My company (lbry.com) tips contributors for opening good issues, PRs, reporting security vulns, even for good blog posts or tweets (contributions are not limited to code). There’s nothing formal. We just try to be fair and generous, and let it be known that this is something we do. Over the years we’ve built up a bit of a reputation for this.
Certainly this system could be gamed or become more hassle than it’s worth. We’ve only seen that in narrow cases (e.g. during hacktoberfest). On the whole it’s been great and it feels good to do it.
We use the blockchain to store metadata about content that's published to the network. We could not do that on Bitcoin (well, we could do it with OP_RETURN but that's considered bad practice).
In addition, having our own chain means we can tune it to meet our specific use case. What Bitcoin wants and what we want are not the same, so solving both problems the same way is probably not right.
Could you explain why a blockchain should not be use if a tamperproof log is not necessary? If the log is just a byproduct but the rest of the properties are necessary, is that still a valid use case?
Shared data store: yes. One of the biggest problems with Bittorrent is that you can only use it if you already know the infohash of the content you want. There's no index of the available content. There are lots of third-party search engines that try to monitor the network and help you find stuff. They are all incomplete and using them is a bad experience.
Does more than one entity need to contribute: yes. Anyone and everyone can publish to LBRY or pay for LBRY content. If only one entity had write access, that would be a point of censorship.
Data is never deleted: yes. Once you publish something to a decentralized network, its out there. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. We actually do have a mechanism to "update" the metadata (description of the content that's stored in the blockchain) by connecting a diff with updated data to the original blockchain transaction.
Sensitive information will not be written: yes.
No single trusted entity: yes. That's how we can make a strong promises about censorship resistance and you don't have to trust that we won't change our mind later.
Tamperproof log of all writes: I'm not sure why this one is strictly necessary, and why we should not use a blockchain if we don't care about a tamperproof log. Please help me understand.
Blockchain requires a tremendous amount of electricity, contributed by all those participating in the cryptographic portion of the network. If you're not using blockchain to create a tamper-proof log, you shouldn't be wasting the planet's resources on a blockchain project.
Even if you can roll back the requirement to "tamper-resistant" you can get away from the necessity of blockchain: use a hash chain instead.
Since you don't care about tampering, I request that you avoid blockchain.
I'm gonna describe a very simplified version of the process.
1) The film is post to the LBRY network in two steps:
a) The film is broken up into chunks. the chunks are announced on a Bittorrent-like DHT (part of the LBRY protocol).
b) A hash of the file is included in a transaction on the blockchain. the transaction also includes some information about the film itself (e.g. name, description, trailer, etc), and information on how to pay for the film (address and price). we call this the "metadata".
2) When someone goes to download the film, their client sends LBC (the blockchain token) to the address in the metadata. You can trade the LBC for Bitcoin, and then sell the Bitcoin for $$$.
3) If LBRY is successful and a lot of people want to use it, demand for LBC will increase and its price on exchanges will go up. LBRY can then turn the LBC we hold into dollars. We've been documenting how we use our LBC here: https://lbry.io/credit-reports
> 3Blue1Brown, and I wouldn't know where to find this elsewhere
Check out LBRY (https://lbry.io). 3Blue1Brown's content is available there, along with lots of great Youtube channels. If your favorite channel isn't there yet, reach out to the creator and encourage them to sync by visiting https://lbry.io/youtube (its a one-click process and they can get paid for it). Or let me know who you'd like to see there and we'll do our best to convince them for you.
