Blockchain CBSA – Blockchain 101 Part 5

31. Comparing enterprise blockchains

Enterprise blockchain. So let’s go ahead and talk about enterprise blockchains. Now, the exam itself is really going to focus on three blockchains. The main blockchain is going to focus on is Ethereum, hyper, ledger and Bitcoin. Let’s just clarify, Bitcoin is not an enterprise anything, it’s a cryptocurrency, right? So it’s not a blockchain, it doesn’t support smart contracts, at least from a wide scale perspective. There’s a way to run them, but it’s not going to be efficient by any means. But that’s another story for another day. What I want to point out here is we want to understand where a theorem fits in, where hyperledger fits in, and I’ll touch on quarter, ripple and quorum as well, but I really want to focus on the exam.

Now, when it comes to a theorem, this is really across industry blockchain and it’s going to allow pretty much anyone from any industry to run essentially a platform on Ethereum. So, for example, it could be go on. It could be game development, it could be anything, whatever you want to think of, right? As long as you want to go ahead and purchase enough tokens to create your own Ethereum blockchain service, you can do that. It’s permission less.

Now, it’s currently running proof of work. It supports smart contracts. Now, there is a cryptocurrency. It’s not really a cryptocurrency, however, it’s treated like a cryptocurrency. It’s really a token and it’s called Ether. When I get to the Ethereum section, we’re going to talk a lot more about Ethereum, but just realize we’re just going to talk about the areas that we want to focus on for the section hyperledger, this is another cross industry blockchain. It’s permission, though, so that’s the main difference.

So if you’re looking for controlling your membership, then hyperledger is clearly going to be a better choice than Ethereum. There is no cryptocurrency as well, and there probably won’t be anytime soon. And it does support smart contracts. Now, the other blockchains, quota, ripple and quorum are considered enterprise blockchains as well.

These are the five main blockchains out on the market. Now, there’s other ones that may be considered enterprise or maybe just be really tiny from a market share perspective. Again, I’m not going to get into those for this course, but again, whether you’re using Neo list or whatever, again, you consider them enterprise or not, that’s great. I’m just going to leave that up to you to decide.

Now, one of the main things I want to point out is when we talk about a blockchain and on the exam, you’re going to get questions that are going to ask you around. What is the ledger? Is it permissionless or permission? How about consensus? We want to know the consensus. That’s supported by theorem and hyperledger. So hyperledger supports a pluggable framework. In other words, you go with Solo, you go with a PBFT hybrid if you want. You could also go, for example, with the Kafka sort of based solution as well.

So those are the choices right now on hyperledger. And you also want to know, does the blockchain support smart contract as well? Now, the Linux Foundation manages hyperledger for governance and marketing and everything governance with the theorem is done by developers. Now, when we get to Quota, Ripple and Quorum, again, those are separate consortiums that are really handling the management. Now, quota is not across industry blockchain, it’s really focused on the financial sector. However, there’s use cases that could expand it out. The main claim to fan that Corda has is that it supports what’s called legal pros.

And legal pros allows you to basically attach essentially legal jargon, a contract. It’s called a document, really, that’s going to explain how things are going to be adhered to, how they’re enforced, et cetera. That’s a way to help provide some legal value to a smart contract. Ripple is mainly the financial sector, but Ripple does not have smart contract capability. But Ripple does have a cryptocurrency called XRP. Quorum is basically a fork of the ethereum blockchain. It is cross industry and it does support smart contracts as well. It is permission and it’s very similar in a lot of respects to how ethereum is utilized.

And again, it is a fork of ethereum really. And it does run the EVM as well. But it does have permissioning, which is substantially different, of course, than ethereum. All right, well, with that said, that’s about all that I had for this module. The main things to know for the exam is to differentiate between ethereum and hyperledger as well. For the exam. Don’t worry too much about the other three right now, but I put in there just for comparison purposes. Let’s move on.

