Yes, and I think that’s a nice way of putting it, at least for accountants!
I generally introduce blockchain to newcomers as a type of database; it is a technology that allows you to organise data - in bitcoin’s case, ‘blocks’, or chunks of transactions, linked together in a cryptographically secured ledger.
Is blockchain the appropriate database for all situations? Absolutely not. It’s a more inefficient database in many ways because of its distributed nature. You may not always need the decentralization and replication that you get with a blockchain versus a traditional database system. There are fewer people who know how to develop blockchain software and applications, and fewer systems that can interact with a blockchain database than with a traditional distributed or centralized database.
So it’s not necessarily a solution that makes sense in many cases, and I think that’s what a lot of businesses that have started to go down the blockchain rabbit hole over these past two years have come to realize. Many executives are now saying “wait a minute, blockchain doesn’t really fit our needs”.
Garrick Hileman and Michel Rauchs released the 2017 Global Blockchain Benchmarking Study, which can be downloaded as a PDF here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3040224.
You can read the brief summary of their study here: https://insight.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2017/central-banks-are-trialling-blockchain/
The above interview was conducted on 12 December, 2017.