Blockchain

A Conceptual and Motivational Overview

Posted by Craig Johnston on Saturday, September 1, 2018

The Internet of Transactions

Blockchain 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.

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What You'll Learn
  • Build data pipelines with MQTT, NiFi, Logstash, MinIO, Hive, Presto, Kafka and Elasticsearch
  • Leverage Serverless ETL with OpenFaaS
  • Explore Blockchain networking with Ethereum
  • Support a multi-tenant Data Science platform with JupyterHub, MLflow and Seldon Core
  • Build a Multi-cloud, Hybrid cluster, securely bridging on-premise and cloud-based Kubernetes nodes

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.

Learn

Deasil Cognitive offers a Blockchain workshop for industry leaders interested in this novel technology, where it came from, where it is going, and the types of problems it solves.

Contact [email protected] for more information on Blockchain or to schedule a Blockchain workshop.

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

This blog post, titled: "Blockchain: A Conceptual and Motivational Overview" by Craig Johnston, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Creative Commons License

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