There’s a certain kind of developer who states that blockchains are just terrible databases. As the narrative goes, why not just use PostgreSQL for

Yes, You May Need a Blockchain

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-05 22:30:04

There’s a certain kind of developer who states that blockchains are just terrible databases. As the narrative goes, why not just use PostgreSQL for your application? It’s mature, robust, and high performance. Compared to relational databases, the skeptic claims that blockchains are just slow, clunky and expensive databases that don’t scale.

While some critiques of this critique are already out there (1, 2), I’d propose a simple one sentence rebuttal: public blockchains are massively multiclient databases, where every user is a root user. They are useful for storing shared state between users, particularly when that shared state represents valuable data that users want to export without fail — like their money.

To motivate public blockchains from the standpoint of a non-crypto engineer, take a look at the cloud diagrams for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud.

There are icons for load balancers, transcoders, queues, and lambda functions. There are icons for VPCs and every type of database under the sun, including the new-ish managed blockchain services (which are distinct from public blockchains, though potentially useful in some circumstances).