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Comment by cakoose | Hacker News Reader

The "blockchain-based" part is misleading.

For one, when people say "blockchain", they're almost always including the clever protocol that enables a currency with no central authority. That's the interesting part. Bedrock doesn't do any of that.

Without that, "blockchain" is just a simple technique for incremental hashing. Bedrock uses that, but it's not substantial enough to sensibly list "blockchain-based" as one of the three top attributes.

(They could have said "Paxos-based". That's the protocol they use to ensure things don't get out of sync.)

Just trying to capitalize on the cryptocurrency hype, I guess. FaunaDB did something similar: https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-ledger-without-the-blockc...

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The "block" in "blockchain" refers to a certain kind of a block. Strictly speaking it refers to the "block" that is defined in the Bitcoin white paper (which itself doesn't mention blockchain): https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Extending from this, "blockchain" may mean any structure that has the same properties as Nakamoto's "blockchain".

Otherwise, the structure is just a hash list, a hash chain or a Merkle tree.

You are absolutely correct in that most of the people think of blockchain as something that includes distributed consensus mechanisms, but strictly speaking from a technical point of view blockchain and proof-of-[insert flavour] are two separate things, so IMHO their claim that is blockchain based is correct.

The word only has relevance when talking about some consensus. Otherwise you are just adding a checksum or signing with a private key

One need only read the words "private blockchain" on the referenced page to interpret this as "not a consensus blockchain".

I agree it's misleading; people need to understand that the words "private blockchain" are meaningless in the context of what they probably expect Blockchain (the capital B being what is on the page, again) to mean.

I note that the link for "private blockchain" attempts to explain this. But no one is going to convince me they aren't using the term for marketing hype.

> The "blockchain-based" part is misleading.

I don't agree. Maybe for one who doesn't understand what a blockchain is and only has an association with crypto currencies. They are just using a private blockchain as a ledger for all commits to the database. It seems a bit far fetched to me to assume they chose this core technology to "capitalize on the cryptocurrency hype".

They use blockchain as a synonym of "distributed ledger" (which blockchain is not just.) However, a distributed merkle tree is most of the "block and chain" part of the bitcoin paper. Yet, like other people in this thread, I believe Blockchain has come to include distributed consensus or byzantine fault tolerance, proof of work, and public keys as identities. Just because the word itself wasnt defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, doesnt mean it hasnt been defined after the fact.

They also claim to have used it two years before bitcoin existed.

https://bedrockdb.com/blockchain.html

just curious. Would you consider git as blockchain?

Hmm... Git's commit chain might be a blockchain (in the minimal sense of the word), since I think it uses that hash chaining technique.

But if I were describing Git to others, I wouldn't say "Git is a distributed, blockchain-based VCS" because that would give the wrong idea.

Not your op but I personally do not. The way the word has evolved blockchain includes the distributed consensus. I understand there is a concept of linked blocks, into a chain, and technically Bitcoin and folk are those. If someone said blockchain (datastructure) I would understand it as being only the data structure.

git is a chain of blocks, kinda. it's distributed. there is no consensus. It's not a blockchain by how most people would define it.

Not really. In bitcoin one chain is considered the truth, and this may change with chain length. in git, all branches are the truth.

I think it's a bit strange to call the basic idea behind a Merkle tree a "blockchain" -- we already had a word for Merkle trees before Bitcoin came about.

I do. My argument is here: https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/blockchain.md

blocktree, more than blockchain.

Aren't there some altcoins that have attempted to do a blocktree? I haven't paid much attention to them, other than reading about one a while back, but it seems like that wouldn't really go anywhere because once you do away with a single, unified, public view of truth you might as well be using a lightning network?

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