[rosetremiere]

It's hard to understand what tigerbeetle is about. Can anyone ELI5 it for me? As far as I can tell, it's some kind of a library/system geared at distributed transactions? But is it a blockchain, a db, a program ? (I did look at the website)

[eatonphil]

Hey thanks for the feedback! We've got concrete code samples in the README as well [0] that might be more clear?

It's a distributed database for tracking accounts and transfers of amounts of "thing"s between accounts (currency is one example of a "thing"). You might also be interested in our FAQ on why someone would want this [1].

[0] https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle#quickstart

[1] https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/FAQ/#why-would-i-want-a-dedicat...

[rosetremiere]

The faq helped, thanks! So, an example of typical use would be, say, as the internal ledger for a company like (transfer)wise, with lots of money moving around between accounts? But I understand it's meant to be used internally to an entity, with all nodes in your system trusted, and not as a mean to deal with transactions from one party to another, right?

[ngrilly]

It's a distributed database for financial transactions, using double entry accounting, written in Zig, and with a very innovative design:

- LMAX inspired

- Static memory allocation

- Zero copy with Direct I/O

- Zero syscalls with io_uring

- Zero deserialization

- Storage fault tolerance

- Viewstamped Replication consensus protocol

- Flexible Quorums

- Deterministic simulation like FoundationDB

[Yoric]

Zero deserialization? That sounds rather scary. This means absolute trust in data read from disk or received from other nodes?

[laserbeam]

It's a special purpose DB. No relation to blockchains.