Is Blockchain a distributed database? [closed]

Question

most of the articles cited Blockchain as a distributed database. Does it mean we can store any type of data in blockchain like audio, video ,pdf?

Answer 1

The first version of blockchain applied in bitcoin. The main idea behind blockchain is to be decentralized. It consists of blocks. Each block contains information about previous node and the current node. Whatever information (like audio, video, pdf) has to be hashed(digital signature).

You can try to understand like this. For example, car sharing companies nowadays try to invoke blockchain to their systems. Once you rent a car, your whole information will store persistent and immutable on the car. The next car renter will see information about the previous user that will help him drive secure :) or something else

Answer 2

The blockchain is something which utilizes the functionality of distributed database to commit transactions between peer nodes which are part of the ecosystem. It's not distributed computing it has something more like Encryptions, nodes, ledgers, digital signing, and many more additional things. You can say its skyscraper for what distributed computing do. If you see in blockchain we have private and public blockchain network, like IBM Hperledger Fabric, Etherium, R3 Corda

Answer 3

It's probably better to think of the blockchain as a distributed ledger i.e., ledger data that is shared among a number of actors. The reason the DB analogy doesn't work is addressed by one of the other answers: all changes have to be adds/amendments as the ledger itself is immutable. Any database that can't modify data is hobbled to say the least, however, the blockchain is more about an unchanging historical record than it is about storing data for manipulation. You can put whatever data you want onto the blockchain but considering how data is added to the blockchain and the fact that ALL CHANGES are recorded the smaller the data the better.

Answer 4

Think of blockchain as a relatively slow, very expensive database that provides excellent resistance to hacking and corruption. It's a Write-Once, Read Mostly (WORM) system.

You absolutely could store any data you want in a hypothetical blockchain. The practical limits are, you don't want to store very large chunks of data (so, not video); you probably don't want to store frequently changing data (so, not a thesis paper you're revising) -- unless it's important somehow to record every single change forever.

Because, its other feature is, once something is written to a blockchain, it's there forever.

Need to fix a typo? Then you add a new record with a correction.

Need to delete a record? Too bad, you can't. Best you can do is enter a new record saying that the record you wish to delete is "obsolete" or "repudiated" or "no longer valid" or "should be considered as deleted."

In short, it's wise to treat your blockchain as a permanent record.

1 Slow: the Bitcoin blockchain runs about 3 transactions per second (tps) and the Ethereum blockchain runs about 30 tps.

2 Expensive: the Bitcoin blockchain cost an average of US$ 8.22 per transaction in November 2017 according to Digiconomist.

Answer 5

If you asked the question referring "blockchain is a distributed database" as the statement used while explaining about blockchain in blogs and video tutorials, providing further clarification for your understanding: 1. blockchain is not a distributed database technology if you are comparing it with other rdbms/nosql database. 2. bockchain is some how distributed database if you consider it has distributed nodes in the network and all have consistent copy of ledgers, distributed ledgers which are maintained in any kind of database technology and also leverage cryptography to provide a decentralized multi-version concurrency control and maintain consensus about the existence.

Refer the link for further explanation, where you find explanation about it as a distributed database and other similar stuff.

Answer 6

Look at what type of data storage, if it is some string, json object, you can expand the structure of the book structure chain store; If the picture, video, large files; You can hash the value of the block chain, the original file using cloud storage