Businesses looking to adopt a blockchain solution often mistakenly believe they can only keep their data secure if it’s not visible to everybody and can only be accessed by select individuals. Ironically, the best way to secure data is to keep it in the public eye or make it public, and that’s e xactly what a public blockchain provides.
This is detailed in the BSV Blockchain Association’s newest eBook – The fallacy of private, permissioned blockchains. In this eBook, Kapil Jain (Solutions Architect at blockchain services company, nChain) describes how the Internet fundamentally changed following the dot-com bubble as companies increasingly turned insular, developing a complex web of services and utilities online that are incompatible with each other.
This means that every entity has to have its structure to handle users and service providers. It also means that when they needed to talk to each other, they needed to work to establish every new connection. This is what is colloquially known as a walled garden.
What companies get wrong about blockchain
This move towards a more insularInternet has also had a similar knock-on effect where companies believe the only way they can safely protect data is by closing themselves off.
Due to a large number of blockchain projects with their native tokens, the idea of a single global blockchain has been overshadowed by confusion more than clarity. This created a situation where risk-averse governments and enterprises decided not to venture into high-risk cryptocurrency tokens.
Many companies have also mistakenly concluded that they could create blockchain solutions for their use cases without the native token. The situation resulted in the creation of ‘permissioned blockchain systems’ where a permissioning system replaced the economic model from the usage of the token.
These systems only allowed approved participants to access the blockchain and ledger. And as expected, this comes at the cost of complexity and security.
The answer is BSV
Bitcoin was invented as a digital cash system with built-in accounting (triple-entry ledger model) which runs on the Internet. It provides an alternative for all these millions of applications – including e-commerce, banks and data firms – that have duplicated some amount of functionality for payment systems with a single digital cash system.
Notably, Bitcoin’s security depends on its ledger being public. Publishing information in public does not mean that sensitive data should be put on public records for anyone to access. Instead, a public blockchain means users can put data signatures, hashes and indexes on-chain, which are then recorded immutably, making the source of information tamper evident.
The security of a public blockchain is not hashing or keys. It is transparency and accountability, provided by a fixed ruleset defined by the network protocol for consensus and mining transactions and publication of the information on a public ledger which no one can change, not even the controlling entities like miners who validate these transactions.
You can learn more and sign up for a free copy of the fallacy of private, permissioned blockchains eBook here.