Solving Blockchain's Enterprise Problem
Bitcoin's blockchain is a fascinating technology. The creator(s) wanted to create a crypto currency that is immune to government censorship.Using a very clever application of cryptography (Proof of Work) they managed to create an amazing store of value supporting "trustless and immutable transactions".
The promise of trustless exchange of information/value has driven incredible investment in blockchain as it is clear that these properties can disintermediate economic ecosystems. However, Bitcoin's main objective of immunity to government intervention led to the creation of the worst possible solution for trustless and immutable transactions in the enterprise. Ten minute transaction latency (at least), eventual consistency, absolutely zero transaction privacy, and an inability to scale make it impossible to use for any substantial use case in the enterprise. Bitcoin's properties were specifically chosen to support MASSIVE decentralization, which is likely the best chance to overcome government intervention. However, what enterprise use case requires massive decentralization and has the main objective of being immune to government intervention? The answer is none. No legal one anyway. Today, the experiments happening in the enterprise are not going into true production, no matter what the marketing hype from the big players keep trying to tell us. Security, privacy, performance, scalability, and consistency simply preclude the widespread adoption of blockchain in the enterprise.
Current players in the blockchain enterprise space have made the fatal mistake of thinking decentralization through peer to peer technology is the valuable property of the blockchain, missing the fact that the driver of disintermediation is actually "trustless and immutable" transactions. It will not matter for enterprise use cases how those properties are delivered. In fact, the distributed ledger technologies we have looked at don't deliver "trustless and immutable" at all. In order to try to make things work, they have given up on the trustless aspect and in reality, don't provide much in the way of immutability. Looking at their architectures, participants must trust key managers, databases, validation nodes, etc. These projects have succeeded in building incredibly bad peer to peer databases with poor performance and no ability to scale. Their security model is the same as today's existing vulnerable model. If they can't deliver trustless and immutable, they should probably just give up and simply have their customers keep buying centralized, strongly consistent, ACID databases.
We took a completely different approach to delivering trustless and immutable transactions in Black Forest Distributed Ledger (BFDL). BFDL delivers trustless and immutable transactions by relying solely on cryptography for trust. Our breakthrough in high performance searchable encryption led us to realize that the answer to secure, confidential, low latency, scalable, and strongly consistent transactions is zero knowledge. BFDL has no knowledge of the contents of the transactions that it holds and never has the keys to decrypt them. Through our breakthrough in massively parallel BFT consensus, we can scale to millions of low latency, ACID transactions per second. Instead of massive decentralization, BFDL uses master/master replication across a number of replicas and cryptography to provide high availability and immutability. The promise of disintermediation through trustless and immutable transactions is real and will happen. We believe Black Forest Distributed Ledger will deliver that promise to the enterprise.