RPI Hackers Meet LBRY (Notes and Slides from RCOS Presentation)

Last Friday, we had the pleasure of presenting LBRY to RCOS, the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software. Jimmy was a member of this group when he attended RPI, and I certainly would have if I have known it had existed! In the years since I attended RPI it's grown from a handful of students to this:

Our Slides

We gave a short overview of LBRY aimed at an audience that would already know BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and programming. On the slide that shows how LBRY works from a user's perspective, we gave a live streaming demo.

Reaction

The RCOS attendees expressed a lot of interest in LBRY and asked some great questions like:

• How is this different from Sia Coin? (Sia makes promises we do not, and our naming/design is focused on discovery. We have a clearer path to traction by extending BitTorrent.)
• What can you do to keep content infringing on copyright off the network? (We cannot remove it, but we cannot emphasize enough that this is a terrible idea and that you are liable if you do this. We are allocating a lot of resources to getting right's holders on board.)
• Can you be sure LBRY's naming system will result in right's holders owning names? (You can never be certain of anything, but we think economic theory sure makes it likely.)
• How does LBRY extending BitTorrent work? (Metadata stored in LBRY blockchain maps to a torrent hash.)
• I've literally never been as excited about anything as this in my entire life. (Thanks, Jimmy's brother.)

We were also able to listen to a number of presentations by students, with the most interesting being Pandamonium, a "network emulator for testing chaotic environments". In our estimation, one could certainly test chaos with this device indeed.

Additional thanks to Mukkai Krishnamoorthy who hosted us.