What are the main differences between blockchains & distributed ledger technology from a technical perspective?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Is there any solid justification that every blockchain is a distributed ledger, but not every distributed ledger is a blockchain?.

What are the main differences between blockchains & distributed ledger technology from a technical perspective?

Why did some researchers say that distributed ledger is different than blockchain, on other side said that blockchain is same as from a technical perspective?

Note: Common keywords for distributed ledger are (shared ledger, or Distributed Ledger Technology, DLT)

I wish if someone could provide a solid justification for it, especially, from the technical perspective not as the definition of the above term.

manpreet 2 years ago

This will be a very short summary of a complex topic.

Starting with Bitcoin and Ethereum, the network achieves eventual consensus in the form of a chain of blocks containing transactions in the order the network has decided to process them, a.k.a. a chain of blocks.

This is not the only way to reach eventual consensus. In Corda, for example, transactions are not arranged into blocks.

They use an unspent transaction output (UTXO) model in which unique states exist and transactions consume states to make new states. The implementation is a big departure from a chain of blocks. There are no blocks. There is no chain.

If I'm not mistaken, R3 was among the first to start using the expression "distributed ledger" to describe a system with many similarities to Ethereum and many differences.

I'm not sure DLT is a precise technical term. In my mind, blockchain is one way to achieve a distributed ledger, but there are others.

Hope it helps.