Hyperledger Intro - Reading Assignment

[Aida1]

1. What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger?
   Businesses needed to privacy and confidentiality which the Bitcoin and Ethereum platforms had not yet provided.
   Business enterprises also needed to identify the participants.

2. Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases?
   Public blockchain has no privacy for its data and transactions are slow for businesses to participate.

3. What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric?
   Java, NodeJS and Go.

4. What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”?
   It means the platform has an appropriate trust level, it rely on a well-establish tool kits for CFT(cash fault to tolerant) or BFT(byzantine fault tolerant).

[MrAndres]

1. What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger?
   The benefits of the underlying technology of the blockchain made companies very interested in applying for example the distributed ledger technology but with some conditions like implementation of KYC & AML regulations, also they required performance characteristics that public blockchains are not able to deliver.

2. Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases?
   Due to its permisionless nature, the participants are not identifiable, low transaction throughput performance and high latency of transaction confirmation

3. What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric?
   Java, Go and Node.js

4. What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”?
   “pluggable consensus protocols” are Hyperledger Fabric’s top characteristics as they enable the platform to be more effectively customized to fit particular use cases and trust models depending on the business needs.

[DoubleTrouble]

1. What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger?
   The realization of limitations of public blockchains and a desire to have full control and ownership of blockchain projects/implementations.

2. Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases?
   In business, in the most of the cases you must follow laws. Use KYC and AML. The networks has to be permissioned. Be able to trace information and control.

3. What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric?
   Java, Node JS, GO

4. What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”?
   Customisable modular component for consensus tailored for specific use case. This allows the platform to rely on well-established toolkits for CFT (crash fault-tolerant) or BFT (byzantine fault-tolerant) ordering.

[William_Kuang]

1. The growing popularity of bitcoin and ethereum as well as a few other derivative technologies lead to the adoption of the underlying distributed ledger technology by enterprises.

2. Public blockchains don’t provide the identity of the participants (KYC) nor does it address anti-money laundering regulations so businesses tend to shy away from them.

3. Java, Go, and Node.js are all used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric.

4. “Pluggable consensus protocols” allows customization of the platform to fit the needs of the business. Depending on how many parties are involved, different protocols can be applied to sustain efficiency of the hyperledger.

[jude]

1. Use cases in industry where performance is needed, while maintaining privacy and confidentiality of transactions are upheld.
2. Popular public blockchains are not suitable because of being permissionless, anonymous, latency of transaction confirmations, and lack of privacy in transactions.
3. Java, Go, and node.js are programming languages that are used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric
4. Pluggable consensus protocols means that the ordering of transactions is delegated to a modular component and is logically decoupled from the peers that execute transactions and maintain the ledger.

[Alex_13]

1. What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger?

The fact that many public blockchains, by design and purpose, do not serve the needs of enterprises that want to use blockchain technology for business use cases, has triggered substantial interest in permissioned blockchain solutions like Hyperledger. Permissioned blockchains can be tailored to the specific needs of enterprises, let it be for pure business purposes (e.g. high data throughput, keeping sensitive company data private) or regulatory requirements (e.g. KYC). Permissioned blockchains offer the possibility to exploit some of the benefits of the blockchain technology while mitigating or eliminating some of its drawbacks that represent significant obstacles for the adoption of this technology in the enterprise sphere.

2. Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases?

By purpose, public blockchains are designed to be permissionless and decentralized networks that offer its members anonymity and independence of the governance of a central authority while simultaneously ensuring that the network is secure and its transactions immutable in order to create a trustless environment that attracts users who seek these functionalities and characteristics. However, these characteristics require performance-expensive consensus algorithms that limit data throughput and all transaction data is public to anyone. These are all points (although this list of points is not exclusive) that hamper companies to use public blockchains for internal business processes.

3. What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric?

Smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric can be written in languages such as Java, Go and Node.js

4. What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”?

Pluggable consensus protocols represent the option to apply a different consensus mechanism to a network depending on its design and setup. This makes it possible to avoid the use of a performance-expensive consensus algorithm in a network where it is not necessary and instead to use a simpler consensus algorithm to improve data throughput.

