I do not really know the lbry system, but according to what I have read from the

https://lbry.io/faq (archival copy: https://archive.is/iOLJS )

users, who do not want to monetize their content, are banned from publishing their videos, unless they pay for or earn LBRY specific cryptocoins to pay for the deposit of the "LBRY_domain/claim". A solution to that issue might be that there might be some set of "system domain prefixes" and one of those prefixes is reserved for the free domains. The "claim"/LBRY_domain_URL would look like:

lbry:/nonmonetizable_and_squattable_<sha256(acquisition date)>_<user chosen suffix>

Only an idiot would want to squat that kind of a domain, but those domains can be copy-pasted to letters/chat_rooms and used at bookmarks. It's interesting that You claim that LBRY must work for the "common man", yet You force the "Jim and Jill" to start figuring out, where to get the cryptocoins to get a domain to publish their cat and dog videos.

Honestly, the alternative to the adoption of the freely available domains is that the LBRY will be just another NETFLIX, with new technology learning curve related hindrance and all of the fun and freely accessible videos are on

https://zeronet.io/

and other P2P networks, like the

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi-kreA52oI

and the

https://ipfs.io/

I am NOT impressed. Thank You for reading this text.

You do realise, you don't have to spend a dime from your pocket to upload content, right? We have the rewards system for a reason. Users verify their account (totally free and easy) and earn FREE LBC to publish their content.

It couldn't be easier.

Hi @martinvahi

Users, who do not want to monetize their content are NOT banned. You can set any price to charge for your content or set it as free as seen in the screenshot below.

However, if you mean "people are forced to use LBRY Credits to upload content" to a lbry:// URL, then yes, you are correct. This is how the system works to secure a claim on the blockchain where your content is registered. However, this amount is microscopic. With just 1 cent you could upload a large amounts of content.

This is further offset with the FREE LBRY Credits you given via Rewards. for using the platform.

See more information about rewards here.

As for Community URL's, think of this like advertising space you bid for. Their price is determined by the market. See below for more details.

The Naming System/URLS's

There are various types of URL's you can have with LBRY.

- Community: These act like advertising space (that's my spin on it).
- Permanent: These remain yours indefinitely - read more.
- Channel: This is like a username for your content.
- Signed: Content published to a channel.

See here for more details about how naming works.

It's a new system that might not make sense to new people, but we are working to make it easier to understand.

Find out More and Speak to us on Discord

Why not come and talk to use on the Official Discord Server. This is where all the magic happens.

We welcome all questions, all criticism and any feedback you have.

Thank You both for the answers, specially @Invariant-Change, who's thorough and detailed answer I specially like. Unfortunately I like the @Invariant-Change answer mainly because of the nice amount of details and effort made to give ma a really thorough answer (I love, if people are thorough and "not so much", if they are superficial), not because it would be able to convince me that I was wrong or on a wrong track. Namely, by using a citation from @kcseb answer:

Users verify their account (totally free and easy) and earn FREE LBC to publish their content.

says it directly that new users are not able to easily get LBC WITHOUT GIVING UP PRIVACY. After all, authentication is what the verification/registration is all about. At the documentation there were statements that YouTube/Google is nasty because it tracks people, but at the documentation it also said that the LBRY.io tracks people with the purpose of avoiding the abuse of the Rewards program. If I remember it correctly, the policy was that only one account from each house-hold is allowed to get the rewards. The Googe and Facebook pretty much can infer, who lives with whom, but even they do not have it as a policy enforcement goal to find out, who lives with whom.

