Understanding Blockchain in 4 Links
For the last 2 months I have been researching blockchain. Without a doubt the hype and vast amounts of content available on this topic is overwhelming. It is often difficult to differentiate between the scams, vendor marketing hype and interesting innovation.
My interest in blockchain has nothing to do with bitcoin or even cryptocurrencies. My initial interest is how and why enterprises will use blockchain to build applications. How will blockchain technology fit within the existing application infrastucture technology? I still have a lot to learn but of all my research here are four links I found the most useful.
This article does the best job of distilling what blockchain provides to enterprise applications. In general, IBM has done a really good job explaining the benefits and use cases of blockchain. It is definitely worth the time reading the IBM blockchain site to get an idea of how blockchain could be used to solve industry challenges.
2. Top 5 enterprise blockchain platforms
There are a number of competing blockchain platforms, in fact the general term is distributed ledger technology (DLT). This article identifies 5 platforms that target the enterprise. I would also add to this list Hashgraph and IOTA.
3. Key concepts and application integration
There is a lot of new terminology, a lot of it not well explained and often specific to a platform. For instance the term ‘smart contract’ is from ethereum but in Hyperledge it is called ‘chain code’. This article from the Hyperledger documentation is the best at explaining some of the key concepts but more importantly how transactions are added to the ledger. It is specific to Hyperledger but the general concepts are applicable to other platforms.
4. Distributed Architect Perspective
If you want the perspective of an experienced distributed architect and a contrarian view then please read this excellent article from Clemens Vasters. There is a lot of hype around blockchain so it is important to make sure you get the view point of someone with a ton of experience and who hasn’t drank the kool-aid.
I hope anyone learning about blockchain finds these links useful. I still have a lot to learn about blockchain and in particular ICOs. I am sure I have missed some other great resources. Please feel free to leave links in the comments to article that might help understand how blockchain will be used by enterprise.