It’s not still the early days of blockchain

Re:It’s not still the early days of blockchain by yashg on Saturday January 15, 2022 @03:01AM (#29944651)

Is there any cool stuff that doesn't involve speculative trading in some "coin" or "token"?

I recently read about a steel maker in India executing a cross border order on blockchain. On further reading it turns out their bank used a third party company for digitizing letter of credit and that company claims to be using an enterprise blockchain R3 Corda. R3 itself is owned by a consortium of banks and on their website they don't use the word blockchain to describe Corda. They call it DLT.

My understanding is that a blockchain is supposed to be distributed, trustless, permissionless, immutable and open. At least that is what the core ideology behind it and is touted as the cornerstone features of blockchain. An enterprise blockchain is private, trustful, permissoned and everything that is a blockchain is not supposed to be. At that stage is it even a blockchain or just another propitiatory data store?

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Re:It’s not still the early days of blockchain by tomc1985 on Saturday January 15, 2022 @03:14AM (#29944731)

> My understanding is that a blockchain is supposed to be distributed, trustless, permissionless, immutable and open.

A blockchain is just a data structure. That description is more befitting of Decentralized Finance/DeFi

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Re:It’s not still the early days of blockchain by yashg on Saturday January 15, 2022 @03:29AM (#29944813)

OK so a privately owned and controlled blockchain which only allows trusted users to add blocks is still a blockchain?

What would be the advantages of using a private, permissioned blockchain over a MySQL/Oracle/SQL Server database for storing data?

Why as an external user would I trust a centralized blockchain more than I would trust a centralized database? They are both private owned and controlled by a company.

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Re:It’s not still the early days of blockchain by freeone3000 on Saturday January 15, 2022 @08:35AM (#29946219)

You'd use a private, permissioned blockchain over federated SQL databases due to the technical difficulties of synchronizing audit tables across organizational boundaries -- since an enterprise blockchain is append-only, immutable, time-stamped, and each new entry has a hash of the previous view, it overcomes a lot of data integrity issues inherent to a distributed SQL database. None of the companies here will fully trust each other to hold an exclusive copy of the data, so the blockchain here replaces an expensive manual reconciliation step in the event local accounting databases don't match up.

As an external user? Nobody cares, it's not for you, move on.

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Re:It’s not still the early days of blockchain by CRConrad on Monday January 17, 2022 @07:48PM (#29973500)

> since an enterprise blockchain is append-only, immutable, time-stamped, and each new entry has a hash of the previous view, it overcomes a lot of data integrity issues inherent to a distributed SQL database.

And why couldn't a distributed SQL database be append-only, immutable, time-stamped, and implemented so each new entry has a hash of the previous state? (If you own it, just set it up to disallow updates or deletes, and allow inserts only through a trigger / stored procedure that adds the timestamp and hash.)

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Re:It’s not still the early days of blockchain by freeone3000 on Tuesday January 18, 2022 @02:12PM (#29984190)

It could, and then it'd be a blockchain in SQL, like MSSQL's BLOCKCHAIN table type. Those features are definitional to a blockchain.

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Re:It’s not still the early days of blockchain by CRConrad on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @05:35AM (#29991983)

I take it using that data type in MS SQL Server doesn't use as much electricity as a small country, though?

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Re:It’s not still the early days of blockchain by tomc1985 on Thursday January 20, 2022 @12:27PM (#30011871)

Yeah but it's not nearly as sexy

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Re:It’s not still the early days of blockchain by xfz on Saturday January 15, 2022 @08:43AM (#29946274)

Talking of R3, their recruiters reached out to me. I wish they'd mentioned Blockchain or crypto hype up front, it would have saved me a few minutes browsing their website.

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