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I'm somewhat bullish on the promise of permissioned blockchain systems, but the Facebook/MySQL example is misleading -- * Facebook doesn't need MySQL to intero
by carlineng 5y ago
I'm somewhat bullish on the promise of permissioned blockchain systems, but the Facebook/MySQL example is misleading --
* Facebook doesn't need MySQL to interop with other systems in the same way that blockchain enables.
* Relational semantics are way more complex than what most distributed ledgers technologies offer. A blockchain is more analogous to the MySQL binlog than to MySQL itself. I would guess that Facebook's DB transaction log is orders of magnitude larger than all the blockchains in the world combined.
* Facebook's challenges with MySQL are most likely due to their unprecedented scale. If one were to layer on the governance challenges associated with distributed ledger systems, I would think an upgrade like that would basically be impossible.
- atom_arranger 5y agoRegarding scale: Bitcoin is a ledger of transactions, it has in the last 12 years had 690m transactions. Facebook has 2.9B MAU. ~4X the number of transactions ever done on BTC. Each user probably generates tens of “transactions” (changes to a DB) per month.