Your blockchain must have all of the following properties:
- It's a merkle tree, or a construct with equivalent properties.
- There is no single point of trust or authority; nodes are operated by different parties.
- Multiple 'forks' of the blockchain may exist - that is, nodes may disagree on what the full sequence of blocks looks like.
- In the case of such a fork, there must exist a deterministic consensus algorithm of some sort to decide what the "real" blockchain looks like (ie. which fork is "correct").
- The consensus algorithm must be executable with only the information contained in the blockchain (or its forks), and no external input (eg. no decisionmaking from a centralized 'trust node').
If your blockchain is missing any of the above properties, it is not a blockchain, it is just a ledger.
Refreshing to see this list. The industry is currently flooded with 'ledgers' rebranded as blockchains, and it’s exhausting to see how much marketing fluff is built around that confusion. It’s exactly why I prefer sticking to sources that actually focus on the tech and market mechanics, like https://incrypted.com/en/, rather than just following the latest buzzwords. Thanks for laying this out—it’s a necessary reality check.