Classification of blockchain: public chain, private chain and alliance chain.

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Classification of Blockchain in Practical Application

Blockchain can be divided into public (owned) chain, private (owned) chain and alliance chain according to its openness. The so-called openness refers to whether everyone can freely join the blockchain and obtain information on the chain, and whether the information on the chain is open and transparent.

Public chain, private chain, alliance chain

① Public chain. It is the most open type of blockchain in practical application. There is no rigid requirement for the right to participate in the public chain, and any individual or organization can join and quit freely. All data records on the public chain are open and transparent, and anyone can participate in the consensus process. The public chain is considered as a completely decentralized blockchain that is not controlled by institutions. The most typical representative of the public chain is the Bitcoin system, which is open to everyone, and everyone can become a node, verifier and user in the Bitcoin system. The information in the Bitcoin system is completely open and transparent.

2 private chain. Also known as internal chain, its openness is very low, and the permission to write and modify data is only in the hands of a few people/organizations, which belongs to a single center network of private institutions. At present, many large company groups are developing their own private chains, which can be used for enterprise management, financial audit, bank settlement and so on.

③ Alliance chain. By a number of organizations that trust each other, they have a good cooperative relationship. The openness of alliance chain is between public chain and private chain, and the permission to write and modify is still in the hands of multiple trust organizations, which is regarded as a partially decentralized blockchain. This alliance can be a kind of alliance between countries, enterprises and banks. The participants in the alliance chain have a high degree of mutual trust, fast verification efficiency, greatly reduced transaction costs compared with the public chain, and at the same time, some privacy of data can be well protected. The information and resources on the alliance chain can only be shared by the members of the alliance, such as the R3 blockchain alliance.

Characteristics of public chain, private chain and alliance chain

Different types of blockchain have different consensus mechanisms, openness and characteristics. Next, let's take stock of the advantages and disadvantages of public chains, private chains and alliance chains.

blockchain

Public chain: Typical representatives include Bitcoin system and Ethereum network.

Advantages of public chain:

(1) Decentralization, the rights and interests of users in the chain are not controlled by any organization, everyone can participate, anyone can join, read, send transaction information, and confirm the validity.

② All transaction data are open and transparent, and the access threshold is low. For example, all the address transaction information on the Bitcoin chain can be verified by the blockchain browser (such as Ou Ke Cloud Chain), and each participant can see the balance of all accounts and all the transaction activities.

③ The data can't be tampered with, and the security is high. After the public chain information is added to the blockchain through consensus, it is recorded by all nodes, and it is guaranteed to be related to each other through cryptography, which is very difficult and costly to tamper with.

Defects of public chain:

① Due to the low access threshold and low mutual trust, the authenticity of data value needs to be confirmed by a large number of nodes before it can be added to the blockchain, so the efficiency is low.

② Some public chains that adopt PoW (workload proof mechanism), such as Bitcoin, have been criticized as "not environmentally friendly" from time to time with the rise of environmentalism in recent years due to the excessive consumption of computing power in the whole network and the fact that not all computing power is provided by renewable energy.

Private chain: a typical representative of ant financial service.

Advantages of private chain:

(1) private because the authority is in a centralized organization or institution, its data processing speed and transaction speed are extremely fast.

② The transaction data is not made public, and the data privacy is good.

(3) The operation is more efficient and flexible, and the problem can be quickly repaired by manual intervention, and the cost is low, even zero.

Disadvantages of private chain:

(1) The authority is completely in the hands of a single organization. If necessary, the organization running the private chain can easily modify the rules, which will lead to a decline in trust and a discount on the security and transparency of the blockchain.

② It is not decentralized, but more like a local area network with limited application.

Alliance chain: it typically represents R3 blockchain alliance and HyperLedger Fabric.

The essence of alliance chain is actually the category of private chain, but the degree of privatization is more open. The authority of pure private chain is only within the organization, while alliance chain is that multiple members of the alliance share data resources. The design concept of alliance chain is more complicated than pure private chain, and its application scope is wider, which can realize value exchange and information sharing in financial industry, insurance industry and Internet of Things. Alliance chain is inferior to public chain in decentralization and transparency, but it is superior to public chain in efficiency, transaction speed and supervision.