&gt; So what I imagine when we talk about a single database is just some mapping of stock shares to owner.<p>Mmhmm. Keep simple things as simple as possible.<p>&gt; So now you have a datastore where the current state relies on an ever-growing stack of immutable changesets. This sounds exactly like what we talk about when we talk about blockchains.<p>Well, if <i>that&#x27;s</i> what a &quot;blockchain&quot; is, then git [0] was doing blockchains <i>way</i> before they were cool.<p>&gt; There are people who define a blockchain more strictly (e.g, The Blockchain(TM) with decentralization and crypto)<p>I can see not having a distributed ledger, but if you eject the cryptographic part of it then you don&#x27;t get any of the tamper resistance. Without that, all you have is a linked list. And -as we all know- &quot;linked list&quot; is a much less sexy phrase than &quot;blockchain&quot;.<p>[0] And -if we drop the cryptographically verifiable history part- pretty much <i>every</i> VCS <i>ever</i>.