Right, but if it’s being used internally within an organization then the business itself is the authority. I think I mentioned this in another reply somewhere but in many of these use cases it’s about preventing tampering or falsification of records.
Let’s take the pharmaceuticals use case as an example. In that scenario the important things to track are:
When did a product come off the production line
Who or what system handled the packing and shipment
When was it shipped
When was it received
Who received it
When does it expire
When was a specific item provided to a patient
Has a participant had their permissions revoked
If the pharmaceutical company is the one managing that system, and they provide individual health care facilities (and any intermediate handles) with “private keys”, that’s the entire extent of the central authority that’s required. Literally every other element can be encoded on the blockchain.
Compare that to a traditional system where you have to maintain databases, provide always-on connectivity to those databases for every participant, manage access control permissions for every user, etc etc etc
With blockchain, every participant can get the entirety of what they need with just their “private key” and a copy of the blockchain from one other peer. That’s it. They can submit their blocks (for a leaf node, “I received this package”; “I gave the item to this patient”; etc) to that one peer and as long as there is a path through that peer to the distributed network, the rest of the network can authenticate the validity of those blocks through network consensus. Tampering is immediately evident. And every block they submit is traceable to whoever that private key was issued to. And once they submit a block to the chain it can never be undone or modified, even if they have all the “permissions” in the world. They’d have to take over a massive percent of the distributed network to alter consensus.
Right, but if it’s being used internally within an organization then the business itself is the authority. I think I mentioned this in another reply somewhere but in many of these use cases it’s about preventing tampering or falsification of records.
Let’s take the pharmaceuticals use case as an example. In that scenario the important things to track are:
If the pharmaceutical company is the one managing that system, and they provide individual health care facilities (and any intermediate handles) with “private keys”, that’s the entire extent of the central authority that’s required. Literally every other element can be encoded on the blockchain.
Compare that to a traditional system where you have to maintain databases, provide always-on connectivity to those databases for every participant, manage access control permissions for every user, etc etc etc
With blockchain, every participant can get the entirety of what they need with just their “private key” and a copy of the blockchain from one other peer. That’s it. They can submit their blocks (for a leaf node, “I received this package”; “I gave the item to this patient”; etc) to that one peer and as long as there is a path through that peer to the distributed network, the rest of the network can authenticate the validity of those blocks through network consensus. Tampering is immediately evident. And every block they submit is traceable to whoever that private key was issued to. And once they submit a block to the chain it can never be undone or modified, even if they have all the “permissions” in the world. They’d have to take over a massive percent of the distributed network to alter consensus.