- What benefits do blockchains provide in business-to-business collaborations?
A blockchain can generate a more transparent business environment and, depending on the design of the blockchain (e.g. control, governance), can create a high level of trust between business partners. Business partners can use data that is stored on the blockchain and proven to be authentic to quickly verify information that is relevant to the business, which creates a trustless environment, increases efficiency and reduces opaqueness. Therefore, a blockchain environment can increase transparency of business processes, reduce the number of intermediaries, reduce the cost of asymmetric information, thereby benefitting the involved business partners on several dimensions (monetary and non-monetary).
- What property of a blockchain does the name “Permissionless” refer to?
In this context, permissionless refers to the fact that anyone can join the blockchain (become a member of the network, i.e. a user, full node, or a miner) and any network member has the permission to read (access and view all records stored on the blockchain) and create data entries (e.g. create a transaction).
- What are 3 examples of permissionless blockchains?
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin
- Who are allowed to join a permissioned blockchain network?
In a permissioned blockchain, there is either a single authority or a small group of selected members that can grant other computers/machines/people access to the blockchain network.
- Why do you think permissioned blockchain networks are preferred by many companies?
Private companies want to exploit the benefits of blockchain technology (e.g. data immutability, removing trust, etc.) while still maintaining control about key characteristics about the network (governance). A company may want to use a blockchain to make the business process with selected business partners more transparent, but is does not want the data to be accessible to anyone outside the network.