Blockchains Focused on Specific Sectors and Use Cases

Welcome back on our blockchain journey! We have covered a lot of ground so far, from the history of money and why blockchain cryptoassets make sense to the foundational technologies of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now that you have a good understanding of Bitcoin and Ethereum, which pioneered the first and second generation of this technology, we can move on and introduce some other interesting projects related to these technologies.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• The different categories of blockchain
• Sector-specific blockchains
• Private blockchains

The different categories of blockchain

As we mentioned in the previous chapters, we can put blockchains into two broad categories, depending on who owns them and how accessible are they.

First, we have public blockchains, which are open source projects, with free access for anyone to join the network and use it, support it, contribute to it, or build businesses on it.

Then, we have private blockchains, which are not open source, and have restricted access to only users and entities who have been approved by the organization that owns and manages the network.

In each of these categories, there are projects with general purpose blockchains such as Ethereum; however, there are also some application-specific blockchains present. General purpose technology is used to provide foundational infrastructure and building blocks to create applications on top of. For example, you can refer...

Sector-specific public blockchains

Let's move on and have a look at a few sector-specific public blockchain projects.

An interesting public blockchain platform in the social media space is Steem. It has an innovative business model, which provides incentives to users to contribute high quality content and to participate on the platform. These incentives come in Steem's native cryptoassets, which are traded on exchanges and have real monetary value. There is a simple rationale for this: quality content increases traffic to the platform, thus bringing in more users. The more users a social media platform has, the more valuable it is. This is called a positive network effect. Therefore, members contributing high quality content or helping to curate content on the platform get their fair share of the value that's created.

The platform itself is a cross between Reddit...

Private blockchains

In this day and age, privacy is an ever more rare and valuable commodity. Technologies such as the Internet and smartphones have brought unprecedented ease and speed to information discovery. Just like everything, these developments have their pros and cons. On the positive side, useful information, education, and knowledge can be spread quickly and empower people globally. People around the world who have traditionally been disadvantaged from information asymmetries now have the tools that can give them an equal opportunity to pursue their personal development goals and dreams. However, on the downside, the same technology can empower entities with dubious agendas to spy on people, like Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's classic dystopian novel published in 1949.

There are malicious hackers who break into central servers to steal valuable...

Summary

You now get the idea of privacy and its important implications in business and everyday life. In this chapter, we learned about public blockchains and how they affect our daily life. We also learned how blockchain can be used with IoT to enhance various sectors. Also, we learned how blockchain affects privacy and helps in securing transactions. Finally, we learned about some cryptoassets and how they deal with security.

In the next chapter, we will learn about corporate blockchains! Stay tuned!