What is LBRY exactly – is it a protocol, an app, a website, a company?
LBRY is many components working together. For most users, it will just be a place where they can find great videos, music, ebooks, and more. A vast digital library available on all of your devices.
But behind that experience is an ecosystem that can be hard to understand at first – especially because we tend to refer to all the pieces and the system-as-a-whole as “LBRY”. (We’re working on clearing that up.)
It might be easier to start with what LBRY is not: it is not just another corporate media service like YouTube or iTunes or Spotify. It is first and foremost a new protocol that allows artists to upload their content to a network of hosts (like BitTorrent) and set a price per stream or download (like iTunes) or give it away for free (like YouTube without ads). What makes this all possible is the blockchain technology developed by the founder of Bitcoin. Do you have to understand any of this to use and enjoy LBRY? No. Does it still matter to users? Yes!
Gmail has built an extremely popular email service on top of the near-universal SMTP protocol that everyone uses to exchange emails. Anyone sending email with SMTP can communicate with Gmail addresses, no matter what email platform they use (Yahoo!, AOL, iCloud, etc.). Google can’t interfere with someone emailing from a 
Compare this to a proprietary, centrally controlled service like Facebook Messenger. If you conduct all of your social communications via Messenger, you’re stuck in that environment – you cannot move your messages or contacts over to Google Chat or Skype. And if Facebook changes the way Messenger functions by censoring conversations or sharing your information with advertisers or governments, tough luck.
Even platforms that are ostensibly designed with the user’s control and privacy in mind are susceptible to corruption if they are centrally controlled. WhatsApp comes to mind. WhatsApp built a huge global user base claiming to put users above advertisers. Then Facebook bought it. Now users may well have their personal phone numbers and metadata mined for Facebook’s advertising algorithms.
There is no such risk of top-down corruption with the LBRY protocol. Content uploaded to the decentralized LBRY network remains publicly accessible so long as the community finds it valuable and continues to host it.
Now, the LBRY project is more than just a revolutionary new protocol. It is also a company, LBRY Inc., which is developing a LBRY app to allow users to easily interact with the protocol. So it’s as if Google had developed the email protocol, released it to the world for free, and then built Gmail to help people make use of it. Not only is our app completely open-source, but others are welcome to create competing apps that also use the LBRY protocol. For a content creator, your uploaded content will be available to all of these apps at the same time.
Do you see the difference here? YouTube can afford to push around its creators and users because they’ve created tremendous lock-in. LBRY is challenging this model from the ground-up. Everything we’ve built is open-source, decentralized, and belongs to the community using it. LBRY Inc. could go bankrupt tomorrow and the LBRY protocol will live on. Can YouTube say that?
How does LBRY benefit content consumers? Why should I bother caring?
Do you watch YouTube? Imagine paying a few cents to eliminate all ads. 100% of the payment will go directly to the content creator – and they’ll still be earning more than YouTube offers, so they’ll want to make even more of the content you love.
Do you use BitTorrent? Imagine getting paid to seed files into the network. Because there is a marketplace for these files, you can finally find rare songs and films that can’t support a torrent swarm based on popularity alone.
Do you shop on the iTunes Store? Imagine paying less for songs, TV episodes, and music videos and having 100% of the price go directly to the creators.
LBRY is a digital media library at your fingertips. It can store any kind of content and make it available at low cost on demand. In a few years time, LBRY may become your one-stop-shop for everything digital, from ebooks to video games to movies. One app to rule them all – but still leaving more power in your hands because it is decentralized by design.
What’s with the name LBRY?
The very first question of newcomers is often, “How do you pronounce it?” Answer: library.
“Is it an acronym?” No.
“Then why confuse people with the all-caps and no vowels?”
First and foremost, LBRY is an internet protocol, just like HTTP. Content on LBRY is served to users via “LBRY names,” which look like this: lbry://itsawonderfullife. Very similar to the URL you type into your internet browser. LBRY is not just our branded name, but the character string we’ve chosen to lead our URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier).
It also serves as a truncated form of “library,” which reflects our mission: every film, song, book, and app ever made – available anywhere. Our vision for LBRY is to create a massive media repository for the 21st century that is built on a decentralized network controlled by its users. LBRY is to a traditional library what Amazon is to a department store.
Is it an odd name? Perhaps. But we would kindly point to the success of brands like Hulu, Yahoo!, Etsy, Skype, Tumblr, and Zillow. In the end, a good company with a strong user base will be remembered regardless of its name. And a company with a brand as straightforward as Pets.com can still fail.
