Ask HN: Before We Spend Millions, What Do You Think of This Blockchain Use Case?

Re:Ask HN: Before We Spend Millions, What Do You Think of Th... by kodablah on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @11:38AM (#19209280)

Depends on what/why you need verification and if you want financial incentives. Forgive me for not taking the time to read into your product deeply. Sounds like you want a distributed DB. The blockchain part assumes you want shared verification via work and give people a reason to stay around and keep it shared. Blockchains just seem to be the distributed DB du jour these days to solve consensus. So I'd say sure, you can use a blockchain as your distributed DB, or you can use another distributed DB (if you can find a decent one) and add simple author verification. But no reason to automatically assume blockchain is the best distributed DB for your use case unless financials are at the core of the product. Hell, for "millions" you could just pin a bunch of data to IPFS signed by the authors.

Discovery/search is a whole other problem that blockchains don't help with either, and is not really an easily decentralized problem in current tech.

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Re:Ask HN: Before We Spend Millions, What Do You Think of Th... by jiggytom on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @12:07PM (#19209566)

Hey, thanks for the comments! We don't think it's a matter of verification / financial incentives for the blockchain use case, but instead, it's the censorship-resistant, permissionless, and spam prevention factors that count. If we had a centralized database, we could potentially limit access or overwrite records.

As far as discovery goes, we've developed a product that helps with exactly this problem - it's called Chainquery. It digests all the metadata from the blockchain into SQL tables that can be easily queried. Check it out at https://github.com/lbryio/chainquery/

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Re:Ask HN: Before We Spend Millions, What Do You Think of Th... by CountPrimes on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @12:17PM (#19209664)

There is an element of URL ownership involved. It's not just a matter of finding and serving up video content; LBRY allows you to post that content at a specific URL. The ownership of that URL needs to be publicly verifiable.

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Re:Ask HN: Before We Spend Millions, What Do You Think of Th... by seanyesmunt on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @11:42AM (#19209317)

Discovery is definitely hard. We've created https://github.com/lbryio/chainquery which parses the blockchain and pumps it into a SQL db for better searching.

So that part is still centralized, but anyone who creates an app on LBRY can use this and create their own discovery/search flows.

Also see u/CountPrimes answer.

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