Garuda Indonesia Colours Magazine May 2019 | Page 132

Business / Outlook
outlook
Technology meets
business
Choosing a
blockchain
partner
Following on from last
month's blockchain
editorial, Colours
Business looks at how a
company might choose a
blockchain partner.
130
The blockchain is an unhackable
storage system of data, or distributed
ledger technology (DLT), where the
list of who owns what is shared across
a distributed network, and each and
every transaction is recorded and
securely stored. Recorded data can’t
be deleted or modified, and there are
no third parties in the process; data
is exchanged almost instantaneously.
Data management at a low cost, with high
efficiencies, leading-edge security and a
robust history for auditing and compliance,
is a natural fit for industries including
insurance, medicine, education, supply
chain logistics, real estate and finance
to name a few, but where to start?
There are essentially two types
of blockchains: public and permission
networks.
Public – example: Bitcoin, Ethereum.
It’s a large, decentralised network
where anyone can participate at any
level. No single node on the network
has control, and these are the most
secure of the networks – once a
transaction has been recorded, it’s
immutable. As these are anonymous
networks, there's no way of creating
permissions (setting who controls the
group or its actions).
Permission – example, Ripple,
Hyperledger. These are also referred
to as Private, Consortium or Enterprise
blockchains. These are set up so specific
participants can be invited to control
and write data to this type of blockchain,
so unlike Public networks, which are
anonymous, these networks need
to know who you are. Transactions
are faster, there’s better scalability,