by Bozho | Jul 17, 2020 | Aggregated, blockchain, Developer tips, ideas, integration
Blockchain has been a buzzword for the past several years and it hasn’t lived to its promises (yet). The value proposition usually includes vague claims about trust and unmodifiability, but rarely that has brought demonstrable improvement to existing processes. There are dozens of blockchain projects, networks, protocols, “standards”, and all of them can in some way help you solve either data integrity issues (guarantee that data has not been tampered with) or multi-party trust issues (several companies participating in one process shouldn’t have to trust each other in order to have automated cross-organization business processes). However, deploying and integrating a separate blockchain solution is usually a large project in itself and especially in the COVID-19 crisis likely gets postponed because of the questionable return on investment. But for the enterprise, blockchain is largely a shared database. Sharing data with other participants in a given business process in a secure way that doesn’t allow any of the participants to cheat. And this can be achieved not by adding a whole new blockchain infrastructure that would in turn integrate with existing systems (which in many cases can’t be integrated easily because they don’t have APIs), but by “blockchainizing” the existing database. Ideally, what I’m describing should be a project itself, which is either deployed alongside the database, or as part of an application. And what it can do is as follows: Select tables and columns to share with other participants – obviously only parts of the database should be shared with others Define shared data model and data transformations – sometimes data has to be transformed, or masked, in order to...
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