My first look at the LBRY app - Decentralized filesharing on a Blockchain

So I popped into the Slack channel for LBRY development to see what was going on, LBRY is a project I've been looking at for a while now and I've been eager to find out more about how it works.

I was quickly given a link to the client and downloaded it to see for myself what youtube/bittorrent like application secured by a blockchain would look like. My first expectations were to find a basic bitcoin like wallet containing a load of random links but I was pleasantly surprised.

The UI is smooth but at the moment very basic, there is already quite a lot of content and uploading your own content is easy and intuitive, no messing around with command line or creating .conf files or anything, just select your file, add the details and upload. Nice and easy.

And Most importantly, it works. The first few videos I clicked on took a while to load, I expected this as it's in development and was prepared for some file load time and 10 seconds or so isn't much to complain about.
Then I remembered that I had a miner running on my machine, I usually do when afk or just browsing so I turned it off and tried a few more videos. With the miner off this pretty much reduced any loading time to what I would expect from Youtube. A lot more still need to be done here, this is clearly a pre-release but it's great to see the devs have spent their time on first creating a working product, simple and functional with no bells or whistles.

LBRY has huge potential, I wonder has an attempt at integration with Steem been talked about? It seems like the two platforms would compliment each other very well. We could have our integrated videos both efficiently monitized while maintaining control of our content, all secured by blockchains.



The LBRY app can be found here: https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-app

You'll need 1 LBRY to unlock the wallet, happy to send some out to some people if they wanna test it out themselves, just post a comment.