Oligarchic Control of Business-to-Business Blockchains

The innovative ideas behind blockchain offer exciting perspectives in research and development of electronic distributed ledger technologies. Bitcoin introduced an "eventual consistency" blockchain with the apparent intent of providing an open and inclusive system for secure, anonymous, yet cost-effective financial transactions based on peer-to-peer computing. It uses Proof ofWork as a cryptographic puzzle to control growth of a chain and to strengthen the resiliency of a chain against subsequent rewrite attempts. Commercial sectors and the public sector have realized the potential of this technical approach, and we now see a number of blockchains that may be called private, closed or permissioned - and that may eschew the values inherent in the design of Bitcoin type systems. From a value-neutral research perspective, there are no clear definitions of blockchain attributes such as "private" or "permissioned", nor is there typically a good understanding of the trust assumptions that clients must make when using such services - for example in systems that do not rely on Proof of Work but on a limited and controlled set of consensus-creating agents. We believe that more research in this direction could establish firm foundations for domain-specific or coalition-specific blockchains, and that such underpinnings would offer novel trust architectures beyond those provided by completely open/public blockchains and third-party operated, closed/private blockchains.