which psychological mannequin is definitely right?
Bitcoin is
- A forex – a unit of measure.
- A community protocol by which funds might be made.
- A set of consensus guidelines.
- A definition of a transaction journal arising from the foundations and protocol.
If you happen to settle for the above, would not defining bitcoin as a state machine or as a database or each be both superfluous or secondary at finest?
So far as I can see, the Bitcoin community as a complete, doesn’t have a predefined finite set of states which it strikes between in response to predefined occasions. So it does not look to me like a classical state machine.
The transaction journal referred to as “the blockchain” is a vital a part of Bitcoin nevertheless it is not a database within the regular technical sense, The blockchain definition successfully defines solely a single unnormalised desk and doesn’t outline what indexes ought to exist. It is not a distributed database within the regular sense and it’s each replicated and decentralised. Nonetheless it is just a database within the broadest sense that you might name any structured assortment of information a database. I might name my outdated diary a database. I do not see the utility of this.
Sure standard databases and state machines could also be helpful in implementations however that does not imply Bitcoin is these issues.
For the reason that UTXO set might be constructed from the blockchain it’s secondary and arguably superfluous – it could possibly be thought-about merely an artifact of efficiency optimisation.
