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Comment by jiggytom | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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