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Professional notes by Craig Johnston
long-form, short-form, working drafts · since 2008
VOL. XIX · MMXXVI
82 NOTES IN PRINT
FOLIO XXXVIII 01 SEP 2018 · 2 MIN · SHORT-FORM

Blockchain

A Conceptual and Motivational Overview

Diagram · folio xxxviii
gitGraph
   commit id: "Genesis"
   commit id: "Block 1"
   commit id: "Block 2"
   branch fork
   commit id: "Block 3a"
   checkout main
   commit id: "Block 3"
   commit id: "Block 4"
   commit id: "Block 5" tag: "longest chain wins"
   commit id: "Block 6"
   commit id: "Block 7"
   commit id: "Block 8" tag: "finalized"

Blockchain (The Internet of Transactions) may be a recent entry to the technology landscape. However, it has quickly become an essential iteration in the evolution of peer-to-peer communication and distributed computing. Originally developed as a way to protect digital currency, Blockchain technologies now support any digital asset, from signal data to complex messaging, to the execution of business logic through code. Blockchain technologies are rapidly forming a new decentralized internet of transactions.

§Transactional Integrity and Security

Blockchain provides the ability to ensure the integrity and immutability of data; it’s origin, destination, and occurrence, as well as computational logic. Blockchain delivers mathematically-sound proof, through consensus-based validation of public or privately shared ledgers. Defined protocols allow consensus to replace central trust, rejecting compromised nodes and data that is incompatible with the agreement of the majority.

§Decentralization and Distribution

Blockchain technologies employ decentralized peer networks, using well-defined algorithms and protocols to distribute transactions and proof of their integrity. Blockchain’s decentralization removes the need for any single point of trust and prevents any single point of failure.

§The Cloud

The Cloud was once nearly synonymous with select vendors offering a variety of managed services. While many of the services managed by leading vendors were often open source application, readily available to anyone, value was provided through vendor proprietary orchestration and interconnectivity. The recent advances of Cloud Native technologies and standards in containerization and container orchestration have paved the way for new vendor-neutral frameworks to emerge. Blockchain frameworks have been quick to support and extend this new Cloud Native ecosystem making vendor lock-in unnessary for rapidly deploying new implementations.

§AI/ML

Artifical Intelligence has traditionally placed its trust in logic designed and implemented by knowledge engineers. The most radical advancements in recent AI technologies are now in the field of Machine Learning. The new breed of intelligent systems not only make decisions based on data but have likely derived their existing knowledge from it. Blockchain technologies ensure the integrity of transactions containing data and logic destined for AI decisions or reinforcement learning. Blockchain allows AI to advance knowledge and implement decisions rooted in transactional and data integrity.

§Develop

Read my article on how to “Deploy a Private Ethereum Blockchain on a Custom Kubernetes Cluster.” to get you started in building custom Blockchain solutions.

§Selected Reading
· 1 September 2018 ← back to all notes