To be direct, is it really Your goal to eliminate the creation of temporary, anonymous, accounts that are operated through Tor relays? Obviously people with technical skills will find a way to do it even right now, but there is a reason, why the teams at

https://theintercept.com/ https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en? https://wikileaks.org/

try to make it easy for people to use their channels anonymously as easily as possible. Honestly, I believe that the LBRY.io team should develop a "version 2.0" of the protocol, before their money runs out. If You do not, then Your competitors at

https://zeronet.io/ https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://ipfs.io/

will make sure that the LBRY.io is just a P2P NETFLIX, not the distrubuted-web-locked-open what the founder of the Internet Archive called for at his presentation at

https://archive.org/details/bresterkahlenetgain

As far as I know, currently the ZeroNet does not yet scale, despite the P2P and BitTorrent, but that's actually fixable, not something fundamental, specification level flaw, it just takes some extra coding, but here's a ZeroNet version of a YouTube competitor, KopyKate:

http://127.0.0.1:43110/18Pfr2oswXvD352BbJvo59gZ3GbdbipSzh/ The same page through a WWW gateway: https://www.zerogate.tk/18Pfr2oswXvD352BbJvo59gZ3GbdbipSzh

All fully anonymous, NO HASSLE FOR NEW USERS. The KopyKate is just ONE WEB PAGE OUT OF MANY on ZeroNet and the LBRY.io wants to compete with just one of the ZeroNet pages. Another awesome application on ZeroNet is a GitHub clone that hosts Git repositories:

http://127.0.0.1:43110/gitcenter.bit This page is NOT available through the https://www.zerogate.tk/gitcenter.bit because the gateway was "abused"(quotes, because it is not possible to "abuse" a system that has been designed for unrestricted use) by pedophiles and the administrator of the WWW gateway decided that the simplest way to stop the Police from finding his gateway to be interesting is to stop downloading new ZeroNet pages to the gateway.

ZeroNet web pages are basically composite documents like the Microsoft Word and LibreOffice documents are, except that the document is a folder with plain HTML/JavaScript/CSS and some manifest files. In general, the viewing of ZeroNet pages is like with the Microsoft Word and LibreOffice documents: one has to download the document to "open" and view it. So, in ZeroNet, the composite documents are downloaded in a P2P fashion. The manifest files can declare some of the files at that the folder that forms a ZeroNet page/document to be optional, so that a user has to explicitly allow the download of those files. That makes it possible to host "huge"(whatever that means, 200GiB is is huge 4 me) files on ZeroNet.

ZeroNet pages/documents, are versioned and a new version can be published only by the party that has singed the previous version. The signing and key management is done automatically, by the server, which is written in Python. To move the identity data, including identity crypto keys, from one computer to another, the user has to copy a few files. Forums, like the one at the

http://127.0.0.1:43110/Talk.ZeroNetwork.bit/ https://www.zerogate.tk/Talk.ZeroNetwork.bit/

are essentially collectively editable documents, almost as if a MicrosoftWord/LibreOffice document were shared at some network drive and then different people make edits to it. The owner of the document, who signs the initial version of the document, determines the various access rights at settings/manifest file. As with the MircosoftWord/LibreOffice documents, there is no need for an internet connection to edit them. The ZeroNet documents that are forums, are a collection of merged edits/posts and the individual posts are published when the ZeroNet server gets access to the Internet to publish the posts/additions. That is to say, people may just make the edits/posts with their laptop while being without any internet connection, just riding a train or a bus/plane, and once the internet connection becomes available, the edits get uploaded automatically.

And, as I said, the whole LBRY.io

COMPETES WITH ONLY A SINGLE ZeroNet PAGE

while adding a considerable amount of hindrances to the new users.

If that's not good enough of a reason for the LBRY.io development team to start working on version 2.0 of the LBRY protocol, then I do not know, what is. On the other hand, I admit that I have difficulties understanding, why some technically crappy projects are financially some of the most successful ones. Think of Microsoft Windows, which was not unique or ahead of its time, because the Niklaus Wirth had its very similar, end user oriented system, available literally at the same time, when Windows had its popularity at rise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)

The way I currently understand the financial success of the Microsoft, the Bill Gates was innovative at sales channel development and beat its competition by selling in bulk to huge corporations, where a few people at the top of the corporation decide, what the thousands of employees will use. Not only was it a very effective way to sell a lot of licenses, but it also decoupled the buying decision maker from the people, who actually use the product, so that when the product is crappy, the person, who has bad opinions about the product, does not make the buying decision.

