Moving Beyond 'The Blockchain Is the App'

If we assume there's no static infrastructure - for example, a traffic beacon - to arbitrate the intersection, the vehicles will have to negotiate a solution using only their in-vehicle computation capacity.

Third, every driver is motivated by objectives that will drive their vehicle's computation, and while some objectives - such as getting through the intersection without an accident - are shared by all, some goals will be unique to the individual.

As I discussed in last year's Consensus Magazine, while a blockchain can provide persistent and transparent transactional management, storage and updates of data, the ability to track provenance also requires efficient, high integrity data entry.

Supply chain applications also demonstrate the importance of confidentiality and privacy of data because, at the core, they are about cross-organizational access to shared data.

Can a supplier prove, for example, that it can meet delivery requirements without exposing otherwise confidential details of its internal operations? Herein lies a core problem for decentralized computing: how to perform network-wide computation on confidential data without exposing the details of that confidential information to the group.

With researchers searching for cures to diseases, there's tremendous societal and potentially business value in performing computations across the broadest possible set of genomic data sources, sources that are often created, managed or owned by different organizations.

Each database contains data that's both highly valuable as intellectual property and restricted by regulations protecting the privacy of the individual contributors of that genomic data.

How can a computer relying on a simple, local record of telemetry data differentiate between an internal error made by the autonomous vehicle, an external attack on the vehicle's telemetry, or the actions of a malicious participant in the coordination protocol?

Ideally, to provide an attack-resistant history of the vehicle's behavior, the black box would confirm the vehicle's telemetry data with that of nearby vehicles as well as information about interactions with those vehicles - a full, system-wide snapshot, in other words.

Our own work on Private Data Objects, a Hyperledger Labs project to explore decentralized computing models, splits contract execution into an off-chain component that performs the actual computation, and an on-chain component that simply ensures an ordering of updates that respects dependencies between contract objects.