Blockchain – An Enterprise and Industry Perspective
Blockchain promises to fundamentally solve the issues of time and trust to address inefficiencies and costs in industries such as financial services, supply chains, logistics, and healthcare. Blockchain's key features include immutability and a shared ledger where transactional updates are performed by a consensus-driven trust system, which can facilitate a truly digital interaction between multiple parties.
This digital interaction is not only bound by systemic trust but ensures that the provenance of the transactional record maintains an immutable track record of interaction between parties. This very characteristic lends itself to culpability and non-repudiation and incentivizes fair play. With the blockchain system design, we are attempting to build a system that has implied trust. This trust system leads to reduced risks, and various applied technology constructs—such as cryptography, encryption, smart contracts, and consensus—essentially create gates to not only reduce risk but also infuse added security into the transaction system.
This book endeavors to provide a view into the technology, as well as the skills to bring it into effective use. In addition to being an enhanced version of the original edition of this book, it also focuses on key business-related issues, outlined in the first section of this chapter. The remainder of the chapter will provide an overview of the technology and integrate important business factors and considerations.
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
- Our approach to this new edition of this book
- Defining a blockchain
- Building blocks of blockchain solutions
- Fundamentals of the secure transaction processing protocol
- Applications of blockchain