Can Your marketing team really beat ZeroNet, specially given that the ZeroNet has been literally developed by the founders of ThePirateBay?

(The main author of the ZeroNet, Peter Sunde, talking about the history of ThePirateBay and his jail time.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MjCM1e87kA

Still not considering a version 2.0 of the LBRY protocol ? :->

It's just that I want You people to succeed, but I'm not able to see, how You have any chance of succeeding the way You are currently trying to do things. But, I'm truy crappy at understanding social processes. Usually I'm mistaken by considering other people to be more rational than they actually are and may be You can just pull off some marketing and psychology tricks, like the Apple has been very successful at doing. Besides, who am I to give any business advice, given that I'm self totally shoddy at business. I tend to see only the technical aspects of projects.

Thank You for Your answers and thank You for reading this text.

I agree somewhat. Although my reason will be short as it's late night this side of the planet.

I believe that if the app came with something like 0.005 free LBC's (fuzzy logic in a fluctuating crypto market) using a unique anonymous token, to secure, it would allow a new user to use the application as soon as they download it and totally anonymously.

It would be hard to see a way for that microscopic amount of LBC to be abused especially if a few fail-safes were within the app to prevent abuse.

However, there could be some technical challenges they are still trying to overcome.

@tzarebczan Is this something that has been discussed? Getting LBRY to work straight out of the box, no sign-up/verification or crypto transfer required? I do see that as a selling point, making the concept less friction and more anonymous.

And before I drop off into the land of nod @martinvahi I see you are a StackExchange user.

You could put some of your questions here: LBRY Protocol - Proposal

@Invariant-Change Thank You for yet another excellent answer. Please do not get me wrong in a sense that I use some irony here, I really like the way You try to address the problem and the fix that You proposed also makes sense to me, but the market does not care, what we 2 think here and by paraphrasing Your statement

However, there could be some technical challenges they are still trying to overcome.

I say/write that

the Titanic also had some technical challenges to overcome.

Not a good excuse, if You ask any of the passengers. :-D

But Your fix is nice, it's just that You probably will have a tough job selling Your fix to the team. But, as I described at my relatively long comment at https://gist.github.com/lyoshenka/0a43205aa9a072b196ff87e2c689a8b9 I would not fit into the LBRY team, so anything I propose is probably not going to be taken well. People are different, have different preferences, different culture based requirements and may be I'm just not the target audience for an application like the LBRY is.

But, I emphasize that I'm glad for the answers I have received here and I thank You all for reading my comments :-)

The Titanic also had some technical challenges to overcome.

Or did it? Link 1 - Link 2 *Puts tinfoil hat away.

Again, somewhat/mostly agree. LBRY is in BETA, so all passenger come fitted with life jackets and it's feedback like yours that helps LBRY become a better ship ready for launch :)

So many thanks for the time and effort you have also put in to give this feedback. It is very important!

My cabin awaits me. But I will be ready to answer any further questions you may have when on deck in the morning (UTC+10).

@martinvahi thanks for your comments, suggestions and concerns. I think a bunch of it was already addressed by @Invariant-Change , but I'll leave a few more points:

1) Sure it may be difficult to acquire LBC at the moment, but we hope regulations/laws around cryptocurrencies will make this easier in the future.

2) If you use the manual verification method, we generally understand users' need for privacy and approve them even without real names/social media accounts.

3) One free alternative to publish videos/images on LBRY currently is https://spee.ch - we foot the bill for publishing.

Regarding the alternatives you speak of, I don't really have any comments. IPFS looks like a promising tech, but there's no monetization strategy at the moment - you are at the mercy of the hosts, which may mean data storage is temporary. LBRY's future goals will be to create a data market around sharing content, which will incentivize hosts to store data.

