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CAP Is Not the Whole Story: Introducing Trust and Blockchain

The CAP theorem asserts that in any distributed data store only two out of three guarantees can be provided regarding consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. But what about trust?

In commercial systems on the internet partition tolerance can never be fully guaranteed, limiting the choice to either consistency or availability. As availability has the most significant impact on revenue, the system design of distributed data stores for businesses reduces to a choice between different eventual consistency recovery strategies.

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Blockchain Reference Architecture

The blockchain design of today has moved beyond cryptocurrency. It has evolved into a platform that supports industry-wide use cases suitable for public and enterprise needs. The reference architecture shown below will serve as a foundation for building or implementing blockchain applications for industry-wide use cases.

It depicts a layered architecture that provides components and services necessary to implement blockchain applications for enterprise needs. It can be used to develop a blockchain of single or multiple networks (involving multiple business units or organizations) based on the business goals and objectives. One can follow the reference architecture to design both permissioned (private) as well as permissionless (public) blockchain applications.

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How Bitcoin Processing Units Are Being Used For Mining Digital Currency

It’s a famous fact that bitcoin mining hardware has changed by leaps and bounds lately due to the growth of new central processing units in the marketplace. The new machines may conduct Bitcoin processing at a faster rate when compared with the computers of yesteryear.

Furthermore, they consume less power. Field programming team array processors are connected with CPUs to boost their computing power. While selecting hardware for Bitcoin processing, ensure it includes a large hash rate that would deliver spectacular results to your users. According to experts, the rate of data processing is measured in mega hash rates each second, or GIGA hash speeds per second.

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How to Lead a Blockchain Engineering Team

Santiago Palladino is a team leader at OpenZeppelin, a company based in Buenos Aires that creates development tools for blockchain and also audits blockchain applications for security. He shared with us his methods for overcoming the unique challenges of leading teams working with a distributed Blockchain development team.

Short on time? Here are three key takeaways from Santiago’s interview which outline what he does to build and maintain effective development teams for a large and complex product:

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Software Testing in 2020: 7 Biggest Trends

The huge demand for high-quality products created in the shortest time possible made testing a critical success factor of the software development process. Because of the continually evolving technology and competitive market QA specialists are in constant search of new relevant testing techniques, so they can stay relevant and meet the rising customer demands. As a result, new approaches are steadily emerging. Here are some of the most important software testing trends to watch for in 2020.

Testing for Agile and DevOps

Agile and DevOps should be definitely mentioned among some of the most popular concepts in software development. Since both DevOps and Agile practitioners work on improving the quality of the products, testing becomes a common area of interest for two groups. In the competitive software development world more and more companies choose popular Agile methodologies which, in turn, has an impact on testing practices. In particular, Agile methodology ensures that testing becomes an inevitable part of the development process rather than a separate stage. At the same time, DevOps, which implements a continuous improvement cycle is aimed at reducing the duration of the testing processes. In the future, more and more companies will adopt DevOps philosophy to improve the quality of released products which will have a huge impact on how the testing is done.

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A Technologist’s Perspective: Blockchain Beyond the Hype

There’s a lot of speculative investment around blockchain space but not a lot of real use. This will change when reality kicks in and new players get involved.

As a developer in this space, you don't sell hype. You sell your craftmanship. I had the privilege to get to interview @jillesvangurp, a senior backend developer with hands-on experience in building blockchains. Interesting stuff on the future of money and finance. And how to navigate in such a hyped and speculative industry as a developer.

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Types of Blockchain Ledgers

Over the years, Blockchain has acquired immense prominence in the digital world. Its capability of maintaining data transparency and its immutable structure has attracted more and more industry verticals to pursue and utilize it for their regular transactions.

Blockchain, in basic language, is an accumulation of blocks (ledger), in a distributed network (chain), which is utilized to record digital data of any value. The data is stored across all the blocks in the network. Consequently, there is no single proprietor or focal vault controlling it.

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Transaction Execution — Ethereum Yellow Paper Walkthrough (4/7)

In this post, we start looking into how the Ethereum platform executes transactions. We will learn transaction validity rules and why they exist. After that, we will deep-dive into transaction execution and understand the steps taken by nodes while processing a transaction.

This post is the fourth in the series Ethereum Yellow Paper Walkthrough. The goal of this series is to demystify the concepts in the paper, making it accessible to a broader audience. If you missed the previous posts, here they are!

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Why Artificial Intelligence Needs to Breathe on Blockchain

AI Needs to Breathe on Blockchain

How Artificial Intelligence Started

Like most innovations and technological breakthroughs, we need to first define the parameters of artificial intelligence (AI) before we reach its point of inception. A broad definition that encompasses the multiple spectrums of AI is a human intelligence simulation via the processing of computer systems. These systems acquire the rules of the information, the information itself and its logic.

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Mr. John McCarthy was the first man to research artificial intelligence at a summer conference at Dartmouth College in 1956. Thoughts regarding the progress of AI had become more convincing as opposed to two decades ago. The seeds of this AI progression were first planted within the work of programmable digital computer where groundworks of a machine were being made on the abstract ethos of arithmetic reasoning.

