Info article about Blockchain as a Service

This is an info article to understand the blockchain as a Service solution that Ardor is offering. To understand this, first let me clarify what blockchain is. Because nowadays people think about; "Bitcoin, big interests and lots of money" when they hear the word blockchain. But blockchain is way more then that! If you understand the underlying thoughts, you will see why you should invest in this technology now, because we are only at the beginning of the rise of this technology.

Blockchain

In the early 1990s, we said the old media is centralized. It’s one way, it’s one to many; it’s controlled by powerful forces, and everyone is a passive recipient. The new web, the new media, we said, is one to one, it’s many to many; it’s highly distributed, and it’s not centralized. Everyone’s a participant, not an inert recipient. This has an awesome neutrality. It will be what we want it to be, and we can craft a much more egalitarian, prosperous society where everyone gets to share in the wealth that they create. Lots of great things have happened, but overall the benefits of the digital age have been asymmetrical. For example, we have this great asset of data that’s been created by us, and yet we don’t get to keep it. It’s owned by a tiny handful of powerful companies or governments. They monetize that data or, in the case of governments, use it to spy on us, and our privacy is undermined.

What if there were a second generation of the Internet that enabled the true, peer-to-peer exchange of value? We don’t have that now. If I’m going to send some money to somebody else, I have to go through an intermediary—a powerful bank, a credit-card company—or I need a government to authenticate who I am and who you are. What if we could do that peer to peer? What if there was a protocol—call it the trust protocol—that enabled us to do transactions, to do commerce, to exchange money, without a powerful third party? This would be amazing.

Several years ago, an unknown person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto came up with the Bitcoin protocol. Once again, the technology genie has been unleashed from its bottle. It gives us another kick at the can, another go, to try and rethink the economic power grid and the old order of things. That, to me, is how big this is. It feels like 1993.
The blockchain is basically a distributed database. Think of a giant, global spreadsheet that runs on millions and millions of computers. It’s distributed. It’s open source, so anyone can change the underlying code, and they can see what’s going on. It’s truly peer to peer; it doesn’t require powerful intermediaries to authenticate or to settle transactions.

It uses state-of-the-art cryptography, so if we have a global, distributed database that can record the fact that we’ve done this transaction, what else could it record? Well, it could record any structured information, not just who paid whom but also who married whom or who owns what land or what light bought power from what power source. In the case of the Internet of Things, we’re going to need a blockchain-settlement system underneath. Banks won’t be able to settle trillions of real-time transactions between things.

So this is an extraordinary thing. An immutable, unhackable distributed database of digital assets. This is a platform for truth and it’s a platform for trust. The implications are staggering, not just for the financial-services industry but also right across virtually every aspect of society.

Most blockchains—and Bitcoin is the biggest—are what you call permission-less systems. We can do transactions and satisfy each other’s economic needs without knowing who the other party is and independent from central authorities. These blockchains all have a digital currency of some kind associated with them, which is why everybody talks about Bitcoin in the same breath as the blockchain, because the Bitcoin blockchain is the biggest.

But to me, the blockchain, the underlying technology, is the biggest innovation in computer science—the idea of a distributed database where trust is established through mass collaboration and clever code rather than through a powerful institution that does the authentication and the settlement.

Blockchain as a service (BaaS)

But then if you want to adopt this blockchain technology in to your product the questions arises:

How to develop such a blockchain? "

That is were blockchain as a service platforms come in. Basically what they do: They offer a unique blockchain technology for you product as a service to you. So you don't have to develop this technique yourself. They offer a complete, almost, of the shelf solution to you. This to ensure that you can focus on the development on your project/platform and you don't have to be bothered about setting up the blockchain.

The Ardor platform

The Ardor platform is offering blockchain as a service. Ardor is bringing blockchain to the enterprise, working with customers, partners, and the blockchain community to continually advance its enterprise readiness. Their mission is to help companies thrive in this new era of secure multiparty collaboration by delivering platforms and services that any company—including ledger startups, retailers, health providers, and global banks—can use to improved shared business processes.

Ardor empowers businesses to digitize transaction workflow through a highly secured, shared, and replicated ledger. It is a public cloud service that customers can use to construct secure blockchain networks.

When you want to implement a new project on Ardor, you create something called a child chain. The child chain holds all the functionality and customizability supported that you need for your blockchain. However, it is still linked to the main chain and derives its security and decentralization from using the main chain for verification.

This new structure means child chains can be implemented and features activated in a matter of minutes or hours. Since the blockchain infrastructure is already in place with the Ardor main chain, child chains can quickly adopt custom use cases. These child chains still receive all the speed, security, and usability upgrades of the main chain, since they’re all integrated on one platform.

The blockchain bloat problem

The biggest current blockchain like; Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, etc. all have the same problem now: " * blockchain bloat* ".

But what is blockchain bloat? More transactions also means more data is transmitted on the blockchain in question. Unfortunately, this also creates a lot of problems when it comes to actively storing all of this data. Using a large hard drive almost becomes a necessity, which can be quite problematic for systemsoperating in the blockchain network. Considering how these blockchains continue to grow on a daily basis, it is a matter of years until we see terabyte-scale blockchains moving forward.

Ardor solves the blockchain bloat problem using a new transaction pruning system. In the future, it won’t be necessary for every node to hold a complete copy of the transaction history, just the relevant recent transactions that have gotten the blockchain to this point. Ardor will also support archival nodes that will operate to keep full transaction histories should they be needed.

To solve the native token problem, Ardor will implement a system of bundlers, nodes on the network that will accept fees paid in the child chain token. These bundlers will then pay the Ardor main chain forgers in ARDR, essentially acting as conversion clearing houses for transaction fees. This means that the end user can initiate a transaction in a child token and pay the transaction fees in the child token.

In theory, users could be unaware of the existence of Ardor at all. This commitment to the unsexy work of infrastructure development is what makes it so difficult for Ardor to generate buzz and press attention. However, if it gains traction, Ardor could be the foundation for endless new blockchain applications.

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More information:
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