---
author: lbry
title: 'Digging Into LBRY: Our Inspiration & The Future of Content'
date: '2015-11-05 21:08:22'
---

In the past week, LBRY was featured in two major Bitcoin publications – CoinTelegraph <a href="http://cointelegraph.com/news/115518/lbry-the-lovechild-of-bitcoin-bittorrent-storj" target="_blank">LBRY: The Lovechild of Bitcoin, BitTorrent & Storj</a> and Bitcoin.com <a href="https://news.bitcoin.com/lbry-decentralized-sharing-platform/" target="_blank">LBRY: The Decentralized Sharing Platform</a>. Both articles are lengthy interviews with our team. We've excerpted some of our favorite questions below.

<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/cVOaKZK.jpg" alt="Digital content at your fingertips"></p>
<p style="text-align: center;">

<p style="text-align: center;">**<a href="http://cointelegraph.com/news/115518/lbry-the-lovechild-of-bitcoin-bittorrent-storj" target="_blank">CoinTelegraph</a>: What was the inspiration for LBRY?**

**Jeremy Kauffman:** LBRY was inspired by a number of things. It was clearly inspired by Bitcoin – seeing the power of the blockchain in reaching consensus without a central authority. It was also inspired by BitTorrent, which is an absolutely brilliant protocol with an unfortunately flawed incentive structure.

It was inspired by the fact that governments, ISPs, and media companies seem to want to treat their customers as something between supplicants and criminals. It was inspired by AirBnB and Uber in that LBRY empowers small-scale entrepreneurs and increases the efficiency of unused resources.

It was inspired by the love of markets and an appreciation for how they facilitate human flourishing. It is inspired by economics, the Coase theorem, and too much time listening to EconTalk. It is inspired by the awful behavior that the biggest torrent clients demonstrate towards their users.

It is inspired by the fact that there has got to be a better way to find, buy, and sell something as simple as a number.

<p style="text-align: center;">**<a href="http://cointelegraph.com/news/115518/lbry-the-lovechild-of-bitcoin-bittorrent-storj" target="_blank">CoinTelegraph</a>: What has been the biggest challenge in development? What about the greatest reward?**

**Kauffman:** One unique difficulty in developing a blockchain-based protocol/application is the difficulty in revising it. Great products are typically created through iteration. But by design, it’s nearly impossible to revise a cryptocurrency once it’s in the wild. To mitigate this, we’re trying to roll out LBRY slowly, as well as have several of its aspects be conventions rather than core properties.

The greatest reward by far is the feeling that you are on to something absolutely huge. The potential to significantly improve the efficiency of sharing information and knowledge and make a buck doing it? Who wouldn’t want to wake up to that?

<p style="text-align: center;">**<a href="https://news.bitcoin.com/lbry-decentralized-sharing-platform/" target="_blank">Bitcoin.com</a>: What are some of the current flaws within the system today that LBRY helps solve?**

**Mike Vine:** There isn’t really a system. There are many systems, and some are better than others. Services like NetFlix and Hulu helped to break cable’s monopoly on TV content. YouTube allowed anyone to upload original content for a mass audience. But these are still centralized services. They are corporations that offer particular services according to their Terms of Use – or effectively, at their pleasure.

The risks of this came to the fore just last week with <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/21/an-offer-creators-cant-refuse/" target="_blank">YouTube strong-arming publishers into its new “Red” premium service</a>. Another example from a different industry is a few years back when Facebook starting throttling Page owners’ access to their own followers – many of which they had paid to accumulate. The lesson is that if you’re using a system that has a higher authority, you’re always vulnerable.

LBRY is an open-source protocol, like the ones that form the backbone of the internet. LBRY Inc. supports the development of the protocol, but it doesn’t control it. With the advent of the blockchain era, I think the internet will fulfill its promise of radically decentralizing the flow of information. We hope LBRY will be a big part of that.

<p style="text-align: center;">**<a href="http://cointelegraph.com/news/115518/lbry-the-lovechild-of-bitcoin-bittorrent-storj" target="_blank">CoinTelegraph</a>: The IPFS is probably the most similar concept to LBRY right now. Why do you think that incorporating a native blockchain with user payments is superior to IPFS's approach?**

**Jimmy Kiselak:** LBRY is about distributing data fast, and to do that it needs to be able to handle the fact that not all data is alike. IPFS relies on the same sort of planned sharing incentives as BitTorrent.

