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What is LBRY?

A revolution in accessing and publishing information.

Hosts earn credits for providing bandwidth and disk space.

Miners earn credits for securing balances and metadata.

Patrons spend credits to access content without gatekeepers.

Tell Me More

LBRY allows anyone to publish content to a location like this:

lbry://wonderfullife

Others can access this resource, either for free or for credits. Let's look at an example:

  1. Ernest wants to release his comedy-horror film, "Ernie Goes To Guantanamo Bay".
  2. The content is encrypted and sliced into many pieces. These pieces are stored by hosts.
  3. Ernest reserves lbry://erniebythebay, a shortname pointing to his content.
  4. When Ernest reserves the location, he also submits metadata, such as a description and thumbnail. This information is stored by miners in the LBRY blockchain.
  5. Hilary, a patron, browses the LBRY network and wants to watch the movie. Her LBRY client collects the pieces from the hosts and reassembles them.
  6. Hilary pays Ernest for the decryption key, allowing her to watch the film.

If BitTorrent + BitCoin Had a Baby

Decentralized Metadata

Information about content is embedded in a blockchain, eliminating centralized failure points. Metadata and data are completely decoupled so that hosts never see metadata and miners never see data.

Marketized Data-Transfer

Patrons request content for free or offer credits for faster speeds or access. Hosts share or sell surplus bandwidth and disk space.

Memorable URIs

Publishers can choose friendly resource indicators like lbry://wonderfullife instead of ugly BitTorrent magnet URIs. URIs are reserved rather than owned, creating strong incentive for rights holders to use LBRY.

Payments to Publishers

Publishers may embed an address to receive payment for data. Publishers can also create assurance contracts? for new content.

Improved Privacy

LBRY uses novel techniques to protect publishers, providers, and consumers. Hosts only have small portions of an encrypted file with no information of the contents.

Designed for Developers

LBRY is designed to allow others to create applications powered by it’s distributed, robust data store.