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How is LBRY different from IPFS or BitTorrent?

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IPFS and BitTorrent are wonderful technologies from which LBRY has drawn a lot of inspiration.

However, they both suffer from the same problems:

  • Lack of discovery. BitTorrent and IPFS provide decentralized ways to access a unique piece of data or information, but they do not provide a way to discover or find what is available.
  • Lack of monetization. Neither BitTorrent nor IPFS innately support payments to publishers for the content or data they create and publish to the network, while LBRY does.
  • No identity. On LBRY, publishes can be authoritatively and provably issued by a cryptographically secured identity.
  • Ugly URLs. BitTorrent only provides access via long, complex magnet URLs. IPFS supports human-friendly naming via IPNS, but as a sort of after-the-fact hack. LBRY URLs tell you what is on the other side of them before you click them.
  • Incentive problems. BitTorrent and IPFS rely on people being generous with their own resources for data to continue to be available. LBRY creates market incentives for data to be as widespread and available as possible.

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