Glossary
Glossary Sections
General Glossary
Account
A kind of basic object in distributed ledger used to keep the balance and other information of users.
Address
A label consists of string of letters and numbers that anonymously represents user's identity on chain. Crypto assets can be sent to and/or from addresses. CKB address packages Lock Script into a single line, verifiable, and human read friendly format. A single public-private key pair can generate multiple Lock Scripts, consequently multiple addresses.
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Asset
A piece of data that has value or that represents an entity having value.
Synonyms
Block
A grouping of transactions, marked with a timestamp, and a fingerprint of the previous block. The block header is hashed to produce a proof of work, thereby validating the transactions. Valid blocks are added to the main blockchain by network consensus.
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Block Height
Block height is the total number of blocks that have been confirmed on the blockchain, also used to identify a unique block when specifying a particular block height, as there is always an exact block at any block height.
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Block Interval
Also known as Block Time. Block interval is the length of time it takes to create a new block in a cryptocurrency blockchain. Block interval is the measure of the time it takes the miners or validators within a network to verify transactions within one block and produce a new block in that blockchain. The block interval is variable on Nervos blockchain.
The block interval on the Bitcoin blockchain is approximately every 10 minutes. The block interval on Nervos is variable, but is usually under 10 seconds.
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Block Propagation
The process of synchronizing a new block to the majority of full nodes in the network. Block propagation is a well-known bottleneck that prevents Bitcoin from scaling.
Block propagation time is an average time that is needed for the new block to reach the majority of nodes in the network. Long block propagation delay reduces the node's resistance against 51% attacks.
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Block Reward
The amount of cryptocurrency credited to a miner's account after the miner successfully adds a block of transactions to the blockchain.
In Nervos CKB, block rewards are the CKBytes credited to a miner's account after a block is successfully added to CKB by the miner.
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Block Time
Alternatively referred to as Block Interval.
Synonyms
Blockchain
A data structure maintaining a growing list of records, organized as a chain of blocks. Each block, apart from the first one, is cryptographically linked to the previous block, thus creating a chain-like structure.
The cryptographic link ensures any party with the last block can verify that none of the historical data is modified after the creation of this block.
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BLS Signature
A cryptographic signature scheme for signing and verification. BLS is short for Boneh–Lynn–Shacham.
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Broadcast
Blocks are sent to all nodes in a blockchain network.
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Capacity
The maximum space (in bytes) that a Cell can occupy on the Nervos CKB.
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Cell
Cells are the primary state units in CKB, within them users can include arbitrary states. All data on Nervos CKB is stored in Cells.
A Cell has 4 fields: capacity
, data
, type
and lock
.
Synonyms
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Cell Model
A representation of how state is managed on Nervos CKB. The Cell Model is a more generic state model than either Bitcoin's UTXO or Ethereum's account model.
The Cell Model is a new construction that combines many of the advantages of Ethereum's account model with the asset ownership and proof-based verification properties of Bitcoin's UTXO model.
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Censorship Resistance
Censorship resistance in blockchain generally means that it is difficult for a malicious party to prevent the blockchain from confirming a set of transactions generated by honest users.
Chain
A shorthand name for blockchain.
Synonyms
CKB
An abbreviation which can have different meanings depending on the context:
- Common Knowledge Base - The layer 1 blockchain of the Nervos Network.
- Common Knowledge Byte - The native token of the Nervos Common Knowledge Base.
Synonyms
CKByte
A shorthand name for Common Knowledge Byte.
CKByte is also sometimes shortened to CKB. Exchanges often use CKB as the ticker symbol.
Synonyms
Not To Be Confused With
CKB-VM
CKB-VM is a crypto-agnostic virtual machine, a RISC-V instruction set based VM for executing both on-chain and off-chain code.
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Code Hash
A field in a Cell which contains a hash value that can refer to a specific piece of data, or a specific Cell referenced by Type ID.
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Cold Storage
A method of securing funds by placing them in a cold wallet; a type of wallet that is never connected to the internet.
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Cold Wallet
A wallet that is used to secure assets offline. This wallet is permanently disconnected from the internet, and not vulnerable to attacks which rely on an active internet connection.
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Commit
Nervos CKB's consensus algorithm, NC-Max consensus, has two phases: propose and commit. Commit is the process of including a valid proposed transaction into a new block.
Commit-Chain
A scheme that enables the off-chain processing of transactions by one or more operators with on-chain state update commitments that do not contain per-transaction data.
Commit Reward
A reward paid to miners in CKBytes on inclusion of previously proposed transactions.
Common Knowledge Base
A layer 1 proof of work blockchain that provides a foundation of decentralized trust for the Nervos Network.
Synonyms
Not To Be Confused With
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Common Knowledge Byte
The native token of the Nervos layer 1 blockchain, the Common Knowledge Base.
Common Knowledge Byte is often abbreviated as CKByte or CKB.
Owning a CKByte entitles the holder to store one byte of data on the Nervos CKB blockchain.
Synonyms
Not To Be Confused With
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Confirmation
A process where a transaction has been accepted and verified by the network and included in a block.
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Consensus
An algorithm executed among a number of distributed participants, ensuring that all participants faithfully executing this algorithm can reach agreement on some data value even if the other participants are faulty or malicious.
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Consume
The process of using a Live Cell as an input to a transaction. The consumption processes indicate that Live Cell turns into a Dead Cell.
Contract Account
An account containing code that executes automatically whenever it receives an event from another account.
