I was reading lot of articles on blockchain and almost everyone has some different understanding of blockchain. Is there any accepted definition of Blockchain by any community? In few articles I read: Blockchains are Decentralised while DLTs are not. All blockchains are DLT but not all DLTs are blockchain. It added "if transactions get stored in blocks then it is a blockchain else it is not" From above statements- Is Decentralisation must for a Blockchain? Or it is just a Immutable Distributed Database? which can be centralised or decentralised?

hyperledger-fabrichyperledgerblockchainethereumcorda

Reputation: 2773

Can a blockchain be Centralised? Will it be called as Blockchain if it is centralised?

I was reading lot of articles on blockchain and almost everyone has some different understanding of blockchain.
Is there any accepted definition of Blockchain by any community?

In few articles I read:

Blockchains are Decentralised while DLTs are not.
All blockchains are DLT but not all DLTs are blockchain. It added "if transactions get stored in blocks then it is a blockchain else it is not"

From above statements-
Is Decentralisation must for a Blockchain?
Or it is just a Immutable Distributed Database? which can be centralised or decentralised?

Upvotes: 5

Answers (6)

Idrab

Reputation: 101

According to Arrifin and Subramanian (2022), blockchain is of three types: public, private, and consortium or federated. While the public blockchain allows reading and engaging in transactions to be done by anyone, following the presence of transparency and anonymity, the private blockchain is closed and limited to one organization. Lastly, the federated or consortium blockchain ensures that access and permission are controlled by a group of entities.

Also, with the definitions of internet, intranet, and extranet, one can easily understand that a blockchain can also leverage centralization. Extranet: An extranet is a private intranet extended to authorized users of an external organization. Intranet: An intranet is a hub for internal communications, allowing your organization to easily and effectively share company-wide announcements and policy updates Internet: The Internet connects computers to provide information using a communication protocol called TCP/IP

In conclusion, one needs to first understand the domain of application before querying the answer. E.G. A consortium should be able to leverage centralization in some of its operations.

REFERENCE

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9970827

Upvotes: 0

JBaczuk

Reputation: 14639

I would refer you to the first blockchain application, Bitcoin, which describes the "chain of blocks" in the original Bitcoin Whitepaper.

Blockchain

The term “blockchain” is often overused, that can have different meanings in different contexts. Blockchain technology has 3 major components that together really make it an innovation. Strictly speaking, a blockchain is just a data structure similar to a linked list. Blocks of data reference their previous block by including their digital fingerprint or hash in their block of data. If a previous block is modified, then all the following hashes will be different and it is easy to detect if the data has been tampered with. Even more importantly, is that this establishes an order to when events took place, in the case of Bitcoin, these events are transactions. The final piece is a consensus mechanism that allows participants on a publicly distributed network to all agree on a chain of blocks.

Consensus

A consensus mechanism extends the blockchain data structure by providing rules (agreed to by network participants) that enforce how blocks are accepted by the network as a whole. For example, with the proof-of-work consensus, there is an agreed-upon amount of work that must be done before a block is accepted as valid (its hash must meet a maximum value threshold). The lower the threshold, the more work must have been done (on average) to calculate the block hash. Providing a valid block hash becomes proof of work. This can make it much more difficult to modify past blocks, as the same amount of work must be done in order for the network to accept it as valid, thus distributed consensus can be achieved. This is why “blockchain technology” was invented, to achieve distributed consensus without relying on a third party. “Blockchain technology” is not really that interesting without the proof-of-work component and so it depends on what your definition of “blockchain technology” happens to be.

In conclusion, by this definition of blockchain, it doesn't make sense to use blockchain in a centralized environment (it is for distributed consensus).

Upvotes: 5

Uahmed

Reputation: 1845

Blockchain is a distributed ledger of Information. The main Concept was taken from the paper of Digital Time Stamping by Stuart Harber. The idea behind blockchain is to remove the centralized System so the decission power is taken from single Entity. Now if you want to make it centralised you are basically doing a trade off of the Basic properties of blockchain.

If you make the blockchain centralised one of the key feature is the consenses where other nodes verify the trnsactions so in centralised System the whole work is done by one node and we can assure that if that node is trustworthy node.

Upvotes: 0

SamChan

Reputation: 91

Let's firstly make it clear that what is decentralization.

Decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Concepts of decentralization have been applied to group dynamics and management science in private businesses and organizations, political science, law and public administration, economics, money and technology. -- WikiPedia

So basically, there's no central, authoritative person or group or whatever to make decisions or plans in a decentralized system. According to this, I personally would prefer to separate it into two essential levels of a blockchain system.

In terms of the blockchain system(software and hardware) itself, it is decentralized. Because it is based on a distributed computer system, and it also has consensus algorithm (POW, POS, DAG etc.) to make sure each node/party in the system can reach to consistency.

In terms of governance, it can be decentralized or centralized. A typical centralized blockchain system is the private blockchain, since it is governed/managed by a single group or organization. While, obviously, a public blockchain is decentralized on the other hand.

Upvotes: 0