which psychological mannequin is definitely right?
Bitcoin is
- A forex – a unit of measure.
- A community protocol by which funds could be made.
- A set of consensus guidelines.
- A definition of a transaction journal arising from the principles and protocol.
When you settle for the above, would not defining bitcoin as a state machine or as a database or each be both superfluous or secondary at greatest?
So far as I can see, the Bitcoin community as an entire, doesn’t have a predefined finite set of states which it strikes between in accordance with predefined occasions. So it does not look to me like a classical state machine.
The transaction journal known as “the blockchain” is a necessary a part of Bitcoin nevertheless it is not a database within the typical 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. Nevertheless it is just a database within the broadest sense that you may name any structured assortment of knowledge a database. I may name my outdated diary a database. I do not see the utility of this.
Sure typical 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 could be constructed from the blockchain it’s secondary and arguably superfluous – it might be thought of merely an artifact of efficiency optimisation.
