BLOCKCHAIN is a Revolution that builds on another Technical Revolution so old that only the more experienced among us remember it: the invention of the DATABASE..!!
BLOCKCHAIN: THE NEW DATABASE REVOLUTION
(This is a great blog for members of the Old School..!!)
Credit:hbr
Coming from the Old School and remembering building and indexing Databases when they first came out, I read this article published today and thought it would be great to share it with you.
Credit to hbr for the content in the article.
Credit:hbr
https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-promise-of-blockchain-is-a-world-without-middlemen
Credit:hbr
Credit:hbr
Credit:hbr
Credit:hbr
IT'S JUST A DATABASE (A BIG ONE)
If you look under the hood of this Revolutionary Digital Distributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain) it is no more than just a Database.... A BIG DATABASE, and one that is distributed and shared across a network of computers.
Sure, it is a little more complicated than that, but at the end of the day it is no different from when the Database was first introduced into Industry and then ultimately onto the Internet.
Cryptography, the clever bit, is in essence nothing more than a set of keys to safely unlock the Database for access and changing.
So in a nutshell when someone tells you that Blockchain is way to complicated to understand, remind them of when Databases were thrown into our laps in the early 1980's and we had to teach ourselves: saving, indexing, sorting, and extracting of data without anyone to teach us..!!
Better still, anyone around at that time will remember LOTUS 1-2-3 and how this really was the beginning of Spreadsheets and Databases..!!
Once again this really is a great article and strips back the layers of Blockchain Technology to the what it really is. "A DATABASE"..!!
Thanks again for reading.
Stephen
Hahaha, oh how I remember lotus 1-2-3. I wonder, is it related to Lotus Notes? My work still uses this and it is a horrifying piece of kit. I always wondered if the blockchain was just a DB. When I saw simple sql queries pulling information from it I thought, perhaps so. But then thought surely this shiny new thing can't be!
If you really drill down into it, yes it is. The difference is that there is a layer of cryptography and a clever set of keys involved but the basics is that in the deep deep deep background it's just a clever database..!! Stephen
Ha, fantastic. I suspected as much! Cheers Stephen!
Well Stephen, now I truly feel like a fossil... not only do I remember Lotus 1-2-3, I remember coding in Fortran and COBOL on IBM data cards to work with databases on the IBM-360 at the University of Texas. Yikes!
But very interesting article, and blockchain IS just some very old concepts given a new coat of paint. Well, maybe a little more than that... but yes. Thanks for the share!
Sometimes if I want a good giggle I tell someone of the younger generation that my first car was a LOTUS 1-2-3... ;) ;) #TooFunny Stephen
ha ha I was IBM-360 in Assembler and then later PL1 and COBOL on the same mainframe / green screen. Used to support the applications too with an Abend causing a massive dump of paper had to dive into the registers and figure out where the error was! late 70's early 80's - wow takes me back. Flat files at first migrating on to Databases after, what fun.
Nice post, History always repeats itself, but sometimes we fail to notice @stephenkendal
Thank you. You are so right. Blockchain is simply a repeat of what us "oldies" ;) remember in the early 1980's. I must admit I have been chuckling to myself these last few years whilst everyone has been running round loosing their heads..!! #TooFunny ;) ;) Stephen
It is just about having an understanding of times and seasons