We believe that if we don’t lay down rules for where data should be and who should be uploading it, but instead create a decentralized market where users directly pay hosts for the data they’re downloading, entrepreneurs will do a far better job of figuring out how to deliver data than any planned system like BitTorrent or IPFS could.

<p style="text-align: center;">**<a href="https://news.bitcoin.com/lbry-decentralized-sharing-platform/" target="_blank">Bitcoin.com</a>: How does this service resemble BitTorrent?**

**Kauffman:** It resembles BitTorrent in the ways that the data is actually transferred. LBRY is driven by a distributed hash table quite similar to the one that BitTorrent uses. It was also inspired by BitTorrent in that BitTorrent is generally a community of people interested in sharing access to information and knowledge. LBRY shares the same goals and extends existing torrents as a way of bootstrapping it’s network.

**Vine:** LBRY can actually accept torrent links as key values on the blockchain. So out of the gate, it will function as the world’s easiest torrent client. Instead of sending someone a complicated hyperlink, an independent artist can just say “Go to LBRY and type in hipster shorts to find my films.” But we expect LBRY’s built-in content hosting model to supplement or replace BitTorrent over time because of better incentives for everyone involved.

<p style="text-align: center;">**<a href="http://cointelegraph.com/news/115518/lbry-the-lovechild-of-bitcoin-bittorrent-storj" target="_blank">CoinTelegraph</a>: Which use-case in particular do you believe would be LBRY's "killer app"? Listeners looking for new music? Indie cultists looking for obscure French films? Something else?**

**Kauffman:** We’re hesitant to speculate. LBRY is designed to gracefully extend BitTorrent, so at a minimum we expect LBRY to be a better BitTorrent client.

However, we think LBRY will be far more than this and be used in ways we cannot imagine today. All we can say with confidence is LBRY is a fundamentally better way to distribute and access all consumer-oriented information, full stop.

**Vine:** LBRY is definitely designed with the independent artist in mind. Unlike BitTorrent, LBRY’s protocol actually incentivizes hosts to make available “obscure French indie films,” as you say. With BitTorrent, the greater number of people seeding and leeching a file, the faster it goes for everyone. That’s bad for obscure works.

LBRY’s hosts are motivated by what price people are paying for a given piece of a file, so as long as those indie cultists are willing to pony up a few more credits to get Un Chien Parlez-vous, it should remain readily available. Also, artists don’t have much of an incentive to make their works available on BitTorrent because there is no built-in payment system.

With LBRY, artists have a turnkey publishing, distribution, and payment platform – all encapsulated in a neat little LBRY name like lbry://hipstershorts. Over time, LBRY’s killer app will be its lower cost and greater reach than centralized media.

<p style="text-align: center;">**<a href="http://cointelegraph.com/news/115518/lbry-the-lovechild-of-bitcoin-bittorrent-storj" target="_blank">CoinTelegraph</a>: Do you envision content distributors, hosts, or miners being able to make a living by their LBRY work?**

**Kauffman:** The “big five” of media (film, video games, TV, music, and books) see over US$2 trillion per year. We think LBRY can play a role in the distribution of all of this. This answer is a verbose “Yes!”

**Vine:** Not only a living, but that mythical unicorn of the working world: a passive income. Instead of Uber, this is more like a ridesharing app where people can fill empty seats in your car for whichever direction you might be headed. But unlike with human travelers, data is not too picky about where it sits or what route it takes to where it’s going.

So devoting hard drive space or bandwidth to LBRY is like suddenly filling your car on daily commutes with paying customers who keep to themselves and get out where you tell them. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

<p style="text-align: center;">**<a href="http://cointelegraph.com/news/115518/lbry-the-lovechild-of-bitcoin-bittorrent-storj" target="_blank">Read the full CoinTelegraph interview here.</a>
<a href="https://news.bitcoin.com/lbry-decentralized-sharing-platform/" target="_blank">Read the full Bitcoin.com interview here.</a>**
