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Professional notes by Craig Johnston
long-form, short-form, working drafts · since 2008
VOL. XIX · MMXXVI
112 NOTES IN PRINT
FOLIO XXXVIII 2018-09-01 · 4 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.

§2026 Update

I wrote this in 2018, near the top of the first big blockchain wave, and reading it back the tone is optimistic. I would not walk that back. The vision held up, it was just early. The “blockchain for everything” froth of 2018 cooled off, the way new-technology froth always does, but the substance underneath kept building, and several of the things this post gestured at are now real infrastructure rather than whitepapers.

Stablecoins turned into a payment rail. The “internet of transactions” idea is most concrete here: dollar-pegged stablecoins move serious volume for settlement and cross-border payments now, and in July 2025 the US passed the GENIUS Act, a federal framework for stablecoin issuance. Regulated, boring, real, which is exactly what adoption looks like.

Real-world assets are getting tokenized. BlackRock launched a tokenized US Treasury fund (BUIDL) in 2024, and its CEO has said publicly that he expects every financial asset to end up tokenized. When the largest asset manager in the world starts putting funds on a public chain, the “any digital asset” line in this post stops being aspirational.

Enterprise blockchain consolidated and matured. The scattered Hyperledger projects came together under LF Decentralized Trust, launched by the Linux Foundation in 2024 with more than a hundred members. The Cloud Native, vendor-neutral framing in the Cloud section below is roughly how that played out.

The AI section aged in an interesting direction too. In 2018 I framed blockchain as a way to guarantee the integrity of the data and logic feeding AI. AI then became the dominant story of the decade, and that integrity question, where did this model’s data and decisions actually come from, only got more important. Provenance for AI is a live problem now, and verifiable, tamper-evident records are one of the credible answers.

So: early, not wrong.

Original article below. Everything from here down is the post as originally written. The 2026 Update above covers what’s changed since.

§Transactional Integrity and Security

Blockchain provides the ability to ensure the integrity and immutability of data; its 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 applications, 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 unnecessary for rapidly deploying new implementations.

§AI/ML

Artificial 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
· 2018-09-01 ← back to all notes