Mastering Blockchain

Chapter 9. Other Blockchains

The success of Bitcoin and Ethereum has provided the genesis for many developers to begin working on blockchain technology. As previous chapters have shown, the decentralized nature of both networks leads to some interesting use cases.

Businesses must secure and protect corporate and user data, and blockchains are a novel technical idea for how to do so. Blockchain technology could be put to many uses within organizations. However, in practice this often requires rethinking the way that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other open consensus networks operate in order to conform with data security, regulatory, and other requirements businesses must comply with.

What Are Blockchains Good For?

For open blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, the main use cases thus far have been mostly speculative—the coverage of markets, dapps, and DeFi in this book have made that clear, we hope. But for businesses and other organizations, blockchain has some other interesting uses, and there are many trials occurring in this area.

Let’s look once again at the basics of what blockchain is useful for besides cryptocurrencies and speculation. Here are the core technologies that are put together to create what is known as blockchain today:

Consensus

Validates new records to prevent corruption

Hashing

Solidifies records to retain an audit trail

Encryption

Secures the transfer of digital data

Distribution

Enables sharing of public ledger records

What are the specific properties derived ...