LBRY is working well as a brand so far. SEO is a top consideration for startup branding, and LBRY already dominates the search results for our brand name.
How does LBRY naming work? Why don’t you just assign names the same way as internet domains?
First, since there have been a lot of misconceptions about how LBRY URIs work, it is absolutely possible to own and control a URI forever. That is the tl;dr of this post if you don't want to read a bunch of words about how LBRY URIs work.
Assigning names optimally is a difficult problem in centralized systems. It becomes nearly impossible in decentralized ones. Just because we’re all accustomed to certain solutions doesn’t mean they aren’t seriously flawed.
Let’s look at the internet’s standard domain name system (DNS). DNS is a centralized service run by an organization called ICANN. ICANN grants registrars the ability to lease domain names for 1-year terms. Registrars pay enormous fees to participate in this system, and individuals/companies can end up paying substantial fees to maintain a particular domain. That is to say, ICANN is a pretty lucrative racket for those involved.
And the results aren’t even that good! Not only are domain names still very awkward (http://www.THENAMEIWANT.somethingelse), but they are highly vulnerable to squatters. Domain name squatting has become an industry unto itself, with speculators viewing it like owning real estate. Unfortunately, as with real estate, the market is opaque and transaction costs are high. Unlike real estate, the scarcity of ICANN domains is basically artificial, depending on a committee to approve new top-level domains (TLDs) at their whim.
So we thought, “what if there were a better way?” Consulting with economists, we devised LBRY’s nameclaim system. LBRY URIs support four types of resolution:
About now you're probably wondering, "what's a claim?". Name claims, as their title would suggest, are made to a human readable name. The claim contains serialized data, which allows it to store a very little bit for a specific purpose, or to point to something else. This format is flexible, allowing support for many use cases to be added. Currently, claims contain encoded channel identities and download streams.
Our bet is that vanity names will be controlled by the people who get the most value out of them – which is almost always the creator of the content. Radiohead would get a lot more value out of lbry://amoonshapedpool than a squatter, pirate, or troll.
Before jumping to conclusions about the system for vanity URLs, here are a few key details:
-Names aren’t bought, only reserved – no credits are lost, only put on deposit. If you win the auction for a name, your credits are held with that name until you decide to withdraw them (at any time you wish). You aren’t buying the name from anyone and no one profits off of the transfer of names. It’s just a test of who is willing to deposit the most credits toward a name. The only cost is that you can’t spend the credits on content or cash them out while they are reserving a name.
-The longer a name is held, the longer the holder has to counterbid. You don’t just lose the name immediately if a bigger bidder comes along – especially if you’ve held it for awhile. The time to counterbid scales up to ~1 week.
-Other users can pledge credits to support the nameclaim of a creator they like. If you claim lbry://bestmovieever and your film lives up to the hype, users may show their support by pledging some credits to make sure you hold onto that name.
-Names are not like Youtube channels; they’re more like search terms. However, publishers can use a claim to a name for much the same purpose, with a "channel" claim. The uri for these claims support allow specifying other claims made by that publisher easily, like lbry://@UCBerkeley/ucb-P7Wjq025f-Q or lbry://@oscopelabs/itsadisaster-sd. Additionally, with the #<claim_id> syntax publishers have uris that are permanent and embeddable, where resolution is not subject to the bidding system. The only time these claims cannot be resolved is if the publisher removes the specified claim, the decision is theirs. The bidding system is only meant to get traffic from users trying to “discover” your content through the naming system. Since every comedy video would want to be at lbry://comedy, the nameclaim system allows the name to go to the creator who can make the most revenue off of it.
No doubt it is unlike anything we've seen before on the net. For creators, it's a tradeoff. You might lose a valuable name, but you also don't have to worry about people squatting on the best names. Squatting has plagued projects like Namecoin and is only (poorly) resolved by ICANN at the cost of much expense and centralization.
Our economic advisor Alex Tabarrok notes:
“Auctions have many great properties, but the public doesn’t like auctions very much. Although participating in an auction is fun for some; others find it annoying. It requires inputs of time and risk, and no one likes being outbid at the last minute.”
So, the short answer is that we’re aware that this is an experiment within an experiment. We’re trying to solve a very hard problem in a novel way. It’s important to note that LBRY doesn't depend on the naming system, but we're committed to giving it a chance.
For a more in depth Q&A please poke the link below:
