The distinction between a traditional database and a blockchain starts with architecture, or how the techniques are orchestrated.
The most common use of client-server network architecture is a database operating on the World Wide Web.
A customer (customer) with permissions associated with their account may alter entries that are stored on a centralized server. By changing the’ master copy,’ they will get the updated version of the database entry whenever a customer accesses a database using their laptop. Database control continues with administrators, enabling access and permissions to be retained as a key authority.
This is not at all the same as a blockchain.
Each participant retains, calculates, and updates fresh entries in the database for a blockchain database. All nodes operate together to guarantee that they all come to the same findings, offering the network built-in safety.
The consequence of this distinction is that blockchains are well suited as a recording scheme for certain tasks, while a centralized database is completely suitable for other tasks.
Decentralized control
Blockchains enable distinct parties who do not trust each other to share data without needing a central administrator. Transactions are processed by a network of consumers acting as a consensus mechanism so that everyone creates the same shared recording scheme simultaneously.
The importance of decentralized control is that it eliminates the risk of centralized control. Anyone with adequate access to that scheme can ruin or corrupt the information within a centralized database. This makes administrators dependent on customers.
For the most part, some administrators have earned the trust they put in them. People’s money is not robbed, for instance, by banks that record the cash they hold in personal databases. And, there’s a logical reason why you want centralized control. Centralized control can be a specialty, a reason to be.
But that also implies those with command, such as a bank, need to spend billions of dollars keeping these centrally held databases from being altered by hackers or anyone else who might want to profit from another’s loss. If the key administrators we trust to maintain our data confidential fail in this respect, then we lose.
History of itself
Most centralized databases keep data up-to-date at a specific time. They are more or less a snapshot of a moment in time.
Blockchain databases are capable of keeping appropriate data now, but also all the data that has come before. Blockchain technology can generate databases that have histories of their own. They develop like ever-expanding archives of their own history while also giving a portrait in real-time.
It is the cost needed to compromise or alter these databases that have caused individuals to call an immutable blockchain database. It is also where we can begin to see the evolution of the database into a recording scheme.
Performance
While blockchains can be used as recording devices and are perfect as transaction platforms, they are regarded slow as databases compared to what is feasible for the digital transaction technology we see with Visa and PayPal today.
While this efficiency will definitely be improved, the nature of blockchain technology needs that some speed is sacrificed. The way distributed networks are used in blockchain technology implies they do not share and compound processing energy, they each serve the network separately, then compare the outcomes of their job with the remainder of the network until there is agreement that something has happened.
On the other side, centralized databases have been around for centuries and have seen their efficiency rise in the lock-step with a formula that has come to define innovation in the digital age: Moore’s Law.
Confidentiality
Bitcoin is a database that is write-uncontrolled, and read-uncontrolled. That means anyone can write a new block into the chain, and anyone in the chain can read a block.
A permitted blockchain, like a centralized database, can be write-controlled and read-controlled. That implies that the network or protocol can be set up so that only permitted respondents can write to the database or read the database.
But, if confidentiality is the only objective and trust is not a problem, blockchain databases have no benefit over a centralized database.
Hiding data on a blockchain needs a lot of cryptography and an associated computational burden on the network nodes. There’s no way to do this that’s more effective than simply hiding the data completely in a private database that doesn’t even involve network connectivity.
Think of all the databases that Ethan Hunt broke into in the “Mission: Impossible” series and you can get a sense of the kind of confidentiality that is possible in private databases.