32. Objective – Bitcoin Improvement Protocols

Let’s talk about BIP, also known as Bitcoin improvement protocols. Now, one of the areas on the exam that you’re going to see a question on is going to be around a BIP. Now BIP is going to be probably an area a lot of people may not even be familiar with. So I put in a little bit more content than I needed to it. I just want to make sure we understand what it is. This could be a give me question on the exam, basically, but just realize that a BIP is really a design document for adding or updating information to the Bitcoin protocol. The BIP basically will provide a technical specification of a feature, a reason for the feature, a use case, whatever is required. This is basically the method for requesting updates. So just think of a BIP as a way to communicate and it’s a way it’s documented because Bitcoin doesn’t really have a central point of contact and therefore the VIP is really the method for developers or other interested parties to communicate.

Now there are three types of BIP. We have a process, a standard track and an informational. So let’s just break down these as well.

Now a standard track VIP is going to basically make changes to the protocol. It could definitely affect interruptibility and it does require basically community consensus. So therefore the community has to agree that this makes sense to do so. If someone wants to try to upgrade something on the blockchain, peer to peer protocol or increase the block size, there’s a VIP process to go through.

And then we have an informational. This is just basically adding support information in a lot of cases and then a process. This is going to basically change a process and how things are handled. Now, on the exam, the main thing to understand is to understand what a VIP is. I didn’t see anything on VIP types, but they’re there in case you do. And I would recommend you go to Google and just type in Bitcoin information protocol and just double check if you haven’t seen them before, just so you have an idea at a high level. But with that said, you’ll get a question on this. It’s just a question of knowing what a VIP is and why they are needed. Let’s go ahead and move on.

33. BTC Explorer

Now I’m over here at one of the Bitcoin block explorers and what we want to do is just take a look at what you could find out in a blockchain Explorer and then we’ll go take a look at the Genesis block for Bitcoin. Now, if we go over here, you can go and see that it has the hash rates available. Tells you the major pool that are essentially running. It also tells you the network status. This is BTC. com, there’s several others out there as well. You can go to there’s plenty of stats here. You can look at pool distribution, block size, the block version tells you the version of the blockchain that’s been released. You could go over here to Ethereum if you want.

There’s tools as well. There’s a mining profit calculator as well, transaction decoding, et cetera. Pool over here and you can join a pool if you so choose. But let’s go back to home and I just want to go show you the Genesis block of Bitcoin. Now all we want to do is go up to address here. The Genesis block of any blockchain is going to be typically zero. So we put in zero. We want to search for zero. Now this is going to come back and it does come back. And if we remember what year Bitcoin started, it was 2009. You could see that the first Bitcoin was actually written to the blockchain in 2009, january 3 at 115 05:00 P. m. . Now you can see here the block hash. This is the first hash that occurred. And notice that there’s no previous block. Again, this is a Genesis block. This is the Merkel Tree route that was started.

This tells you the number of bytes, confirmation, transaction, et cetera. This tells you again that this is the ID here of the transaction, no Bitcoin. This is basically initiated the blockchain, as you can see. And then again you go over here and find out the next block. Or actually the easiest way is to go here to the next block and see the next transaction. And then you’ll see the previous block hash listed here and the next block after that. So this is the way you could explore the transactions that have occurred. Again, the first few transactions on Bitcoin were more of a test for that matter. And then we go to the next block and the next block and you can see that the Merkel Tree will change and the previous block hash will change as well, so on and so on. And then after they’re done testing, you can see over here the fees.

Again, there isn’t much going on initially, but after Bitcoin gets started, like when we go back to home, we go and select one of these block heights over here, one of these transactions that were written. And let’s take a look. This tells you the height, basically the difficulty rate. That’s another discussion itself. Over here you get to go ahead and see the bitcoin and the time and date over here. So that was basically about a third of one bitcoin. The value of that at time of rating is about 3500 per bitcoin. And with that said, it’s probably about eleven, $1200 in that range somewhere in there. With that said, this is a Blockchain Explorer. Go to BTC. com and look around.