# Analogies: Phones and Shopping

We’ll conclude this IronWeave overview with a couple of analogies that help relate IronWeave to our everyday lives:

## A Single Phone Line vs. the Entire Telephone Network

First, let’s compare monolithic blockchains to IronWeave using something familiar - **phone lines**. We can compare monolithic blockchains (like Ethereum, Solana, others) to an individual phone line – that phone line is shared by everyone who wants to use it, and every conversation that occurs on that shared line can be heard by everyone else, recorded for later playback by anyone who is interested. You can talk on that phone line when it’s your turn (or bribe your way to the front of the line) but you must be quick, because you only have a few seconds to say what you want. And for the most part, you can only talk on that single line about subjects that have to do with money changing hands.

In contrast, IronWeave is like the *entire global phone network*, with essentially an unlimited collection of phone lines. In that vast global phone network you can have individuals making calls on their own lines, there can be conference calls, there can be party lines, whatever communication the phone line owner wants, they can have. Calls can be long, they can be short, or anything between, and they can be on any subject that can be talked about. You can have as many phone lines as you like, too, like a home line and a cell line and a work line, and only share each line with appropriate people. If you’re a business, you might have hundreds of lines. And if the world needs more phone lines, they just add them to the global network as needed. 

## Shopping For Data

Next, let’s compare centralized data stores (like databases, data warehouses, so on) to IronWeave using a pair of analogies. 

We can compare centralized data stores (like cloud-based databases, warehouses, file systems, so on) to the massive department stores you see in big shopping malls, with huge glass storefronts that show all the valuable data sitting inside… relatively unprotected. Centralized data stores are just like those shopping malls, where anyone can roam around nearby and see what's just beyond the glass. For online hackers it takes only one smash-and-grab robbery to break through that glass and gain access to all the valuable data goods inside. And online those “shopping malls” of huge data are available 24/7, and bad actors constantly probe the glass to see where it’s vulnerable so they can attack when the store is most vulnerable. 

In contrast, each IronWeave block is like its own **data vault** (like a safe), each with its own unique combination, unavailable to the public and tossed into an ocean with millions (or billions, or trillions) of other similar data vaults, all of which would look the same from the outside. 

Any bad actor would have to dive into that ocean and try to find whatever data vault they were after (remember, IronWeave blocks are only known to exist by their participants). Even if a bad actor were to find a particular data vault, they would have to crack that unique combination (unique encryption keys). Even if they *did* crack it, they have only that one piece of data for all their work… and what could they do with it? In ransomware cases, bad actors re-encrypt data then demand a ransom to unlock it, but each IronWeave block has two or more interconnected hashes to detect such tampering and if a bad actor were able to scramble that block's contents, IronWeave can simply *reconstitute* that block from any one of its multiple duplicates that are automatically created whenever a block is created. 

So anything built on IronWeave, with its individual and distinct data vault (block), does not have a good ROI (return on investment) for bad actors or hackers, because each unit of data is so relatively small, hard to crack, and one of multiple duplicates. Whether it’s a payment or a contract, a hospital infrastructure or a utility grid, interactions and applications built using IronWeave are better prepared for the always-online world we live in today.


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