[Messari AMA] Jeremy Kauffman, Founder of LBRY Credits
Messari hosted a public AMA with LBRY Credits’ ($LBRY) founder Jeremy Kauffman in the Messari community group. This is a transcript of the conversation.
Messari: Jeremy, thanks so much for joining to field questions with me about LBRY Credits. I’m excited to chat with you, and we have a great queue of questions about a wide range of topics. This should be fun. The first community question is pretty simple. “What is LBRY and how does it work?” (which also is a perfect opportunity to link to the LBC asset profile).
Jeremy Kauffman: A great question to start with! Since this is a smart group, I'll start with the harder definition. LBRY is an open-source, blockchain-based protocol that facilitates the discovery, distribution, and purchase of digital content. But I tell my mom I make a community controlled YouTube.
An experience is worth many, many words though (way more than 1,000), and you can download LBRY from lbry.com. You'll find videos from top creators, Hollywood films, and weirder stuff like 3D gun files all via a censorship-resistant, user-controlled protocol.
For the more technical minded, we have full descriptions of how it all works at lbry.tech
Messari: Before we dive too deep into low-level questions about the protocol and the LBRY team, I'm curious to know about your background prior to starting LBRY Credits and what motivated you to build a team to develop and deploy this protocol.
Kauffman: My educational background was physics and computer science. Prior to LBRY I started a SaaS company in the sport and activity space (white-label registration and team club software). But my motivation predates both my education and work, I grew up on the internet. And I remember an internet that was way less corporate controlled, way more free, and a little more weird. I've been using peer-to-peer, decentralized tech before BitTorrent even existed.
And the genesis of LBRY was wanting to improve what we saw as three problems with BitTorrent:
- Discovery is centralized and poor
- Incentives to be a good network participant are weak to non-existent
- BitTorrent was never able to serve mainstream content creators
Messari: I see, that makes sense. And I think just answered this question from the community: “At a high level, what problem are you trying to solve with the platform that you’re building and how does the addition of a token facilitate that?”
Kauffman: I can expand a bit on: why token
Messari: Please do.
Kauffman: A blockchain is a database first and foremost. And in many ways it's the worse database tech ever created. But it's really good at one brand new thing: agreeing on what should be in the database without one party controlling it. This is powerful if we want to create free and censorship resistant money, but we can do other things with this capability. An extremely powerful one is to have a register of all of the content that exists in the world, that anyone can contribute to, but that is owned and controlled by no one. The LBRY blockchain has been tailor made from the ground up to facilitate this purpose. And public blockchains (the only worthwhile blockchains) are not viable without a token.
Messari: On the note of controlling content, one bravely not-anonymous community member asks about copyrighted content on LBRY apps that has been removed and the potential for uncensored apps from your team: “Currently, LBRY blocks copyrighted content in your apps. Game of Thrones has trended several times before being removed. Could there be an uncensored app?”
Kauffman: This is a tricky subject and the truth is no in the entire world understands how copyright and blockchain intersect. I've paid lawyers a lot of money for expensive memos on this subject (and can share one probono one if there is interest). But the bottom line is our laws aren't written to handle this case, so we're going to have to wait until courts tell us the answer.
However, LBRY has no ability to censor or remove content entries from the blockchain, nor can we force users to stop hosting data. We are a registered DMCA agent with the US federal gov, and we process takedowns. We publish the valid ones we receive here. When we receive a valid one, we maintain a separate, centralized database that lists these.
The browser that we release currently checks that database, but that's not a foundational part of the protocol. Anyone could release a browser with this check disabled, and we're working on being able to remove it ourselves as it's been unpopular with users (our legal team said this was the conservative option, but not necessarily required)
For further reading, see:
- lbry.com/what#combatting-the-ugly
Messari: Of course, LBRY Credits isn’t the only project working on decentralized and permissionless content creation. We have a couple questions about LBRY competing with incumbent platforms and other peer-to-peer platforms. We have a few questions related to LBRY competing with other content platforms.
