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Ask HN: How does consensus work in an enterprise blockchain?

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Ask HN: How does consensus work in an enterprise blockchain?

#1

Post by thisisit »

We have seen a lot of focus given to bitcoin's PoW and the electricity usage. This got me thinking how the enterprise offerings like Quorum, Hyperledger work exactly? Are they like a PoS model?

Edit: Based on the inputs, I wanted to add couple more questions.

If the consensus is based on a set of trusted accounts, why are people using the enterprise blockchain stuff still talk about blockchain being "trustless"?

Second, if it is only about a set of shared ledger with multiple trusted parties, what is wrong with an API layer integration? What exactly is the value creation for a full fledged system?

Third, bitcoin blockchain defends against a miner getting hacked by making everyone do PoS. Sure coins will get stolen.

But, if we have a permission-ed server which can add stuff to an enterprise blockchain doesn't it make the whole thing a lot less secure?

Re: Ask HN: How does consensus work in an enterprise blockchain?

#4

Post by prepend »

econner wrote: post #3
dozzie wrote: post #2

> How does consensus work in an enterprise blockchain? It doesn't, because blockchain doesn't solve consensus problem.

What's the point of using a blockchain then?

There’s tons of answers to this, but one example I’m interested in is as a good shared, accessible audit log for data throughout an organization. Just having a stable history for all data helps with investigation and master data management.

In this case consensus isn’t really necessary because all participants are trusted and should rarely differ (since they all have the same boss at some level).

Re: Ask HN: How does consensus work in an enterprise blockchain?

#6

Post by blueplanet200 »

dozzie wrote: post #2

> How does consensus work in an enterprise blockchain? It doesn't, because blockchain doesn't solve consensus problem.

Maybe explain a little more? Obviously in your opinion the OP is confused, but this answer is short and unhelpful.

Re: Ask HN: How does consensus work in an enterprise blockchain?

#8

Post by YuriNiyazov »

When the Bitcoin paper originally came out, it used the word 'blockchain' to specifically mean a 'trustless distributed blockchain' where consensus is reached via mining, and that is susceptible to a 50% + 1 attack, and where the mining nodes are individual businesses that have no reason to trust each other except that the game is set up in a way that it is in their self-interest to secure the blockchain.

However, there's a use for the word 'blockchain' which is 'distributed blockchain', which is a data structure that is a chain of blocks where each includes a hash of the previous one - it's distributed amongst machines, but those fundamentally trust each other (like in case of JPMorgan chain), so there's no reason to use a 'trustless distributed blockchain'. You can't set up a miner and join Quorum and make money securing it. In such a case, quorum is probably solved just using standard distributed database algorithms like Paxos or Raft.

Re: Ask HN: How does consensus work in an enterprise blockchain?

#10

Post by 0xf8 »

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #8

When the Bitcoin paper originally came out, it used the word 'blockchain' to specifically mean a 'trustless distributed blockchain' where consensus is reached via mining, and that is susceptible to a 50% + 1 attack, and where the mining nodes are individual businesses that have no reason to trust each other except that the game is set up in a way that it is in their self-interest to secure the blockchain. However, th…

JPM's Quorum is originally a fork of Ethereum though.
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