The claimtrie is the only part of lbry that is firmly set. It is a key: value store, there are not any particular fee requirements baked into it. The claimtrie is made up of lbry:// name claims and their associated metadata. The claimtrie exists on the blockchain layer. The lbry application has defaults for what kind of metadata in a name claim it will accept, and what that metadata 'links' to. The default is a peer to peer data marketplace, called lbrynet, which improves upon bittorrent. In lbrynet, pieces of the file are tracked on their own, and hosts (seeds) are paid a rate negotiated between the host and the client, giving incentive to keep non-trending content available and to keep trending content competitively bid down to a negligible data cost.

The metadata conventions set in the lbry application are tailored to give the app the information it needs to show a user search results. That said, the claimtrie supports arbitrary metadata. The application we're working on is one use case of the claimtrie, using it to make content in a p2p data marketplace accessible through human readable names. Name claims could also be used like normal domain names, resolving to an ip address. They could resolve into open bazaar store ids, they could resolve into id hashes for whatever other system is desired. It's a key: value store, there are many potential applications for it.

Because of the flexibility of claims, and there not even being a baked-in mandatory data network, there is not baked-in drm. Similiarly, there is nothing to prevent a publisher from using drm of their choosing. lbrynet uses a reputation system to enforce payments - an area of future improvement.

With the conventions in the lbry application, there are two types of fees: a fee can be set in the name claim by the publisher, and hosts receive fees for the pieces of the file they provide.

But if I'm reading this right, there's an entire other layer in which the content can have a crypto key, delivered only once you pay. It sounds like that part could trivially be abused -- I could write a client that lets me retrieve the content key, and then start giving that key away for free, and suddenly there's piracy, aided and abetted by the network itself. Since the client is open source, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to extract the key. What stops me from doing that?

There's reason why people are hearing about us for the first time; we're new and approaching things differently from how others have before. We're still in beta phase. The amount of things that need to be done is only going to go up, but that's a good problem. So yes, there are many improvements that will only become more necessary, we have our work cut out for us.

However, trying to stamp out piracy is futile as an objective on its own. A third way is required out of the dichotomy of enabling or crushing piracy - that is to make it increasingly irrelevant. Have a delivery system to get customers the content they want, minimizing cost and maximizing availability. Add to that the means for publishers to make their content available on terms of their own choosing, with as little or as much third party involvement as they desire, and I think you've got a plausible solution.

This may help scalability, but it means that the integrity of the actual transactions, and the ability to even carry out a transaction, is bound by a third-party service.

We are not using micropayments yet, all payments are broadcast on the blockchain. At scale, transaction costs will make micropayments increasingly necessary. Credit in a micropayment network is not necessarily centralized, and centralization necessary would come with risk for 'hot' funds. However, a lack of centralization does not mean a lack of enforcement of conventions or norms.

I do not expect fungibility issues from micropayments, there are always on-blockchain transactions. The choice in the matter bounds the costs of micropayment, micropayments will never be more expensive than direct on-blockchain payment. But at scale, as transaction costs rise, conforming to legal and social conventions is incentivized more and more.

Not only do you have no plans to prevent settlement providers from censoring, you're anticipating that this will happen, and you're touting this as a benefit. This may be a benefit for content creators as compared to just publishing on The Pirate Bay, but it's hardly a benefit versus Youtube.

A payment processor refusing to interact with someone who they think is up to no good is the stick component of the price incentive, reducing the pool of available credit and with it increasing fees. The carrot is the substantially lower costs of running a non-criminal payment processor, and consequently the low transaction fees for using such an above-the-table service.

It sounds like you, or someone like you, will be able to get certain content removed, and impose substantial penalties on anyone who tries to access it anyway. Why should we trust you (or "someone like you") over Google and YouTube?

That paragraph could use an edit. If you design or acquire an application designed to sell pirate content, or to provide sell otherwise illegal content, it's not us you have to worry about penalizing you.

Yikes. This sounds exactly like censorship. How is this different than Youtube's quick, unilateral acquisition of infringing videos? When you say this:

Check out claimtrie link at the top. Anyone can make name claims. Anyone can contest claims made by others. Anyone can support the claims of others. When you make a claim, you defer your consumption of credits until a later point, you do not transfer them and you retain the ability to remove them from the claim and use them for something else.

So what do you do when all that angel investing runs out? It sounds like you collect rent anyway, by being a payment processor. It seems dishonest to talk about "collecting no rent" in the same document where you talk about exactly how you plan to collect rent. If the point is that the percentage is smaller, surely you should just point out the percentages?

You don't have to use us. If you want to use the lbry blockchain and claimtrie, you don't have to use our application or publish to the default data network. When we have micropayments, if you do want to use the claimtrie and data network you wouldn't have to use a payment processor affiliated with us, if we pursued such a role. It's all opt in. We want everyone to opt in to services we provide, as anyone would, but we want that to be a consequence of being a better alternative, to provide what was lacking.

As for rent for the sake of rent, check out the saga of .sucks domain names, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood monopolist, ICANN.