CHINA “INNOVATING” BLOCKCHAINS WITHOUT CRYPTO

They’re not permissionless of course, and not public. But rest assured, China is otherwise innovating like crazy with blockchain technology. So reports the Communist government-tied newspaper, the South China Morning Post.

According to theBlockcrypto.com, blockchain based immutable distributed ledgers run by entities authorized by the Chinese government’s internet regulator are offering smart contract based software services that companies are signing up to receive.

The majority of the registered services are for blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS), which enables users to integrate pre-existing blockchain technology like smart contracts into their own enterprises, and legal and financial applications.

The story at theBlockcrypto.com doesn’t mention that blockchain technology by itself wasn’t the innovation that created such a sensation with bitcoin back in 2009.

Bitcoin solved the problem of trusted authorities. It dispensed with the need for trusted authorities to ensure or vouch for database integrity. This allowed the network to operate as a public decentralized network in which any party could fire up a node, without having to be vetted or “trusted.”

Bitcoin offered a publicly transparent ledger that couldn’t be manipulated, and incentivised running of the nodes via its tokenized ecosystem. 

Of course, anyone writing about China’s use of “blockchain technology without cryptos” should probably point these things out.  That’s why we’re here at Trends In Cryptos.

Informative threads on how cryptos relate to the functioning of public permissionless blockchains, can be found here and here.

As for China’s rejection of crypto technology, the Trends Journal has covered the ongoing story in such articles as “THE GEOPOLITICS OF BITCOIN” (27 Jul 2021), “CHINA SEES CRYPTOS AS EXISTENTIAL THREAT” (28 Sep 2021) and “U.S. REPLACES CHINA AS CENTER OF BITCOIN MINING” (19 Oct 2021). 

Update: Following the writing of this story, crypto outlet CoinDesk.com posted an article on 4 July that made exactly the points about China’s blockchain revolution that we’ve made here.

According to CoinDesk:

“Of course, this isn’t real blockchain per se. It’s a neutered version of that called ‘permissioned blockchain’. No corporation or government, in China or elsewhere, wants their key data to be in a decentralized state they can’t control…”

CoinDesk noted that IBM and Microsoft have recently abandoned enterprise blockchain offerings and initiatives, including Microsoft’s canceling of enterprise blockchain services on Azure Cloud.