Comment by abakker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abakker | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

#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.

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.

Ok - that makes some sense. In that context, can you answer the question about why, as a developer I would use your platform/tech instead of creating my own, then? If I read it correctly in your response and your about page, this allows developers to use your blockchain to create applications that need a backend like you describe.

So, you are asking whether this is an idea worth spending millions of dollars on. So far, my sense is no, because I have not yet seen any indication that you've got a way to be paid to do this? if you plan to charge developers to use the platform, that would make sense. If you plan on taking transaction fees from the network and that requires working with an exchange to sell tokens for dollars, then that doesn't. So far, I think there is little evidence that anyone wants to transact any business in a cryptocurrency, at least at the consumer level. If it becomes clearer how you will spend millions of dollars to make millions of dollars, that might make everything sound better.

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