LBRY: A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Digital Content Marketplace

Despite the critical need of publishing and consuming content online, a centralized content platform such as Amazon or YouTube may not always have their policy and practice aligned with the interest of their users and could be rent-seeking, censorious, and frequently exploitative, whereas a peer-to-peer solution such as BitTorrent may suffer from issues of content discovery, legitimacy, monetization, verifiable publisher identity, and poor user experience. In this paper, to improve significantly over both options, we propose a new approach called LBRY that enables a decentralized online content marketplace. In particular, it uses a blockchain to build a decentralized content platform controlled by the community, and allows its users to publish, host, find, access, download, and pay for content with ease. LBRY introduces a new naming scheme that gives users the full control of the names of their content, and uses a blockchain to not only support a digital currency (LBC) and transparent decentralized ledger, but also allow every user to access a synchronized name space and a global index of content metadata, thus supporting a new paradigm of digital content distribution. We detail how LBRY works in this paper, including how it designs its data structures for content, content metadata, and a novel content naming space; how it uses the blockchain to manage and synchronize the name space and implement an index for content metadata in order to support content sharing and purchase; and how it handles several issues in running LBRY.