Definitely agree with the exit scam assessment. By the way, this came up when searching for "ICO scam", I had a good laugh at how much LBRY's website resembles this, right down to the ridiculous autistic son developer story on their blog.
I really don't see why they should need a new protocol for distributed media. Torrent already works fine, and there is plenty of cool new software that makes the user experience friendlier, like streaming torrent video etc. The problem with the torrent protocol is the discovery process being too centralised, and as a result being liable to denial of service. As for the coin thing, that is just ridiculous. Especially the whole saving 10% for themselves... a viable crypto currency should not give any individuals power by design. It makes it reek of an exit scam.
And the idea of monetisation through encryption is not really anything new, they've basically just said they've implemented a DRM scheme. Even if they weren't such obvious fraudsters, I think the project encompasses far too many different areas all rolled up into one. My views are
We already have torrent for distributed file hosting
We already have DRM
We already have serious cryptocurrencies for payment
All that has yet to become mainstream is a good distributed protocol for file discovery
They're integrating so many different protocols into their "one true protocol" that if it's not a scam, it's tremendously overengineered.
This is such an old scheme by now you'd think it'd be common knowledge.
I broke the DAO split before the split even happened, talking about how the asset was effectively a non-liquid trash bond (it took 48 days to exit legally, and the DAO didn't even last 48 days)
These nouveau-riche tech teens get lucky on one alt trade and they think they're invincible. Predatory projects like LBRY deserve all the bad press they can get.
Hi, I am the CEO of LBRY and the guy in the video (Jeremy Kauffman).
We would be agreed that investing in cryptocurrencies is foolish. However, the statements you criticized me for are indisputably correct:
A blockchain is literally a database. I don't know what definition of database that a blockchain would not meet.
There is centralized bootstrapping of Bitcoin. While Bitcoin takes several steps before falling back to hardcoded IPs, there are in fact hardcoded IPs used to bootstrap. Here is the exact place in the source code. This is also true for BitTorrent's DHT.
Criticizing me for saying "Bitcoin isn't money" is fair. I was more saying Bitcoin isn't just/only money, or it doesn't have to be.
I may have overreacted, I've had do deal with entirely too much of this type of elevator pitch this news cycle. The vast majority have been ICOs with the intention of an exit scam.
Yes -- a blockchain is a kind of database. It is not, however efficient or scalable to applications that traditional databases can already solve more or less adequately. Claiming that they are is irresponsible at best and dishonest on average.
Blockchain -- in it's current state, is a marketing term, nothing more. A buzzword used to sell solutions to problems that, for the most part, don't exist, by fraudsters, or a catch all panacea for the modern MLM and Ponzi conductor. If you are, in actual fact, trying to innovate, you may want to distance yourself from that. Not issuing a token would go a long way as well.
I'd love to see your product succeed and be beneficial to its users in a way that doesn't end in a speculative dump, but all historical evidence points to that being a vanishingly remote pssibility. I'm going to continue to make that evidence available to people so that they can decide for themselves.
Would you mind giving your opinion on the two points I brought up? These were mainly:
Is there a way for someone (uploader, etc.) to delete a file from the network? I am wondering how that is supposed to be possible in a distributed system that shouldn't rely on a central service.
If this is supposed to replace YouTube, how are you going to deal with varying bandwidths of the clients? Streaming is only really possible, if the video is available in various resolutions. Is your intention that the uploader has to provide various resolutions, that are then somehow linked together?
We are agreed to an incredible extent. Blockchain is a buzzword and there is a lot of bullshit. Honestly, I take advantage of this, because it's useful.
But, blockchains are actually useful if you leverage the unique property they have that other databases don't: distributed consensus (distributed byzantine fault tolerance).
This works very well as a catalog for digital content.
Payments at scale have to be handled at the second-level, or currently unproven technologies need to be proven to work.
You can remove the pointer at the blockchain level that points to your content. This does not guarantee that the hosts delete the content itself, but it ought to (our clients do) and there is little reason to not do so. It also removes the ability for others to discover it.
This is something we have only discussed. LBRY only provides the ability to point to a determined stream of bits (i.e. no on-the-fly encoding). It would be possible to point to multiple copies at different qualities. However, at launch, LBRY will only support pointing to one copy for piece of content.
I've seen very little evidence of any real world benefit over high availability or replay systems in the traditional space. You have to expend far more energy to achieve the same effect. Even then, I don't see what value your system adds over something like zeronet, which doesn't require a huge, scammy red flag (a token tied into the protocol) to use.
I'm not the only one in the space that thinks this way -- I'm sure the majority of the resistance you'll come up against will be on the front of the token. I'd focus on addressing that if you want people to approach your project with anything other than (warranted) skepticism.
Also, am I the only one that is annoyed with Brian Lunduke? His voice is annoying and he's not that insightful. His linux talks are what he's known for but they're all captain obvious and unoriginal.
There's a reason LBRY is steering clear of critical interviewers even tangentially involved with cryptocurrency. Great PR strategy. Sucker in people who've never seen this type of scam before.