[alonsoalvaradojr]

1. What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger?
   The rise in interest for public blockchains caused businesses to see what blockchain tech could accomplish if the data being created could be kep private and costs could significantly drop.
2. Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases?
   they are expensive and public and a lot slower
3. What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric?
   java,go, node.js
4. What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”?
   it means that consensus protocols can be easily designed for a specific use case

[Damedius]

1)The popularity of permissionless blockchain technology caused people to be interested in how it could be applied to existing businesses.

2)Users are anonymous and the costs are higher to maintain it.

3)Java, Python, Go Lang.

4)It means being able to “plug-in” different consensus protocols depending on what is needed.

[FreeBird81]

1. The popularity of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other derivative technologies grew, but enterprise use cases required performance characteristics that the permissionless blockchain are unable to deliver. The identity of the participants is a hard requirement, so the Hyperledger was able to provide that.

2. Public blockchains are open to anyone and participants interact anonymously and that’s why it’s not appropriate for enterprises. Enterprises required:

• participants must be identifiable
  -networks need to be permissioned
  -privacy and confidentiality of transactions and data pertaining to business transactions

3. Java, Go, and Node.js

4. Pluggable consensus protocols enable the platform to be more effectively customized to fit particular use cases and trust models.

[kwaben]

1. What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger?
   The critical need for enterprise to have a middle of the road between Full Centralized/Permissioned & and Fully De-Centralized/Permissioned attributes thereby utilise some of BlockChain attractive attributes without compromising Identity, Privacy & Control
2. Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases?
   They are not efficient (Latency, Txn Thruput, Cost of decentralisation) and their Permissionless, Annonymous nature cannot deliver the Control, Legal/Regulatory/Identity Compliance required by enterprise.
3. What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric?
   Linux platform languages… Java, Go, NodeJS etc
4. What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”? One can define and implement their own specific consensus protocol that meets their needs fully, and plug it into the framework/platform

[alemr]

1 What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger?
–> The possibility to keep data privacy meanwhile the possibility to trace the participants actions.

2 Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases?
–> Because:

• "participants must be identified/identifiable
• High transaction throughput performance is needed
• Low latency of transaction confirmation is needed
• Privacy and confidentiality of transactions and data pertaining to business transactions is required"

3 What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric?
–> Node.Js, Go, Java.

4 What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”?
–> To support the possibility to fit particular use cases and trust models.

[Y2z3H]

1. Businesses were interested in the growth of permissionless technologies utilized by Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, there was not a technology which implemented blockchain in a permissioned manner and this is where Hyperledger stepped in.

2. Public blockchains can not fulfil the following requirements:

• Participants must be able to identify themselves.
• Permissions are required for networks.
• Exceptional transaction throughput
• Transaction confirmation has a low latency.
• Transactions and data connected to commercial transactions must be kept private and discreet.

3. Java, Node.js and Go

4. They make it easier to adapt the platform to match certain use cases and trust models. This could be for use within a single organisation or by a trusted authority.

[Mohamed_Farah]

1. As the popularity of btc and eth grew, interest in the underlying technology of the blockchain distributed ledger and the distributed application platform grew. However enterprise use cases could not be met with permissionless blockchains thus hyperledger was formed as a permissioned alternative.

2. Popular blockchains are inefficient in transaction throughput, high latency and anonymous participants prompting possible regulator ramifications.

3. Java, Go, Node.js

4. Pluggable consensus means that consensus in a permissioned blockchain is done on a case by case basis where some trust occurs between participants thus leveraging this to create consensus across the network (i.e. legal etc) in these cases byzantine fault consensus algorithims are not necessary.

[Murisoja]

@filip

Welcome to the discussion about this reading assignment.

Leave your answers to the questions below in this thread. If you have any questions or you want to discuss something connected to the assignment feel free to do it in this thread as well, but please everything to the topic.

1. What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger?
2. Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases?
3. What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric?
4. What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”?

1. public blockchain limitations, full controll in private blockchain
2. they are slow and expensive
3. Java, Go and node.js
4. Pluggable consensus protocols enable the platform to be more effectively customized to fit particular use cases and trust models.

