LBRY uses a blockchain to store metadata related to digital content and provide pointers to a more traditional decentralized P2P network like BitTorrent. The blockchain also provides publisher identities, human-friendly URLs (e.g. lbry://@MinutePhysics/magnetic-levitation), and a payment mechanism.
My questions would be:
- Why blockchain and not something else? I had similar idea in mind a while ago, wanted to "revolutionises" piracy My intention was to use BigchainDB for metadata, anonymise version of IPFS for actual storage, make each movie an ERC721 and attach ERC20 to all as rewards method for people who keep files up. There would be only donations, not really a price for watch / download. I still think that it's overcomplicated and that there's no need for it. Especially those days when you can watch on netflix/itunes/amazon/hulu/youtube... for some small amount. None wanna bother with torrents when he can pay $10 and watch whatever he wanna watch.
- Why published identity? I guess that idea is that all content is actually legal and there are no pirate movies / tv shows? Even so, how will you control what someone share? You can get into a lot of trouble for doing this?
- Payment mechanism for legal and original content is great, but again, how will you control who and what is uploaded? First of all legal movie distributers will not use it because content will end up in P2P, they don't wanna do that and wanna distribute through platforms from where they can get a constant revenue stream. If someone upload illegal content (the one that they don't really own) how will you check that?
- There's also a problem with content like child pornography. How are you going to prevent upload of those? You can't really watch everything that's uploaded?
Conclusion: I see only big problems and not real value here. This can be also easily accomplished with simple database? Token mechanics, as reward system is also questionable. Who will give liquidity for those tokens?