@Invariant-Change Thanks for yet another nice answer, but the reason why I logged in right now is not to say thanks to You, but to tell/write here that during my own hobby project, the

(Redirects to my softf1.com) http://www.silktorrent.ch

I have given a lot of thought about different storage and network traffic allocation policies and the best that I was able to come up with is the idea that the hard disk space that is reserved for a P2P storage application, is divided to fixed size regions that each are used by a different agent, each agent having a different storage allocation POLICY. The agents DO NOT COMPETE for HDD space and in a naive, extra simple, case the algorithm is such that the same artifact/file can be stored by multiple agents, resulting duplication, because the agents work totally independent of each other.

The different storage policies, one policy per agent, (each agent having its personal fixed chunk of the HDD space) might be:

Store everything for free, use the queue/FIFO algorithm or some fancy modification of the FIFO, where the index of the element in the array is calculated dynamically by using some weighting. May be storage time, may be usage frequency, may be size, etc.
Store data from authenticated users only, but do it for free. (read: serve friends and family)
Store data from authenticated users according to some payment policy. The data may also be in some crypted chunks, like is the case with the MaidSafe and StorJ and bluzelle, etc.
Store data for free for authenticated VIP users like local fire department, community doctors (read: encrypted chunks of medical records), ambulance services, local private security services, etc.
Actively download and store quickly obsoleting material for a relatively short time period. That helps to cope with the demand peaks of news sites and messaging applications, forums, that require some very-long-term hosting for seeding, but that have high demand for the newest records.
Store according to price POLICY_1.
Store according to price POLICY_2.
Store according to price POLICY_3.
etc.

Implementation Quirks

Policy wise multiple agents can each store the same file. The implementation can be more complex to eliminate this duplication. A way to do it is to place an additional agent (hereafter: HDD_accountant) between the policy agents and their respective HDD chunks. Each of the policy agents tells the HDD_accountant to store or delete files from its HDD account/chunk. If the HDD_accountant detects that at least 2 policy agents store the same file, the file might be stored on the HDD only once. The policy agents do not have a guaranteed minimum storage size any more, but in average the set of policy agents together can store more DIFFERENT KINDS of files than they were able to store with the fixed/guaranteed size HDD chunks.

Implementation Component Candidates

I haven't tried this, may be it's all nonsense that I say in this chapter, but I would consider using RethinkDB for interprocess communication(IPC), the messaging between different agents, if they are different operating system processes, written in different programming languages. They advertise the RethinkDB for web applications, but that does not rule out that it would not be usable, with all of its bells and whistles, for localhost messaging. Another option for the IPC/messaging might be the WhiteDB, which is basically limited to GPLv3, but with a strange exception.

I suspect that probably the most portable and still sufficiently fast solution for a client side group of agents is the use of the SQLite database, which is a C library that stores the data to a file. The SQLite3 library is often times available from stdlib of scripting languages and supposedly (I haven't tested it like that) the SQLite as a C library handles the collisions of multiple operating system processes that try to access the file simultaneously. The SQLite is being used as a sub-component of the https://fossil-scm.org/ and the Fossil is able to store multiple GiB of data without problems, provided that the data consists of small chunks, with maximum file size of about 100MiB, depending on the amount of RAM that the computer running the Fossil has for it.

Thank You for reading my comment :-)

@tzarebczan Thank You for the answer.

IPFS looks like a promising tech, but there's no monetization strategy at the moment - you are at the mercy of the hosts, which may mean data storage is temporary.

Aren't we all at the mercy of the hosts, who host our current WWW pages?

The monetization policy of paying a yearly fee, in €/$, to the web hosting companies seem to keep the web pages up pretty well. If P2P systems reduce the network traffic that the current, centralized, supermafia censored, hosting companies have to deliver, their costs at the network connection side go down. As of 2018_06 I believe that the most critical hosting service that a P2P network needs and where money is needed for keeping the servers running is

SEEDING

That can be done with the old business model of paying to the hosting companies, as is the case with Tor network hosting companies. Some examples that I was able to see with the TorBrowser:

(TorBrowser download site) https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en?