[supertramp007]

1. What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger? Enterprises needed

• Participants must be identified/identifiable
• Networks need to be permissioned
• High transaction throughput performance
• Low latency of transaction confirmation
• Privacy and confidentiality of transactions and data pertaining to business transaction

2. Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases? Anonmity. Enterprises need to know who is on the blockchains
3. What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric? Java, Go and Node.js
4. What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”? It enables the platform to be more effectively customized to fit particular use cases and trust models

[angelo]

1. The desire to have full control of the blockchain implementations.
   2)Public blockchains are permission-less and slow and not financially feasible.
   3)Chaincode
   Java
   Go
   Nodejs
   4)Enables the platform to be customizable to use cases and trust models.

[Fjell]

1. Applying the underlying technology of permissionless blockchains, distributed ledger and distributed application platform to more innovative private enterprise use started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger. However, many enterprise use cases require performance characteristics that the current permissionless blockchains are unable to deliver. Also, in many cases, user identity is required, such as in the case of financial transactions where Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations must be followed.
2. The popular public blockchains are not suitable for business use cases because of specific requirements such as: users must be identified/identifiable; high transaction throughput performance (i.e. high traffic flow); low latency of transaction confirmation (i.e. quick completion times); as well as privacy and confidentiality of transactions and data pertaining to such business transactions in general; i.e. the networks need to be “permissioned” in nature.
3. Java, Go and Node.js are examples of programming languages that can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric. In comparison to constrained domain-specific languages (DSL), i.e. focused on a particular aspect of a software system, such as CSS.
4. Having support for “pluggable consensus protocols” means that since consensus is modular, its implementation can be tailored to the trust assumption of a particular deployment or solution. This modular architecture allows Hyperledger Fabric to rely on well-established toolkits for CFT (crash fault-tolerant) or BFT (byzantine fault-tolerant) ordering.

[Chris83]

1. As the popularity of Bitcoin, Ethereum and a few other derivative technologies grew, interest in applying the underlying technology of the blockchain, distributed ledger and distributed application platform to more innovative enterprise use cases also grew. But to be able to apply the underlying technology the blockchain needed to be modified to fit the needs of enterprises.

2. Because for business use cases the following key points need to be considered:

• Participants must be identified/identifiable
• Networks need to be permissioned
• High transaction throughput performance
• Low latency of transaction confirmation
• Privacy and confidentiality of transactions and data pertaining to business transactions

3. Common languages can be used with Hyperledger fabric which is good considering that the developers don’t need to learn new languages. For example: Java, Go and Node.js.

4. They enable the platform to be more effectively customized to fit particular use cases and trust models.

[AndyEken]

1. What started the large interest in permissioned blockchain technologies such as Hyperledger?

The permissionless blockchain technology, as Bitcoin and Ethereum, representing an immutable, transparent, and secure transaction ledger, opens up a lot of possibilities in many different industries for open and decentralized solutions.
Hyperledger adapted this to enterprises who got more control of the participants, what data to keep private, increased transaction throughput, decreased latency of confirmations, modularity and configurability, open for different consensus protocols, no need for native cryptocurrency.

2. Why are the popular public blockchains not suitable for business use cases?
   Especially the possibility for anyone to join and use the blockchain as well as the storage of data in uncontrolled nodes is problematic for a lot of businesses.

3. What programming languages can be used to write smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric?
   Java, Go and Nod.js

4. What does it mean to have support for “pluggable consensus protocols”?
   The enterprises can chose between different consensus algorithms to meet the needs and set-up of their blockchain.

[Crypto_PONY]

1. Enterprises and their use cases require blockchain technology but not in the permissionless state as in the case of public blockchains; Enterprises require blockchains that provide privacy/confidentiality and also identifiability of participants for business purposes, hence the interest in permissioned blockchains.

2. Transactions on public blockchains are not confidential and the network participants are anonymous, more or less unidentifiable, hence not suitable for business.

3. Standard languages like Go, Node.js.

4. “Pluggable consensus protocols” refers to a feature of permissioned blockchains that enables effective customizability to fit particular use cases and trust models.