Page 8 - MSDN Magazine, March 2018

Editor’s NotE MICHAEL DESMOND Chain of Demand
I’ve been alive long enough to enjoy a good, irrational market run- up. The stratospheric rise of Bitcoin could rank up there with the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s, the dot-com bubble of the 1990s and Florida real estate circa 2007. All of which proves that people have an amazing ability to crave a thing, especially if they don’t understand it.
Yet the hype and chicanery around cryptocurrencies can obscure the exciting technology that enables them: blockchains. As Jonathan Waldman explains in this month’s lead feature, “Blockchain Fundamentals,” the distributed technology rooted in cryptography and consensus algorithms has the potential to rede- fine transactional processes by making them secure, tamper-proof, permanent and even public.
Yet all the hype and chicanery around cryptocurrencies can obscure the exciting technology that enables them: blockchains.
“While still in their infancy, blockchain technologies are being used to power logistics and asset-tracking systems,” Waldman explains over e-mail, before ticking off a list of scenarios that includes distributed cloud storage services, political voting systems, personal identification systems, digital notary services, and manage- ment of sensitive health care data. And blockchains can be used to document the provenance and thus authenticity of valuable goods. Waldman offers the example of digital IDs being laser-etched into diamonds by jewelers and into wine bottles by vintners.
Waldman says blockchain implementations have solved a fundamental challenge, by creating a “disintermediated digital
infrastructure on which a digital asset can be openly and reliably transferred, rather than copied and shared.” He describes block- chains as a data structure that tracks any asset of value or interest as it is transferred from owner to owner.
While blockchains are built on well-known concepts like hashing, cryptography and decentralized peer-based relationships, the number and diversity of blockchain solutions pose a challenge to developers. Blockchain implementations are often poorly documented beyond the source code, Waldman says, which can complicate decision making.
“One misconception I see is that blockchain technologies require ‘no trust,’” says Waldman. “While a traditional, human-staffed, centralized trust authority isn’t necessary, the technologies and algorithms that power blockchains must in fact be trusted. Due to the complexity and number of current blockchain implementa- tions, it remains unclear which ones are truly trustworthy.”
Waldman urges developers to consider a number of factors when deciding to adopt a blockchain implementation, including who’s behind it, whether it’s public or private, and the quality of its tech- nical documentation and end-user apps. He also tells developers when vetting a particular blockchain to look into the kind of data it records, its age and adoption rate, and the number of discov- ered vulnerabilities. Ultimately, says Waldman, “the blockchain becomes the trust agent.”
The best way to get up to speed, he says, is to pick an existing block- chain implementation and pore over its technical documentation. He also urges developers to explore the Microsoft Azure-hosted blockchain service at azure.microsoft.com/solutions/blockchain.
“I think that establishing trust is imperative if blockchain is going to become a widely deployed and effective tool,” Waldman says. “I think it’s fair to say that disintermediating untrustworthy agents and middlemen and replacing them with rock-solid, time-tested blockchain technologies is a natural, prudent, and inevitable step in the evolution of our
digital lives.”
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