When the whitepaper from Microsoft surfaced disclose a new block-chain project they have undertaken, the first thing that came to mind was the joke over at IBM.
Well not so fast. We reviewed the paper in depth and there's more here.
Microsoft is doing what IBM should have done and what others should be doing if they cannot come up with original ideas. Make tools so others can do that. Instead, IBM just made a cloud based database and its pretty much worthless and certainly not secure as far as blockchain standards go. You don't need it to accomplish anything but pay them cloud subscriptions.
Microsoft appears to be making an attempt at building tool framework. Project betchley is decribed by Marley Gray as:
Bletchley is Microsoft’s architectural approach to building an Enterprise Consortium Blockchain Ecosystem. To be clear, this is not a new blockchain stack. It is Microsoft’s approach to bring distributed ledger (blockchain) platforms into the enterprise to build real solutions addressing real business problems while keeping the platform open.
Of course they seem to be promising everything under the sun without releasing anything but seeing as they have more money than God, they will certainly spit something out of their lab. Maybe they can make Biztalk do something here and find a market for that heap. This time don't release it 10 years late and you might just have a chance at a winner.
Shatters Earth? Negative. Positive? Somewhat.
The highlight of the paper is most certainly the "To be clear, this is not a new blockchain stack" ... thank goodness. The market is saturated with "block-chain" labeled systems to the point it appears that Excel might soon be called a blockchain.
It's painfully obvious the target here. It's the conglomerations of companies scratching their heads and trying to figure out why they need blockchain. Typically they have been talked out of it by other misleading direction making attempts to shovel private software painted as blockchain technology to their decision makers.
Who can blame them, these are the easy targets and they have a large payroll to cover and with the term "block-chain" becoming increasingly diluted, the opportunities to exploit the interest anyway possible to siphon those extra budget dollars is sitting there like a lamb in in front of a lions cage. "Blockchain" once identified the global network that underpins bitcoin and the electronic trust, security, and absolute it provides. Now it's become an identifier for everything that stores a stitch of shared data anywhere.
From Promise to Disappointment
Unfortunately Microsoft losses points in some of its explanations, it mentions non-block-chain solutions in the paper in its presentation of block-chain technology and whereas it is important to have the interoperability between all systems, calling everything that can save data a block-chain is considered a party foul by many. For example it mentions Etherum and Eris in the same sentence as "block-chains".Whereas the Ethereum network is certainly an alternate blockchain, Eris is not, first of all it's a company. Second of all it's a company that sells database software that works "kind of like" an altchain but not really and also without tokenization or incentive for support, security is non-existent, trust would be limited to the requirement of a paper contract, and the ultimate probability for it being viable in a global, public, or major production environment is extremely low and unrealistic. It's basically just a workflow system. That's not to say there isn't good use for the product, it's just not a true blockchain technology based system and rather misleading.
Not to pick on Eris specifically, there are plenty of other companies producing the same types of systems and using the same marketing tricks or re-branding older systems as block-chain tech when there's nothing really block-chain about them at all. Microsoft just mentioned their name so it was more a lack of options.
Its also doesn't seem to have anything that is going to help in the Blockchain block-chain (bitcoin) as far as integration or development. Which is something allot of people in the enterprise space are looking for. We keep getting these altchains and altchain solutions, but what we need is better access access to the actual Blockchain .. you know the really powerful one.
Nevertheless this is still tool-framework in the works and that doesn't completely suck. One very important note: They might want to drop the "Cryplet" name immediately, that's far to sound-alike to Hashlet and that's a bad word around here (this is why).
Still, it's a step in a positive direction and another unexpected surprise from Microsoft. Assuming its released sooner than later and without 8 billion bugs that immediately require a patch and the home run will be if it actually communicates with the Blockchain as well as other networks like Ethereum.
Report by dinbits
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