Foundations of Blockchain

Distributed databases versus distributed ledger technology (DLT)

The first question that pops up when we think of implementing blockchain is, how is blockchain-powered ledger technology different from traditional databases? Traditional databases are centralized, and most blockchain platforms use databases to store transactions locally on each node. So, the actual comparison should be between the DLT-powered by blockchain and the distributed databases, and this is what we'll focus on in this section.

Although databases are distributed in the case of distributed databases, there is still centralization involved as the databases are managed by a central trusted entity, whereas the ledger in a DLT is maintained by trustless nodes in the network. ...