At the Hyperledger Munich Meetup

So I was at the Hyperledger Munich Meetup yesterday. First there was a "Fireside chat" (which indeed seems to be a thing lately) with quite an improvised fire if you look closely, and then a talk by IBM's Elke Kunde.

Elke's talk and presentation was really good. She gave a great introduction into the blockchain subject in general (I've seen much worse), also covering the technical foundation reasonably well.

She went on to explain Hyperledger, the "cross-industry collaborative effort, started in December 2015 by the Linux Foundation", which is basically a blockchain construction kit first and foremost tailored for corporate and business needs. Hyperledger is also pretty modular and plug-able. It is on the roadmap that you'll be able to choose the consensus mechanism (proof-of-work mining vs proof-of-stake vs consortium consensus, with hyperledger bringing their own implementation for the latter), and if "your" blockchain will be private or public.

Still I'm not convinced about the reason of existence for a "private blockchain", which (in our circles) is a long-standing discussion (dare I say a subject we're making fun of), as the contradiction is almost in the term itself. The mentioned examples with trust seem to mix up trust at the application level or contract level, and trust at the protocol level. A distributed database with Merkle Tree data-structures/tables (like git) seems sufficient in all imaginable scenarios.

https://www.meetup.com/HyperLedger-Munchen/events/229755432/