There is much discussion today about multinational firms entering into the blockchain space. They, in fact, with their deep pocketbooks, created an entirely new Industry: the blockchain industry. At industry events, many topics are explored, most notably centered on the ways in which forms of blockchain technology could make more efficient the business and government processes of today, from bank transfers to verification to data storage. Is it a Blockchain?
At the heart of much of this discussion regarding blockchain innovation is end-to-end encryption and multi-signature transactions. The use of multi-signature and end-to-end encryption, while an important part of Bitcoin’s iteration, are probably not what’s central to the innovation, and neither are particularly new. What’s central to the Bitcoin innovations is perhaps the distributed manner in which data consensus is reached and the way in which the network is secured: via miners and cryptography, as it were. R3 is working with the biggest names in finance and technology. The purpose of this essay will not be to explore whether or not Bitcoin miners bring true security to the network (some of the brightest minds do not believe so), but, rather, we will explore whether or not, without a distributed consensus mechanism, can one have a true blockchain?
IBM has announced it is all-in on blockchain, but are they all in on an entirely blockchain “blockchain?” That is murky. Major institutions will find it difficult to adapt the mining complex – a central piece of the blockchain technology as expressed by Bitcoin – to their business models. IBM is “all in” on blockchain. How distributed could a private company ledger be? Is it even distributed if only one institution is running all the nodes on a network? These institutions will probably use distributed technology in some way to update their […]
