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NIST's Blockchain Technology Overview is a good explainer: * https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/det
by throw0101a 5y ago
NIST's Blockchain Technology Overview is a good explainer:
* https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final
See especially Figure 6 ("p. 42", 53 of the PDF), which is a flow chart to help you decide on whether blockchain may match one's use case. Extracted:
* https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed https://imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed
Generally you need the conditions of needing both (i) append-only log and (ii) distributed/decentralized before considering blockchain 'technology'.
- josephg 5y agoThat’s a nice flowchart. Also, blockchains are only applicable when you don’t know anyone you trust to run your infrastructure. I don’t think this is often true in practice. Blockchains are also only needed in situations where you need a single, global source of truth. Ie, where eventual consistency / gossip networks wouldn’t be good enough. So blockchains are needed to avoid the double spend problem, but plenty of real world software can get on just fine without a single central ledger. (Eg scuttlebutt, CRDTs, etc).