First, “Does LBRY see itself as a Patreon replacement?” Second, “How does LBRY compare to similar content based projects (bitchute, flixxo, etc.)?” And a third very similar question, “What is LBRY Credits edge against other platforms that are working on decentralized and permissionless content publishing in the crypto space?"
Kauffman: LBRY couldn't replace Patreon without improving onboarding/offboarding from Crypto, and I don't see what we're doing as too directly competitive with that. AFAIK, BitChute is not a dapp, it's a website that publishes to BitTorrent. While I support that, it has all of the same problems as BitTorrent. Last I checked Flixxo wasn't a real dapp either, but that was probably over a year ago and maybe things have changed.
Typically when people bring up competitors I look at what I can actually run and it turns out it's just a website, not a true dapp. (We think websites are important and are releasing a web version, but the right chain is dapp then web, not web first. Websites aren't dapps, and they can't be.)
Someone from my team just pinged me and said Flixxo currently manually reviews uploaded content. If they can do that, it's not a permissionless protocol and it's not a dapp. I should also say that I view our real competitors as companies like YouTube, not the other blockchain companies.
We're on the same team with those guys. If someone succeeds in building a world in which we can truly and freely share information with one another, that's a big win, even if it's not us (though I think we're in the lead here)
Messari: On a note related to YouTube et al., an interesting question from the community about competing with incumbent social content platforms asks: “How do you hope to take advantage of the recent missteps of other social media platforms against various polarizing groups?”
Kauffman: That's a great question. YouTube has been our best friend in this regard. A lot of people would prefer experiences where they get to make the choice of what they watch and don't watch, rather than letting Zuckerberg or the like choose for them. Pretty much every time there's a big story like this, we get an influx of users.
If you know of any creators that are censored by YouTube or other platforms, we will compensate them and onboard them to LBRY. You can see more about our program for YouTubers at lbry.com/youtube.
Messari: That's a perfect segue into a couple questions we have from the community about LBRY incentives content creators. First: “You have big LBC incentives for YouTubers to sync their channels, based on subscribers. Do large up-front payments ensure they are properly engaged with LBRY?” And second: “How much do content creators generate on the platform?”
Kauffman: I think the upfront payments bring them in, but the relationship doesn't end there. We contact the ones that come in and look to build relationships with them, as well as do direct outreach. And a PPV program is coming in the near future.
The second question is a bit ambiguous, so I'll just talk a bit about how content outreach has gone. Right now there are over 10k YouTubers syncing content with over 100m subscribers across them. We've got a few dozen with over 500k subscribers. We're approaching 1,000,000 videos from all sources (not all YouTube obviously, many people publish directly). You can also find films from Oscilloscope Studios. That means that James Franco is on the blockchain. On an average day, we see over 1,000 new publishes right now, and that number is going up every day.
Messari: One community member asked about balancing free speech with preventing objectionable content, specifically harassment. How does LBRY Credits think about this issue? We touched on this briefly earlier, but I wanted to surface this question all the same.
Kauffman: This is a very good question. We believe strongly that people should have the right to publish and communicate to others what they want. And that granting any entity, whether a government, an individual, or a corporation the right to choose what others can and can't read/watch/consume is a mistake. But that doesn't equate to therefore people should be subjected to objectionable content, or really anything they don't want to see.
But the right answer to objectionable/hateful content isn't to prevent it from existing entirely (because you can't, and because to attempt to requires the addition of a censor). Our solution is to develop open, protocol-based ways of labeling content for what it is. And then people can have the choice of what they want to be exposed to. So if you want to consume objectionable content, you'll have to strongly opt-in to that preference. And if you find stuff you don't want to see, there should be easily/clear ways to say "never show me stuff like this again."
Messari: I want to jump back to this [Patreon] topic quickly because we have one question about fiat gateways onto LBRY. Any plans for something like this? “What are your plans for fiat gateways so that content creators can easily monetize their work?”
