LBRY: A Decentralized Digital Content Marketplace Alex Grintsvayg (
[email protected]), Jeremy Kauman (
[email protected]) Introduction LBRY is a protocol for accessing and publishing digital content in a global, decentralized marketplace. LBRY uses a public blockchain to provide a single shared index of published content, as well as content discovery and payment. Clients can use LBRY to publish, host, find, download, and pay for content — books, movies, music, or anything else that can be represented as a stream of bits. The protocol is permissionless and censorship-resistant, which means that participation is open to everyone and no one can unilaterally block or remove content. Before LBRY, publishers had to choose between a centralized host such as Amazon or Youtube, or a protocol like Bittorrent. Centralized platforms suer from several problems because their incentives are not aligned with the incentives of their users. Hosts engage in rent-seeking behavior, oen extracting 30-55% of creator profits. They enforce opaque and arbitrary rules on creators, and change those rules without warning or community input. They choose to censor content at the behest of repressive regimes around the world, in exchange for access to more users and higher profits for themselves. Bittorrent does not have these faults, but it has problems of its own. It is only useful if one already knows the infohash of the content they seek, and there is no way to discover these hashes within the protocol. Even using an external search engine does not provide a comprehensive list of what is available on the network. There are no incentives for users to seed content, and Bittorrent largely works because users earn status through private communities, are nice, or simply fail to understand what their client is doing.