issuer of the coin?

Or will some future development make search decentralized?

~~~
seanyesmunt
All the code for our search engine is open source
[https://github.com/lbryio/lighthouse](https://github.com/lbryio/lighthouse)

You could also run your own search server if you don't want to use that one.

But that is only part of discovery. Another is built into the protocol. I can
navigate to `lbry://bitconnect`, to see what has been published at that url.
There is no way to spoof this part since it happens at the protocol layer.

Also if your interested,
[https://spee.ch/bitconnect](https://spee.ch/bitconnect). Spee.ch is a web
wrapper for the lbry:// protocol. `spee.ch/url` will serve the same file as
`lbry://url` (but is limited by different file types. There are more viewers
in the app like a 3d file viewer.)

~~~
Canada
Can I see lbry://@SomebodyUnpopular without talking to the centralized search?
If so that's very good as that person couldn't be deplatformed.

Anyway, great job offering working and usable software. Way better than
99.999% of blockchain projects which offer nothing but empty promises.

~~~
seanyesmunt
Yep. The lbry urls are handled by the protocol, there is no way for a company
to block someone from accessing that channel.

I could outbid that person so that the short url is directed to my channel,
but that person will always have a url at lbry://@SomebodyUnpopular#xyz123...

------
robjan
My first question is always the same: what problem is the Blockchain solving
for your business that cannot be solved using another technology?

~~~
CountPrimes
One of the major things that blockchain solves is URL ownership. LBRY is
trying to build a censorship resistant video service. The blockchain backbone
allows public proofs of URL ownership and that specific content came from a
specific URL -- it's like SSL without the central server or the chain of
trust.

~~~
kangnkodos
What stops an evil squatter from claiming URL's that do not belong to them?

------
NekoNormalan
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:

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.

My questions would be:

\- 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.

\- 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?

\- 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?

\- 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?

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?

~~~
kauffj
\- Why blockchain and not something else?

I'm not aware of any other system can provide the permissionless and
censorship-resistant aspects of blockchain while still maintaining a coherent,
single view of the network, though I admit I'm only loosely familiar with
BigchainDB.

\- Why published identity? I guess that idea is that all content is actually
legal and there are no pirate movies / tv shows?

It's possible to publish anonymously if that is your preference. Even using an
"identity" you can be anonymous, they're just cryptographically provable
pseudonyms.

Open protocols do not have a legal obligation to perform censorship at the
protocol level, only users of the protocol must censor (see HTTP, BitTorrent,
etc.).

\- How will you control who and what is uploaded? ...legal movie distributers
will not use it because content will end up in P2P...

We don't. Currently over 750,000 pieces of content are available on LBRY and
to our knowledge only a little over 100 are infringing.

We do receive and process DMCA takedown requests and provide a service that
lists content that is illegal to access in the United States. Official
applications that we release respect this endpoint, but it's not even legally
clear that we have to do this (e.g. uTorrent could do the same, but does not).

Additionally, LBRY already has one Hollywood studio making films available.
You can watch a James Franco film (Howl) or a David Cross film (It's a
Disaster). All existing attempts to restrict re-distribution of digital
content do not work and there are strong theoretical reasons to believe they
never will. Hopefully more studios will eventually be as enlightened as
Oscilloscope.

\- There's also a problem with content like child pornography. How are you
going to prevent upload of those?

This is essentially already answered above. You can read a bit more here:
[https://lbry.io/what#combatting-the-ugly](https://lbry.io/what#combatting-
the-ugly)

~~~
NekoNormalan
Thanks for your answers! About this one:

"I'm not aware of any other system can provide the permissionless and
censorship-resistant aspects of blockchain while still maintaining a coherent,
single view of the network, though I admit I'm only loosely familiar with
BigchainDB."

Maybe you also wanna look at Google Trillian?
[https://github.com/google/trillian](https://github.com/google/trillian)

------
altairiumblue
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.

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.

~~~
verdverm
Agree, it's always best to go from problem to solution. I have only seen a few
examples of this in blockchain, and most are not using permissionless systems.

------
ericflo
You asked HN about the blockchain in 2019. The answer will reflexively be that
you are doing something wrong.

I think LBRY is exploring one of the more promising use-cases for blockchains,
which is users selling their original content to each other.

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.

~~~
robvsmith
Thanks for the feedback, we're definitely working on UX improvements and
scaling issues... when the catalyst hits, we'll be ready. If you use the app,
it would be great to hear from you with more feedback!

------
mondo9000
Walk me through the process. Lets assume I made a film.

1) where does the film get uploaded to?

2) how do I get $$ out of this process so I can pay rent?

3) how do you pay your investors back?

~~~
perlgeek
4) how can you retract the film, should the necessity arise?

~~~
seanyesmunt
You can `abandon` your claim. [https://spec.lbry.io/#claim-
operations](https://spec.lbry.io/#claim-operations)

This removes it and gives back your deposit for staking a lbry url.

------
thom
How do you stop people selling, for example, child pornography on this?

~~~
seanyesmunt
Also, as horrible as it is, the post right below this one is titled: On
YouTube, a Network of Paedophiles Is Hiding in Plain Sight

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19209314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19209314)

It's hard to prevent entirely, even if you fully control the network.

~~~
thom
Yes but the fear would be a point at which someone asks you to remove the
stuff and you say "well technically we can't" and they start looking for
reasons to put you jail. Even if you're losing the game of whackamole, you at
least need to be seen whacking moles.

~~~
seanyesmunt
We can remove data from our official apps (or at least hide it). We do this
for dmca requests.

But if someone is hosting it, anyone can access it through the command line,
or if they take our app code and remove a couple lines.

Another way to look at it is, `http` isn't responsible for preventing illegal
content to be shared, `lbry` is the same.

------
root_axis
What prevents someone from stealing my content, modifying one byte and then
uploading back to the network as their own?

~~~
kangnkodos
Or... What if @root_axis has not uploaded their content to LBRY yet, and I
post it to LBRY first? How does @root_axis claim their proper money?

------
alexcnwy
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: [https://custostech.com/](https://custostech.com/)

~~~
jiggytom
What are your views on DRM? We think it's a really tough problem to solve -
especially once the data is decrypted, the cat is out of the bag!

------
foxreymann
This is reverse logic.

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.

Most blockchain use cases reverse logic: We have a blockchain, so lets find
problem that we can solve with blockchain.

This is a cognitive bias.

------
altairiumblue
\- Why would content creators choose to use this service over youtube or
twitch?

\- And why would users choose it over the other platforms?

\- And if they did, how would the experience be different for each party?

~~~
CountPrimes
Producers would use this service over others to ensure that the content that
they sell is not tampered with, not censored, not edited, not removed by
someone else. They would use this service to be sure that their content got to
the consumer in its pure form.

Consumers would use it for the same purpose: they use it to ensure that the
content they are viewing is exactly what the producer intended. Consumers
would also use the service to acquire content that has been wrongly-suppressed
elsewhere.

~~~
fwip
What kind of content creators do you imagine needing this?

Real talk, nobody at YouTube is editing your uploaded videos.

Since you need to own a website to publish, can't you just put a bittorrent
magnet link on there? Or IPFS or other flavor-of-the-month.

I'm struggling to imagine your blockchain not being largely composed of
pirated movies, child porn, and Nazis. Everyone else is served well-enough by
easier alternatives.

~~~
seanyesmunt
Users get censored and demonetized all the time. Recently they also started
messing (as a small test) with changing the thumbnails that users chose after
they published a video.

It is not viable to create a business on YouTube. In one day, it could be
gone.

------
arbitcoin
What's the point in having your own coin? Why not use Bitcoin rather than
reinventing the wheel?

~~~
CountPrimes
LBRY was commenced a while back -- back when having your own coin was a cool
thing to do. LBRY also uses non-standard transactions to purchase and build
their URL tree. (LBRY allows you to acquire a named channel to host your
content, similar to Youtube.)

In addition, Bitcoin at the time was plagued with performance concerns and
high fees. If your vision is to serve and support content to millions per day,
you want freedom to address the performance needs of the system.

I do think you could build a similar system on bitcoin; your wallet server
could build the necessary indexes. You would need to do some interesting P2SH
work to construct the channel hierarchy.

------
fock
How big is this company that they have a PR team consisting of 4 accounts
here?

~~~
seanyesmunt
We employ about 20 people full time - check out our team page at
[https://lbry.io/team](https://lbry.io/team). There are a few folks not listed
there, we'll be updating that soon.

We aren't all part of the PR team, we have various roles across the company
like CEO, CTO, developers, engineers, and quality assurance

I work on the desktop app. [https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-
desktop](https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop)

------
crote
So basically Tribler, but without the privacy part?

~~~
seanyesmunt
I haven't seen Tribler before, this looks pretty neat.

Another difference is the ability to make money off your own content. You can
upload a file and charge some amount users have to pay before downloading it.

------
riskneutral
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.

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 _designed_ and _advertised_ to be "censorship-resistant."

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.

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 _Inc._ " It is conceivable that
the SEC could take an interest in this as well, after they hear from their
pals at the FBI.

[1] [https://tinyurl.com/y5l7kpc7](https://tinyurl.com/y5l7kpc7) [2]
[https://tinyurl.com/y2utrfn3](https://tinyurl.com/y2utrfn3) [3]
[https://tinyurl.com/y4kuww83](https://tinyurl.com/y4kuww83) [4]
[https://tinyurl.com/y4e4dnqd](https://tinyurl.com/y4e4dnqd)

~~~
finer9
First off, thank you for taking the time to share your concerns. I'm from the
founding team and work on compliance a lot.

In all fairness, starting off with 'crypto and p2p are used by criminals' as
the context was a bit unfair. There are many more people doing good things
with both technologies vs bad things. We are the good guys. We are basically
software engineers.

In response to your specific concerns, I'd like to reassure you that LBRY
works closely with our legal counsel Perkins Coie on several fronts. One of
those is illegal content, of which CP would be categorized. Section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act provides fairly well established guidance for
operators of networks such as ours.
[https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230](https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230)

That being said, of course we dont want nor will tolerate this type of content
and report each and every instance to the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children \- including IP and/or any data we have in the specific
situation. We would not hesitate to report to local or state law enforcment if
we had information that was relevant. Fortunately at this time we have had
very few things to report.

With regard to your financial concerns - LBRY maintains the stance that we are
a pure play utility token. We never had an ICO, have never made statements
about future prospects or returns from our tokens, and do not encourage
purchase of tokens except for use on the platform. We have put in a
considerable amount of legal work in this regard too, and have had extensive
discussions with many parties. While every single crypto company currently has
regulatory uncertainty, we believe we have possibly the best facts of any
utility token and stand behind them.

