Summary

In this chapter, which served as a preview of the hands-on content to be presented in chapters 8 to 12, I explained the disruptive effects of the blockchain and pointed out that the main reason for this is that blockchain is a trustless system that employs a consensus protocol to validate transactions. This makes it very secure and is a major factor in its adoption. Blockchain is not owned by a single vendor or corporation, which makes it easy for anyone to develop the technology further. Because of the distributed network model, there is no single point of failure, so nodes can appear, disappear, or malfunction without affecting the group as a whole. Operations happen in real time on the blockchain, and whenever a transaction occurs, it is broadcast to all validating nodes. Then, one of the nodes validates the transaction and adds it to the blockchain. Inherent in its distributed model is that it is very scalable. A blockchain is highly programmable and so advanced that it can run full-blown decentralized applications.

I continued by answering the question about Oracle's strategy regarding this technology; how they are involved in the future development of the Hyperledger Fabric framework and what their plans are surrounding their own PaaS offering, the ABCS.

In the next section, I introduced Oracle's Autonomous Blockchain Cloud Service and described the feature set it offers compared to Hyperledger Fabric, the underlying framework of ABCS. I explained that BCS is a PaaS offering that makes it easy to provision, build, and develop your own blockchain business network. However, Oracle is not the only one investing in blockchain technology. We also took a look at what Oracle's competitors, including IBM, Microsoft, and AWS are doing in the blockchain space.

Finally, I reviewed some of the disruptive effects the blockchain technology might have on your business. Many roles, such as architects and business analysts, will be affected. This will be covered in greater depth in Chapter 9, Building a Next-Generation Oracle B2B Platform.

In the next part of the book, Blockchain Core Concepts and Terminology, we will start exploring the technology behind the blockchain in more detail. In Chapter 3, Blockchain 101 - Assets, Transactions, and Hashes, I will explain what we mean by assets, what is included in a typical transaction, how assets are distributed to all nodes in the network, and how transactions are secured by hashes.