(Tor network pages of Tor network hosting companies, semi-randomly picked from some Tor forum.) http://kowloon5aibdbege.onion/ http://ezuwnhj5j6mtk4xr.onion/

To give You a quick idea, I created a screenshot https://temporary.softf1.com/2018/bugs/2018_06_11_screenshot_of_hostie65cxwr4tza_dot_onion.png of this one: http://hostie65cxwr4tza.onion/ (The Tor "Hidden services" are really not hidden at all, because if they were, then the Tor network itself would not be able to find the servers in real-time for real-time communication. Only the clients of the servers can have anonymity.)

As a matter of fact, encrypted chunks that are salted, can be seeded/hosted even by using the current censored web hosting companies, the ones that host the WWW, because if the supermafia("government") can "ban" some of the use cases of the classical "cloud" (I hate that term), then they might as well "ban" certain type of traffic at ISP networks and most of the current P2P traffic goes through centralized ISP networks, which are vulnerable to the point that people can't buy food from grocery stores, as happened in Estonia, Tallinn, my home town:

(The Hollywood style graphics of the movie is an exaggeration, just try to bare the graphics, but the talk, the statements, are not an exaggeration.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWKgcxHyS10 (Part 2 of the clip.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-odEtppUsk

---my--side--comment--start---
Very subjectively speaking, I do not think that well
of the NATO Cyber Defense Center in Tallinn, because
they seem to put their focus on supermafia rules ("law" in 1984 new-speak/news-peak)
in stead of the technical aspects. The list at the 
https://ccdcoe.org/publication-library.html
seem to have more to do with 
social processes than the technical aspects of the matter.
Hence my relatively poor opinion of them. May be
I would think better of them, if they swapped their name to
"NATO Center for Social Organization Research"
---my--side--comment--end----

That is to say, as long as P2P systems use centralized ISPs, the supermafia("government") can easily take down any P2P system and if they can take down any P2P system anyway, then it does not matter, whether those P2P systems depend on centralized web hosting companies for seeding encrypted and salted chunks. To spell it out: unless You are designing for citizen built

PHYSICAL P2P NETWORKS

then there already exists an excellent set of hosting service providers, who have proven themselves to be quite reliably available. For comparison, I tried to design my

(Redirects to my softf1.com) http://silktorrent.ch

for a situation, where the ISPs are DOWN and bits of information are delivered on USB/sticks, memory cards, mail pigeon drones, vehicles, live pigeons at an environment where classical omnidirectional antenna based radio receivers fall victim to jammers.

If you want an overview of different competing projects, then You may find a list of different P2P-like solutions at my Silktorrent Fossil repository, at

https://www.softf1.com/cgi-bin/tree1/technology/flaws/silktorrent.bash/wiki?name=List+of+Similar+Projects

I also have a collection of slightly "more interesting" scientific papers at

https://www.softf1.com/cgi-bin/tree1/technology/flaws/silktorrent.bash/wiki?name=Attic+001+for+Holding+Various+Files

If You wish, then You may clone the whole repository (about 30GiB) by using the commands at

https://www.softf1.com/cgi-bin/tree1/technology/flaws/silktorrent.bash/wiki?name=User+Guide

Thank You for reading my comment(s)/texts and thank You for the answer(s) :-)

Thanks again for your suggestions and thoughts. The data layer of LBRY can be extended to many of these other protocols, even IPFS down the road. Right now we are focusing on the LBRY P2P network and HTTPs, but will look support BitTorrent and others down the road.

@tzarebczan Thank You for the answer.

lbryio / lbry-sdk

New Users can't Publish Anything Without Paying #1240

The Naming System/URLS's

Find out More and Speak to us on Discord

Implementation Quirks

Implementation Component Candidates