About the Blockchain - A Skeptic's Guide Interactive Intelligent Textbook

Backstory

When I first heard about blockchain and how it used a distributed ledger and hashing to validate transactions I was skeptical. For many years I had used the W3C digital signature technologies and public-private key technologies and I thought they worked fine for non-repudiation. So I was quite curious about all the fuss. Then I was told that issuing the certificates required a certificate authority (CA), and if the CA was compromised, that new certificates might be invalid.

I was open to the use of blockchain and we set up some pilot projects where I worked. But none of the pilots ever got into production. The cost of creating standards around blockchain and the huge computational overhead of distributed ledger and proof of work was orders more expensive than any of our customers would pay for. I became quite skeptical about people that told me that blockchain was the future. We would frequently get into heated arguments about the cost of developing and maintain distribute ledge servers and the political efforts required to get people to participate in cost sharing.

So that is why I wrote this book. The goals of this book are to:

  1. Accurately describe the problems in building trust across networks
  2. Clearly define the scope of non-repudiation technologies
  3. Define what certificates are that are created by CA-backed public-private key technologies
  4. Describe what distributed ledger technologies are in general and then describe what blockchains are
  5. Understand the network costs and CPU costs are for doing blockchain
  6. Fairly compare the different technologies for trust management and show their costs
  7. Show some real-world scenarios for using non-repudiation trust networks in fields such as e-commerce, healthcare and retail
  8. Do detailed simulations of the cost of creating an managing these networks
  9. Build precise processes to help architects do fair architecture tradeoff analysis methods (ATAM)
  10. Fairly show the pros and cons of different architectures and how to display utility trees that highlight the ability of different architectures to meet business requirements and show the areas of risk and how to mitigate these risks

THis book will have several key strategies:

  1. Detailed chapter content
  2. Integrated interactive infographics
  3. Integrated interactive micro-simulations that show costs/performance
  4. Case studies of actual attempts to use both CA and blockchain technologies in the real world
  5. Stories of how cognitive bias prevented people from making the right decisions

My intended audience are any business professionals both technical and non-technical. Although most of this book is about architecture tradeoff analysis, the focus is making good business decisions