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Cryptocurrency
A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that is secured by blockchain and cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend.
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Cryptographic Signature
A concise piece of proof data. Cryptographic signature schemes are a fundamental component of cryptocurrency networks that verify the integrity and non-repudiation of transaction messages across the network.
Synonyms
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior.
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Cycles
The number of RISC-V computational cycles required by a Script to execute. It's a metric used to prevent malicious behavior such as infinite loops, that's why it is called cycles.
This is a similar concept to Ethereum's Gas, we set cycles to ensure optimal performance and security. Scripts must stay within cycle limits, otherwise the block will be rejected by CKB nodes.
See Also
- Estimate cycles
- Max_block_cycles
- Rules for calculating cycles in RFC on Nervos Network Github
- Script
- RISC-V
- Ethereum's Gas
DAO
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organization members and not influenced by a centralized entity, in other words they are member-owned communities without centralized leadership. A DAO's financial transaction record and program rules are maintained on a blockchain.
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DApp
Decentralized application. At a minimum, it is a smart contract and a web user interface. In a broader sense, dApps are web applications that are built on top of open, decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure services. Additionally, many dApps include decentralized storage and/or a message protocol and platform.
Data
In Cell Model, data
is a field in a Cell which can store arbitrary bytes.
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Decentralization
In blockchain, decentralization refers to the transfer of control and decision-making from a centralized entity (individual, organization, or group thereof) to a distributed network.
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DeFi
Short for "decentralized finance", a broad category of dApps aiming to provide financial services backed by the blockchain, without any intermediaries, so anyone with an internet connection can participate.
Digital Asset
A digital asset is an individual piece of data that has value, or represents another entity that has value.
Digital assets are most commonly represented as tokens, which may be used as digital currency or represent physical items such as real estate.
Synonyms
Digital Currency
A type of currency that primarily exists digitally over the internet. Physical representations of the currency, in the form of cards, bills, or coins, may exist, but are secondary mediums.
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Distributed
A system where components are spread across multiple nodes to parallelize workloads, add redundancy, or eliminate single points of failure.
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Digital Object (DOB)
A non-fungible encrypted asset with its content fully stored on-chain, establishing an intrinsic link between content and value.
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Double-Spending
Double-spending is the risk that a digital token is spent twice or more. In the context of blockchain, it happens when the transaction spending a digital token is cancelled after confirmation, and the same token is spent in another transaction.
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Epoch
An epoch is a period of time for a set of blocks.
In Nervos, the PoW difficulty changes on a new epoch. All the blocks in the same epoch share the same difficulty target. The difficulty adjustment algorithm aims to stabilize the orphan block rate at 2.5% and the epoch duration at 4 hours.
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Fee
The sender of a transaction often includes a fee to the network for processing the requested transaction. There's no minimum fee rate set in consensus, but there's a minimum fee rate 1,000 Shannons/KB in CKB's P2P network. (1 Shannon = 10-8 CKB)
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Fee Rate
A tip per byte that a user offers to the miners for including his transaction in a block on the blockchain.
This is a same concept to Bitcoin's Fee Rate(often spelled feerate).
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First-Class Assets
Assets that 1. the asset itself (rather than a reference to the asset) can be passed directly in smart contract interactions, and 2. directly controlled by owners without any intermediaries.
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Fork
A change in protocol causing the creation of an alternative chain, or a temporal divergence in two potential block paths during mining.
Full Node
A full node is an essential component of the CKB network. It stores and syncs the entire blockchain, verifies the validity of blocks and transactions, and enforces the network's consensus rules.
ckb init --chain Mainnet && ckb run
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Full Payload Format
The deprecated full payload format directly encodes all data field of Lock Script. The encode rule of deprecated full payload format is Bech32.
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Fungible Token
A fungible token can be fiat currencies like the dollar or a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.
Fungible tokens or assets are divisible and non-unique.
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Gas Limit
The maximum amount of gas a transaction or block may consume.
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Hard-Fork
A permanent divergence in the blockchain; also known as a hard-forking change. One commonly occurs when nonupgraded nodes can’t validate blocks created by upgraded nodes that follow newer consensus rules. Not to be confused with a fork, soft fork, software fork, or Git fork.
Hardware Wallet
A hardware wallet is a form of cold wallet. A hardware wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet that stores the user's private keys (a critical piece of information used to authorize outgoing transactions on the blockchain network) in a secure hardware device.
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Hash
A fixed-length fingerprint of variable-size input, produced by a hash function.
Hash Rate
Hash rate is a measure of the computational power per second used when mining. These operations are known as "hashing".
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Height
A shorthand name for block height.
Synonyms
Light Client
As a low-resource node, a light client allows users to sync with a blockchain in a cryptographically secure manner without having to store the whole blockchain.
Light Node
A light node downloads only the headers of the blockchain, conserving resources. It relies on other nodes for full transaction data and is a lightweight option for network participation.
ckb-light-client run --config-file ./testnet.toml
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Mempool
Short for "memory pool". A waiting area on full nodes for transactions that have been broadcasted to the network but have not yet been confirmed on the blockchain.
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Metadata
Metadata is data that provides information about other data. capacity
, type
and lock
in Cells are metadata, they occupy Cell capacity and incur a state cost as well.
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Micro-State
A small piece of state that is isolated and often able to be acted upon independently without knowing the total state of the network.
On Nervos, micro-state is represented by a Cell.