Editing LBRY (section)

= Terminology =

There's a lot of jargon surrounding LBRY, and you may hear people close to it (like GunCAD Index devs) refer to things like "claims" or "stream descriptor hashes". Here's what it all means:

* '''claim''' - A transaction on the blockchain that reserves ''something'' on LBRY for you, like a repost, stream, or channel. It has a '''claim ID''' that's just a giant pad of hex characters.

* '''channel''' - Exactly what it seems like -- an <code>@whatever:a</code> code.

* '''stream''' - A file. Can be a video, zip file, text file, whatever.

* '''qualifier''' - Short handles for things (ex. <code>@mychannel</code>) are a bidding war. You have to stake LBC in order to get them and they're volatile. If you instead add a '''qualifier''' to your channel with enough characters of the claim ID to disambiguate it (ex. <code>@mychannel:a</code>), you get a permanent immutable link to something.

* '''height''' - Refers to a proprietary algorithm LBRY uses to bid for the aforementioned short handles. In short: older and more expensive bids are "higher" and take more effort to topple.

* '''blob''' - A 2MB unit of data addressed by its SHA-384 hash. It is the fundamental unit of data transfer and seeding across LBRY.

* '''sd hash''' - A stream descriptor hash, which points to a blob that describes the stream in better detail and points to other blobs that have the actual file data. This may update somewhat regularly even if the underlying file changes and is thus ''not'' a good indicator of revisions.

Additionally, GunCAD Index invents even more jargon (kinda) to refer to specific things:

* '''release''' - A stream claim that is a zip, STL, or STEP that we care about.