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Comment by askmike

I've worked on private blockchain solutions for financial firms (in supply chain and commodity trade finance). The reason companies are doing these projects is because in a lot of scenarios no one trusts each other. Even if they do, there are not allowed to for legal and compliance reasons. As such huge parts of the industry are paper based. Because if there was a simple MySQL solution from a company they would have gone with that 2 decades ago.

The article talks about reasons for wanting a private blockchain. But I have never heard any of these reasons come up in any of my projects. I'm not sure what projects the author is talking about, but definitely not anything related to what most private blockchain projects companies are doing. That said there is a lot of hype in the space (not denying that).

You can make an argument that bitcoin in the whitepaper was defined as an open access system, and as such any closed access system is not a blockchain. Sure, but the developers on these projects (like me) are calling them blockchains nonetheless because most the of the tech is the same (except for things like consensus forming, you probably would never use PoW in a private blockchain).

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Companies are looking into private blockchains because they allow for systems where not one party is in charge of all the data and the network. But they require more than an append only log.

parent askmike 8 years ago

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