Highest Rated Comments


kauffj1445 karma

First, it's important to recognize allocating names is a really difficult problem.

If we hand them out ourselves, we lose the best benefit of LBRY: that the system is controlled by the users, not any one company or organization.

If we let people buy them outright cheaply, we run into terrible extortion and speculation problems. This happened both with the traditional domain and with recent alternatives like Namecoin (something like 50 out of 200,000 names in use).

So what to do? Our answer is to allow people to control, but not outright own, URLs. We think this will result in the names being most likely to return what people are actually looking for. It also backed by some sound economics (the Nobel Prize winning Coase theorem) and one of our advisors, Alex Tabarrok, an econ chair at GMU, thinks it is the best possible design.

Our goal is to create a system where the URL a user guesses is the most likely to return what they are actually looking for. Economics says this design is the most likely to do so, because the URL is most valuable when it returns what users want.

Also worth clarifying: if you just want a URL you always own, you can do this by publishing an exact stream hash (similar to a BitTorrent magnet link). ONLY the user-friendly, English URLs are awarded via this system. Additionally, URLs take significant time to change. The original owner, and the community at large, have weeks to respond to a contested claim.

Additionally, credits are never destroyed when used for a name. They're really a lot like votes.

Bottom line: we hear your responses and WILL NOT create a system that only rewards the trolls or rich. We'll definitely be thinking hard about this.

kauffj366 karma

We see the internet as being controlled more and more by corporations and governments instead of the way it was originally intended to work: a way for anyone to share information with anyone else.

LBRY helps move the internet from corporate and government control and back into the hands of everyday users and people.

kauffj102 karma

Well, one of the really cool (and to be fair, also scary) aspects of LBRY is that it is an open source, community-controlled protocol once it's released. So we simply do not have the power that these other companies have to make unilateral changes.

kauffj92 karma

It's from a combination of tech and media based seed firms. The names will start coming out next week (they have their own PR plans, but blessed this post).

It's all equity in the company itself. The company has no plans to sell any LBC for as long as possible (at least a year).

kauffj74 karma

vid.me is just another YouTube clone. They suffer the same problems - they will have to censor their content when they go to places like Iran or China and they can change the rules at any time.

LBRY is an open source technology that can be used by anyone. It's a protocol. No video service existing works like this currently.