Hacker News Reader

Comment by altairiumblue | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain what your product does without using the word blockchain?

LBRY uses a database, that everyone has access to, to store metadata related to digital content and provide pointers to a more traditional decentralized P2P network like BitTorrent. The blockchain also provides publisher identities, human-friendly URLs (e.g. lbry://@MinutePhysics/magnetic-levitation), and a payment mechanism.

This decentralized db allows anyone to access the data without relying on one source.

As a legally protected property, ownership of IP is not usually contested. Why shouldn't a single organization control writes and publish an open database?

Can you rephrase the question, I'm not exactly sure what you are asking - why should, or shouldn't?

>"provide pointers to a more traditional decentralized P2P network like BitTorrent"

What does this statement mean, links to IPFS? trackers to bittorrent?

The metadata stored in the blockchain contains a hash to the header blob of data for the stream. Peers for this header and later data blobs are found on the lbry DHT. Once peers are found the blobs are downloaded over a tcp based protocol.

Okay, so for a use case like The Pirate Bay, which is a popular database of magnet links and related metadata (Description, who added to the database, when added, etc). Users search this data in various ways.

Can you explain how the same would be implemented on your system? As in, how would a user search it or find popular torrents? What would the components be and how would they fit together?

Obviously the vast majority of users (> 99.9%) will never consider running their own node, they won't need to store data on chain, they only want to read it, and they will not pay anything in order to do so.

How would your solution be better than doing it with an existing system such as EOS? It also provides publisher identities, human friendly account names, and a payment mechanism. In addition it also supports smart contracts or dapps or whatever you want to call them, which could be used to facilitate moderation.

edit: BTW, I like your demo

Hey, thanks for the question! Give our app a try and I think you'll answer some of these questions for yourself: https://lbry.io/get - it uses an SPV wallet, so no need to host blockchain data.

There is very basic (to be improved soon!) search functionality in the app - it searches through lbry:// urls and content metadata from publishes. Any type of data can be published to lbry, including videos, images, pdfs, and more!

In terms of how it compares to EOS, I'm not sure, but our tech is specifically designed to content publishing, disovery and monetization. It also includes publisher identities and a payment mechanism in LBC.

I installed the client and searched. Did the results come from the blockchain directly as seen by my client or did they come from a HTTP request to a server you run?

They went through a search server we own that runs chainquery. https://github.com/lbryio/chainquery

It parses the blockchain and syncs it with a SQL db. Anyone can run their own search server and adjust it as they see fit.

Right, so nothing stops you from altering the search results at will, which is the most critical part of the system in my opinion.

Why bother with a blockchain then? Instead of letting content creators be tipped in bitcoins or something, is there any reason other than getting to be the issuer of the coin?

Or will some future development make search decentralized?

All the code for our search engine is open source https://github.com/lbryio/lighthouse

You could also run your own search server if you don't want to use that one.

But that is only part of discovery. Another is built into the protocol. I can navigate to `lbry://bitconnect`, to see what has been published at that url. There is no way to spoof this part since it happens at the protocol layer.

Also if your interested, https://spee.ch/bitconnect. Spee.ch is a web wrapper for the lbry:// protocol. `spee.ch/url` will serve the same file as `lbry://url` (but is limited by different file types. There are more viewers in the app like a 3d file viewer.)

Can I see lbry://@SomebodyUnpopular without talking to the centralized search? If so that's very good as that person couldn't be deplatformed.

Anyway, great job offering working and usable software. Way better than 99.999% of blockchain projects which offer nothing but empty promises.

Yep. The lbry urls are handled by the protocol, there is no way for a company to block someone from accessing that channel.

I could outbid that person so that the short url is directed to my channel, but that person will always have a url at lbry://@SomebodyUnpopular#xyz123...

thanks for the feedback! Shoot us your LBC address at hello@lbry.io and we'll get some extra credits over to you for testing :)

>Right, so nothing stops you from altering the search results at will, which is the most critical part of the system in my opinion.

You don't use the search server to perform resolution of claims, the search engine gives names that you then look up yourself. The resolve operations are provided by the SPV server, it cannot falsify results sent the the client as the client validates everything it gets (if the claim is winning this includes a proof that it is winning at the current block height). The server (like other SPV servers) could in some cases omit records/return false negatives, but it cannot alter them.

The SPV server is also open source and you can configure lbrynet to use whichever server you want, you don't need to use the default operated by us.

>Okay, so for a use case like The Pirate Bay, which is a popular database of magnet links and related metadata (Description, who added to the database, when added, etc). Users search this data in various ways.

The problem with this search index is that it requires all of the .torrent files containing the metadata. In lbry this metadata (as well as more rich fields) are stored to the blockchain, so any full blockchain node has the information to provide more sophisticated searches. Chainquery is what runs a full node and provides the search engine for the UI (https://github.com/lbryio/chainquery).

>As in, how would a user search it or find popular torrents?

As indicated above, if they're using the UI it provides a search engine via chainquery. Torrents are also not a currently supported source type for a download, however there is nothing to stop it from being added.

Since the mention of P2P traffic comes up, can you maybe mention the differences are between what you want to achieve and a P2P network with a payment system included into it? I'm honestly just curious...

My first and ongoing thought reading here was: "this sounds they want to build a P2P service like Bittorrent". Tje only difference is that you seem to want to include a payment mechanism into it.

Different note: how do you plan to verify original ownership of material? So of I upload copyrighted material of content, does that allow me to get paid for someome else's work? And if the original content creator uploads the same material, how do plan on validating originality of the content?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com