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The innovation of blockchains is not on the how-to-store-things side, but how to keep a state of things every nodes agree with. Stellar can store data on Postg
by fiatjaf 9y ago
The innovation of blockchains is not on the how-to-store-things side, but how to keep a state of things every nodes agree with.
Stellar can store data on Postgres because it is just a small database of how much money each account has at each ledger. Past ledgers can be erased from the database (which makes it not a blockchain in any sense anymore).
Bitcoin has a history of all transactions organized in blocks not because it's a fancy new database technology, but because that way is the way it worked out better to keep a synced state between nodes, kind of an append-only log.
You could, if you wanted that, read the Bitcoin database and translate it into a set of rows of a who-has-how-much Postgres table.
Or, better, you could implement a Bitcoin client that stored its blocks as rows in a Postgres table, but I think it would be much more resource-intensive than the databases the Bitcoin clients are using today.
- runeks 9y agoThe Bitcoin blockchain is a compact serialization format used as the input to the proof-of-work function. The proof-of-work is the important part, and for that we need a centrally, agreed-upon serialization format where the latter blocks inherit PoW from earlier blocks. A Bitcoin node can store blocks/transactions in whatever way it wishes -- Postgres, Dropbox, SQLite DB on a floppy disk -- as long as it's able to deliver to nodes in the canonical serialization format, because it's needed to verify proof-of-work (and signatures for the transactions).
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago> Past ledgers can be erased from the database (which makes it not a blockchain in any sense anymore). A block snake? That sounds catchy.