The key difference is that NoSQL was being developed and used to solve specific issues with using traditional databases. They were implementations of solutions to problems. Blockchain is a solution in search of problems.
By all means I support the research and development of blockchain technologies, but most applications are impractical thus far. The backlash against blockchain is a natural levelling mechanism combating the hyping and over-application of as yet inappropriate tech. As those in the know we should aim for the correct balance rather than blindly support it in hopes of future possible benefits. But as always, be informed and follow what you believe.
Please don't go by the title. It is tongue in cheek but on reading the article will actually clear author's position. He is a supporter/worked on both technologies.
Author's position is that "haters" brought NoSQL down. (Side note - With this usage of "haters" I wonder if "critic" will ever be seen outside a dictionary).And same is happening with Blockchain. Too many critics. NoSQL proponents should help Blockchain because of the shared camaraderie of being a technology which were/are criticized heavily.
The main point of the article, like most in this space, is to re-define the word blockchain. What exactly is it? As per author it is byzantine fault tolerant state machine replication or BFTSMR. But there is not much to be said aside from the fact that "blockchain shouldn't be written off, just yet".
While agree on not writing off blockchain yet, I can't help but ask if blockchain solved BFTSMR - it happened over 9 years ago. And people/companies dint jump in until 1-2 years ago. So most of these people/companies are just following the hype train.
Except that (to use your acronym) BFTSMRs are fairly common and well understood. Git, to choose the obvious example, probably qualifies.
The only thing that's new about blockchain is that it removes the requirement for a quorum of nodes in the network to trust one another. It achieves this solitary feature by means of forcing all updates to be as computationally inefficient as is economically feasable. Even then the security guarantees only hold as long as no single party can directly or indirectly control 51% of the network's collective computing power.
Aside from the cryptocurrency use case, that's a fantastically unattractive feature profile. The more fully I grasp how much of blockchain's promises rest on proof of work as a cornerstone the less optimistic I am the technology will ever have any useful real world applications other than serving as the mcguffin in weird zero sum securities market games.
Haters did not bring NoSQL down. Unrealistic promises brought NoSQL down, and people bought into it without ever actually benchmarking anything because everyone else was doing it too.
That argument for support due to situation is pretty spurious 'crank magnetism' level like suggesting scientests of gut bacteria's role in human health should support homeopathy because both are outside mainstream established practices. NoSQL actually works for a task and isn't being pushed by people trying to rerun every financial scam in history but with tokens on a computer.
The big difference is that NoSQL (and XMl, and...) were always primarily developer tools and the hype/investment was always scoped more-or-less to that environment.
My parents never asked me about NoSQL, and celebrities didn't sell/promote IPOs for companies built around XML processing libraries...
The author hits on this in the end:
> There are some very real things to worry about in association with Blockchain. Cryptocurrencies are not investment strategies, and are not going to have any of the promised power-distribution and -equalization effects they peddle while their value and cost fluctuate so wildly.
Companies and VCs investing in NoSQL databases really were trying to creating business around developer tooling. But most blockchain companies aren't selling themselves as developer tooling companies. The rest of the comparison seems less important than that distinction.
The missing ingredient in the first wave of NoSQL was ACID transactions. (Disclosure, I was an early contributor to Apache CouchDB and Couchbase Mobile).
Now that we have global ACID transaction algorithms like Google Spanner's and FaunaDB's (my current employer), mission critical apps are moving to NoSQL because multi-region consistency is safer and easier to deal with than RDBMS scale out. With ACID transactions, temporal storage, and object-level security, these distributed databases can beat blockchain at its own game by becoming a scalable runtime for smart contract applications, with all of the safety but with the flexibility of a database.
Blockchain is of course much wider than cryptocurrencies and is the underlying technology. Blockchain is not being outlawed or discouraged, cryptocurrencies are.
The point is that many companies have now a hammer (blockchain) and are seperately searching for a nail to use it with when all they have is screws.
> Blockchain is of course much wider than cryptocurrencies
This is a weird position.
In the sense that the concept of a "blockchain" is not tied to cryptocurrencies, they're really just an old, well-understood data structure (e.g. the Git datamodel is fundamentally a blockchain, except generalised from a linked list to a DAG), and it's neither novel nor the focus of the current craze.
In the sense of a decentralised distributed system, the only fully decentralised consensus layer I know of (Nakamoto consensus) literally depends on being used to host a cryptocurrency for its security guarantees.
Why do you believe they didn't? It was pretty impossible for them not to win since traditional systems cannot meet availability, latency, performance, scale requirements of applications in the cloud. You can clearly see a complete take over of large scale data storage for example.
> governments were not actively trying to regulate or outlaw NoSQL
... perhaps they should have ...
> so NoSQL did manage to win eventually.
post hoc ergo propter hoc
I've always been of the belief that the best thing that could happen to a given cryptocurrency is for it to be prohibited by major governments - it would drive it underground, sure, and kill institutional investment... but it would also spur innovation in the areas that are required to make it a truly revolutionary technology.
nosql is a databse system, blockchain mission is to enable trustless immutable unstoppable appications and miney transmission worldwide to change society. comparing apples with hot dogs here
By all means I support the research and development of blockchain technologies, but most applications are impractical thus far. The backlash against blockchain is a natural levelling mechanism combating the hyping and over-application of as yet inappropriate tech. As those in the know we should aim for the correct balance rather than blindly support it in hopes of future possible benefits. But as always, be informed and follow what you believe.