They’re functionally equivalent these days. Blockchain has become marketing speak mostly.
But if you squint a little. The history of a git branch sure looks a lot like a blockchain (or vice versa). You have a ledger of records (commits), that are append only, and each commit contains a merkle or hash tree (git tree object)
I have to squint pretty hard to convince myself. Git itself really only covers the auditing part, which any static service will do by virtue of storing data. Git repos aren't decentralized, they rely entirely on external software like GPG and SSH to enforce identity and have no native consensus mechanism. They also don't protect from erasing transactional history which is kinda seen as the cardinal sin of ledger-based economics.
If you wanted to be reductive you could try to argue that all linked lists or hashmaps are a blockchain once compiled. I think that's silly, bordering on revisionism. Git wasn't programmed as a Blockchain, and Blockchains weren't intended to resemble Git.
Sure they are. Git is one of the pioneering “distributed” version control systems. Every clone of a git repo is a complete copy. Sounds pretty decentralized to me.
Git’s native consensus mechanism is to defer to humans and record their decisions as merge commits.
I agree git natively doesn’t protect against erasing history. Although rebase is discouraged and any one node can’t forcibly erase history from every other node.
> Every clone of a git repo is a complete copy. Sounds pretty decentralized to me.
Every clone of a DNS lookup table is a complete copy too. That doesn't change the fact that DNS is one of the least decentralized technologies being developed and propagated today.
But if you squint a little. The history of a git branch sure looks a lot like a blockchain (or vice versa). You have a ledger of records (commits), that are append only, and each commit contains a merkle or hash tree (git tree object)
So yeah git is basically a blockchain.