R3CEV

Getting Started with Blockchain

Peter Cripps education , , , , , , , ,

In an earlier post I discussed the UK government report on distributed ledger technology (AKA ‘blockchain‘) and how the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Mark Walport, was doing the rounds advocating the use of blockchain for a variety of (government) services.

Blockchain is a shared, trusted, public ledger that everyone can inspect, but which no single user controls. The participants in a blockchain system collectively keep the ledger up to date: it can be amended only according to strict rules and by general agreement. For a quick introduction to blockchain this article in the Economist is a pretty good place to start.

Blockchains are going to be useful wherever there is a need for a trustworthy record, something which is pretty vital for transactions of all sorts whether it be in banking, for legal documents or for registries of things like land or high value art works etc. Startups such as Stampery are looking to use blockchain technology to provide low cost certification services. Blockchain is not just for pure startups however. Twenty-five banks are part of the blockchain company, called R3 CEV, which aims to develop common standards around this technology. R3 CEV’s Head of Technology is Richard Gendal Brown an ex-colleague from IBM.

IBM recently announced that, together with Intel, J.P. Morgan and several large banks, it was joining forces to create the Open Ledger Project with the Linux Foundation, with the goal of re-imagining supply chains, contracts and other ways information about ownership and value are exchanged in a digital economy.

As part of this IBM is creating some great tools, using its Bluemix platform, to get developers up and running on the use of blockchain technology. If you have a Bluemix account you can quickly deploy some applications and study the source code on GitHub to see how to start making use of blockchain APIs.

This service is intended for developers who consider themselves early adopters and want to get involved with IBM’s approach to business networks that maintain, secure and share a replicated ledger using blockchain technology. It shows how you can:

  • Deploy and invoke simple transactions to test out IBM’s approach to blockchain technology.
  • Learn and test out IBM’s novel contributions to the blockchain open source community, including the concept of confidential transactions, containerized code execution etc.

It provides some simple demo applications you can quickly deploy into Bluemix to play around with this technology.

Marbles
Marbles Running in IBM Bluemix

This service is not production ready. It is pre-alpha and intended for testing and experimentation only. There are additional security measures that still must be implemented before the service can be used to store any confidential data. That said it’s still a great way to learn about the use and potential for this technology.

 

Blockchain in UK Government

Peter Cripps comment , ,

You can always tell when a technology has reached a certain level of maturity when it gets its own slot on the BBC Radio 4 news program ‘Today‘ which runs here in the UK every weekday morning from 6am – 9am.

Yesterday (Tuesday 19th January) morning saw the UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Mark Walport, talking about blockchain (AKA distributed ledger) and advocating its use for a variety of (government) services. The interview was to publicise a new government report on distributed ledger technology (the Blackett review) which you can find here.

The report has a number of recommendations including the creation of a distributed ledger demonstrator and calls for collaboration between industry, academia and government around standards, security and governance of distributed ledgers.

As you would expect there are a number of startups as well as established companies working on applications of distributed ledger technology including R3CEV whose head of technology is Richard Gendal Brown, an ex-colleague of mine from IBM. Richard tweets on all things blockchain here and has a great blog on the subject here. If you want to understand blockchain you could take a look at Richard’s writings on the topic here. If you want an extremely interesting weekend read on the current state of bitcoin and blockchain technology this is a great article.

IBM, recognising the importance of this technology and the impact it could have on society, is throwing its weight behind the Linux Foundations project that looks to advance this technology following the open source model.

From a software architecture perspective I think this topic is going to be huge and is ripe for some first mover advantage. Those architects who can steal a lead on not only understanding but explaining this technology are going to be in high demand and if you can help with applying the technology in new and innovative ways you are definitely going to be a rockstar!