Google Public Blockchain Cloud and Decentralization

If you know something about digital decentralized technology, it might sound strange to provide hosted blockchain products through the public cloud. Because a major feature of blockchain is decentralization.

Copies of blockchain ledgers are kept in multiple locations, usually on different computers or nodes. Take Bitcoin blockchain as an example, the number of nodes reaches several thousand. The system cannot confirm changes to the ledger unless multiple nodes agree on a change.

In contrast, the essence of the public cloud is to concentrate the services of multiple companies and multiple customer data.

Despite this contradiction, Belendov believes that users do not have to worry about cloud-based blockchain products.

Even if a blockchain system is started from a public cloud platform, it does not mean that it does not support decentralization. In fact, if Google provides blockchain products through Google Cloud, then it is likely to support decentralization, allowing customers to set up nodes for blockchain ledgers elsewhere, or even set up nodes on AWS or other public cloud services.

Google may allow its blockchain products to be accessed through competitor cloud services, which may be counter-intuitive. But Belendorf believes that Google must provide such flexibility. After all, many companies operate around the world, so they hope their blockchain can be accessed anywhere.

In addition, the main reason for decentralization is to ensure that parties who do not know each other can achieve trust. However, the public cloud does not have the same criteria for establishing user trust. People know Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and trust their services. Belendov said that if you use cloud computing services to save information about the business, then you are likely to hope that this information will be protected by blockchain technology.

In fact, this is happening. Although neither AWS nor Azure offer blockchain products, people have already hosted blockchain systems on these cloud computing services.