Kauffman: I should have mentioned this earlier, but we've started offering fiat offboarding to verified content creators. On boarding users to crypto from fiat is ridiculous fucking legal nightmare. You can see this in the choice of even companies like Brave to not do it themselves. We really want to do this, but the challenges are legal, not technical. So we're currently looking at ways to do this, including working with a 3rd-party provider, but the situation is really unfortunate.
Messari: We have a couple questions about the LBRY Credits launch. First: “How do you think that not doing an ICO has impacted your ability to grow a community of users and developers? If you could go back in time is there anything you would've changed?” Second, can you discuss decision-making process for the LBC pre-mine? “Can you expand on the decision to do a premine? Even back then it was a pretty controversial decision.
Kauffman: All questions about how we feel about not doing an ICO should be directed to the Kik legal team. :D I feel good about not doing an ICO as the SEC has said all ICOs are illegal. However, I could spend the rest of this chat talking about things I'd have done differently. There's no map for what we're doing and that means you're going to make wrong turns. Honestly (prepares for boos), I've never been to into the trading side of crypto. We started LBRY as a small group of hackers that just wanted to release a project. The reaction was way beyond what I would have anticipated. We were able to use some tokens to build up capital for the business and the company is still in strong financial shape from this. You can read more about how we have used our LBC and plan to use it here.
Regarding the pre-mine, I think it was more controversial back then then it is now. We might not have gotten all of the parameters perfect, but I think they were pretty reasonable. And we've been extremely judicious and respectful of how we've used the funds (see above link for more details on that). And if you want to receive some of that pre-mine, check out lbry.fund, lbry.tech/contribute, or lbry.org. Actually lbry.org isn't really up yet... but that's a new community page coming out very soon.
Messari: The last couple questions we have are about future development plans and roadmap-like questions. The first question is from the community: “There’s a lot of interest in using LBRY for fully functioning websites. Are there any plans to take LBRY past the basic HTML support it already has?”
Kauffman: YES!
Messari: The second question is also from the community regarding adoption milestones: “Hi. My question would be: What's the next milestone for mass adoption?”
Kauffman: beta.lbry.tv is a work in progress but coming out soon. Enter your email at lbry.tv for updates. There’s also spee.ch, which is also kind-of a web version, but more imgur/streamable-like in functionality than YouTube-like. Big upcoming milestones are:
- lbry.tv launch (including a bunch of creator deals that will be announced in parallel)
- entire re-work of discovery functionality in desktop, mobile, and web (coming to desktop first in the next release)
- commenting
- mobile out of beta
- lbry.org launch (this is a community project though)
We also have some partnership deals in the works with existing freedom oriented video sites, but too early to discuss names or specifics.
Messari: The last roadmap question is from me. I’m curious to know more specifically what Q3 and Q4 2019 look like for the LBRY team.
Kauffman: All of the above will happen this year plus hopefully onramps/offramps. The roadmap here is still pretty accurate. It's uh... rare... that an item comes in ahead of schedule, but nothing on that list is too far behind, and I still expect to do all of them.
Messari: We’ve touched on a lot of topics this afternoon. Before we open up messaging abilities to the rest of the group, is there anything not asked about that you and the LBRY team want to communicate? And what are the best ways to continue these conversations and keep up with the LBRY Credits team and protocol development?
Kauffman: Yes! One: unlike a lot of crypto stuff this is one you can touch and use today, right now so if you haven't used LBRY yet, start! And I have a special code for everyone here whether they've used it or not. Enter "messari-ama-yhzwtk" in the Rewards section of the app to earn a bonus for participating in this AMA.
In terms of keeping up, you can enter your email in the app itself or at lbry.com/list/subscribe. You can also follow us on Twitter, join us at Reddit, Facebook, or on Telegram. We also have a Discord chat which has more activity than Telegram.
Messari: Thanks for all of this! And thanks for answering questions, Jeremy. This has been a lot of fun and very informative.
Kauffman: Thanks Zack! It was a blast to participate and I think what Messari is doing is important and valuable to blockchain community.