Cisco's Blockchain Bootcamp

Today I attended the Blockchain Boot camp from Cisco. There were lot of start ups out there trying to see whats there in Cisco's platform. They were also seeing if Cisco will help with funding the effort.

There was also lot of developers/  innovators across Cisco who have submitted something about Blockchain for the Innovation Challenge 4.

Initially we had some talk from Anoop and DD(the marketing head for Blockchain business). Then there was Ram Jagadeesan talking about how the blockchain platform in Cisco works.

Pooja Bhatia gave a good demo. I am waiting for the first version to be released in Devnet, so we can work on it.

Blockchain for Business

I just finished the course

Blockchain for Business - An Introduction to Hyperledger Technologies. 

It was a good course. There are lot of Hyperledger frameworks: 

1. Hyperledger Iroha

2. Hyperledger Sawtooth

3. Hyperledger Fabric.

 

Fabric provides a easy way to get to the private blockchain  - hence it is used by companies. 

 As of now, Blockchain is fairly young. Blockchain was founded by Nakoshi Sakamoto (May be wrong) in 2009. Bitcoin was direct child of blockchain. Bitcoin has grown quickly while Blockchain as a technology has been experimented and used by various other industries only now - recently in 2013-14 timeframe. As of now only Supplychain industry has taken it up.

IBM created Hyperledger fabric, but they gave away the code to the open source Linux Foundation. All other corporates like Oracle, Salesforce, IBM and even Cisco are working on creating their own version of this fabric so that they can use it for supply chain. As of today, Supply chain is the only other use case other than Finance that has taken up Blockchain

One main reason is we need to still think and come up on what is the best usecase for Blockchain. May be we dont even need such a elaborate thing like blockchain for many usecases. Blockchain is a distributed decentralized database and with permissioned block chain- a bit of the decentralization goes away.

When businesses need blockchain - why do they need it ? 

1. If the data to be created in blockchain is very large - it wont scale in a blockchain network. As it is, it feels like blockchain is  a bit slow even though Bitcoin is trying to be fast.

2. If any company has

  -  a small data - in bytes and not kilobytes

   -  and they want to create a common database which 

   - they can access along with a few more players around the globe

    - and needs to be permission ed

 then it might be good to use blockchain. Some examples are :

a. Tuna fishing industry - to mark the sustainable tuna.

b. Land records - this is needed because we need to make sure the land records of a particular country is saved without any dispute.

c. Any other sustainable agriculture industry where there is need to store the origin of a particular record to make sure there is no foulplay when it is marked as sustainable/fairtrade. 

 d. To create Anti-Counterfeit chips or pieces in a software to help avoid counterfieting or overusing of software.

e. Identity card in a big country like India or China - where SSN might be a lot harder to implement.  Adding Blockchain for this kind of identity cards might avoid kidnapping and child trafficking.