Blockchain use explained with Google Docs

To explain how the blockchain use to the newbies it is easier to compare its functionality to Google Docs, the popular document tools I’m using to write this article.

“The Business of Blockchain” author, William Mougayar, in fact, said that the two tools have something in common and this comparison is very useful to explain the blockchain use.

Everyday you can find new use cases of the distributed ledger and the more people understand how it works, the more we will see an improvement in this revolutionary technology.

Who invented the blockchain didn’t probably imagine all of its possible applications, which is the reason why nowadays there are more and more experts with a deep knowledge in a particular side of the technology.

But, the first step is having a good expertise in the blockchain use.

The blockchain is similar to a database, but the ledger doesn’t revolution databases themselves, but how they get synchronized, explained Mougayar in his article appeared on Coindesk.

If two banks need to update their own account balances, they need to spend a lot of time and energy to coordinate, synchronize and ensure that each transaction works correctly.

In this case, money is held by the sender until it is received by the beneficiary.

But with the blockchain, this process changes a lot because there is only a single ledger and not two separate databases.

This is similar to Google Docs: what happens when you share a document and users need to edit it?

With traditional text editors users need to transfer the documents back and forth, losing time, energy and likely losing track of the versions.

With Google Docs, instead, all the users involved have access to the same document at the same time, and that document together with the updates are always visible real-time to each of them.

The same thing happens with the Blockchain compared to traditional ledgers.