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Podcast: Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies
Episode: Allen Day: Google’s Mission to Provide Open Datasets for Public Blockchains
Description: Public blockchains produce enormous amounts of data. In theory, anyone can access the raw contents of transaction and blocks. In practice, however, querying blockchains can prove to be a daunting task.
The difficulty lies in the fact that blockchains are particular types of distributed databases and thus carry several limitations. Most, if not all, blockchains lack the most basic SQL querying capabilities supported by nearly every off-the-shelf database system.
Take Bitcoin as an example. Its API lacks even the most basic calls which would allow a user to query any address and receive the balance...