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Blockchain for Logistics: Considerations for Successful Implementation

Almost all major manufacturing companies have a global footprint and continuously move materials from one geographical region to another. Multiple service providers — Freight Forwarders, third party logistics service providers, and carriers — work together in moving materials and act as parts of one single shipping network. Effective collaboration among all these different types of organizations is critical to the success of any supply chain.

Blockchain architecture, which was evolved from distributed computing theory, helps creating a distributed digital ledger that can be shared among different parties and still keep the data clean and accurate. After creating the first impact in digital currencies, Blockchain is now a significant focus area in Logistics.

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A Bit About Blockchain

This article is for anyone who is curious about blockchain but has no idea what it is exactly. The goal is to make you understand what is blockchain, which means that there are few simplifications done while writing this. If you understand what blockchain technology is by the end of this article, then my mission will be accomplished!

Tips: Do not ignore the images mentioned in this article for the best understanding of blockchain technology. Images are very important.

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An Overview of Modex BCDB for Deploying Blockchain Solutions

Let's push some software.

Modex Blockchain Database (BCDB) is a software product designed to empower businesses by enabling them to develop and deploy blockchain software solutions. Modex BCDB falls into the middleware category, as it positions itself between the client’s software application server and their database. What sets Modex BCDB apart from its competitors is its approach to handling data. From the start, the brains behind this new innovative take on blockchain technology decided to employ a minimally invasive approach, in the sense that companies and enterprises keep their database system intact. Their proposed solution which later took shape in Modex BCDB modifies a set of connectors in order to link the database to a blockchain network, thus significantly enhancing storage capabilities.

Just getting started with Blockchain? Then check out Blockchain: An Introduction

What Is Modex BCDB?

Modex BCDB is the first middleware solution that manages to be both database and blockchain agnostic. Currently, other solutions present on the market are either blockchain or database agnostic, but not both at the same time. Modex BCDB doesn’t aim to replace the existing database but to improve it by adding a blockchain layer. By situating ourselves between the database component and the client’s software, we ensure a higher degree of security and trust, while giving access to a mechanism through which clients can create their own infrastructure. By adopting a modular design, Modex BCDB becomes truly agnostic in the sense that it to any type of database and blockchain. To push the envelope even further, can connect to different databases at the same time, as a result, clients are not obliged to change their database provider. Through Modex BCDB it becomes possible to build a distributed database network with different database engines. Distributed databases exist for some time, but our system allows developers to combine different databases and distribute them across different database engines. Another unique feature is how the system performs encryption through the master and the user key, as well as the fact that encryption can be performed selectively, at the field level.

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Writing About Security [Prompts]

Ever struggle with what to write? No worries, we've got you covered. Here's a list of security prompts and article ideas to help cure even the worst cases of writer's block. So, take a moment, check out the prompts below, pick one (or more!), and get to writing.

Also, please feel free to comment on this post to bounce around ideas, ask questions, or share which prompt(s) you're working on. 

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6 Ways Blockchain Technology Delivers a Glimpse of Future Innovation in Today’s World

For some time now, the focus has predominantly been on cryptocurrencies and their phenomenal rise to fame. Cryptocurrencies work on decentralized controls. These controls eliminate the need for intermediaries thanks to blockchain technology. As the number of cryptocurrencies introduced to the market increase, blockchain technology continues to grow in leaps and bounds.

This is the type of technology which has the potential to change the current monetary system. Blockchain goes beyond the possibility of controlling digital currencies and offering faster peer-to-peer transactions. It is part of an advanced ecosystem of emerging technologies.

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The Four Best Programming Languages for Blockchain

Blockchain is rapidly becoming one of the most important technological advancements of the past several decades. This “open, distributed ledger” makes anonymous, peer-to-peer transactions between users possible and is the foundation of the cryptocurrency revolution.

The global Blockchain market is currently worth an estimated $1.2 billion and experts predict that it will reach a $57 billion valuation by 2025, growing at more than 69% per year.

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The Convergence of IoT and Blockchain: Significance and Benefits

Converging blockchain with IoT technologies poses many benefits.

Since time immemorial, science and technology have continuously evolved. The result of this is that humankind has come up with better solutions to their problems. The last few years have been no different with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence, IoT, blockchain, and data analytics technology, which have changed the way we perceive the world. Now out of all these, let us shed some light onto the two technologies whose convergence is most promising: blockchain and IoT.

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In terms of IoT, we see a lot of successful implementations. From smart homes to agriculture to healthcare and education, there are many sectors being impacted by IoT technology. With security and privacy being some of the major concerns regarding IoT, the technology has reached a new level of stagnation in recent years. Since then, no significant developments have been reported.

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How Analytics and Data Science Improve Your Business Efficiency

Corporations, particularly those that are focused on making sales to a broad audience — as opposed to those selling a small number of large ticket items — have always had a keen interest in crunching numbers related to the ways customers interact with their brands to boost sales. This is what we might refer to as data analytics. But, many organizations opt to take their efforts a step further by using data science.

What Is Data Science and Analysis?

Techopedia defines data science as:

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Blockchain – The Competitive Edge for Your Digital Marketplace

The competitive edge for digital marketplaces

Digital marketplaces orchestrating millions of transactions and online networking are often marred with challenges, such as payment delays, trust, and relevant suggestions to better reach target markets.

Although the shift from offline to online has enabled cross-border networking and propelled business reach, there are certain core areas that continue to haunt even when there is technology for everything.