LBRY Bank Accounts Shut Down! CEO Jeremy Kauffman on Being Newly Unbanked, Why Decentralization Matters
This past week I had the distinct please of speaking with Jeremy Kauffman, the founder and CEO of LBRY, a decentralized content platform, about a recent challenge affecting both him and his company: becoming unbanked. Recently, LBRY's bank accounts were shut down without warning or stated reason, likely because of the company's focus on blockchain technology (a fact which was never hidden), a key area of competition for banks. Beyond this, however, Jeremy's own personal accounts and those of his family were also shut down, similarly without explanation. We spoke about what this whole situation means for LBRY and more personally Jeremy moving forward.
Naturally, we then covered the dangers of relying on centralized services such as banks which have the capability to completely shut users out for sometimes arbitrary reasons. We also covered the "fake decentralization" phenomenon, where platforms and services claim to be blockchain-based while actually running on fully-centralized infrastructure. These platforms mix in some token blockchain elements, such as rewarding users with tokens, while still operating exactly the same as traditional services, including the ability to go offline and, of course, to censor user content and withhold funds. Platforms such as LBRY seek to maintain maximum decentralization from the beginning, which can make building a strong user experience from the beginning a challenging task, but doesn't run the risk of simply failing to decentralize down the line and creating just another censorship-prone content platform.
Finally, of course, we dove into LBRY itself and went over some hard questions on the platform's future and potential, from its humble beginnings to its newest ambitious versions and recent spike in popularity.
You can watch the entire interview embedded above, exclusively on LBRY for the time being, and I recommend you do. If you enjoy the content please remember to leave a tip and a comment. If you want to check out LBRY, please go here.