Why is IBM betting on blockchain? What is the purpose of the Hyperledger project?

Global technology giant IBM recently participated in the Blockchain Conference held in San Francisco, further demonstrating its determination to enter the blockchain industry.

At the end of last year, IBM announced its participation in the Open Ledger Project (now renamed Hyperledger), an open source blockchain project led by the Linux Foundation. Once announced, the project has attracted widespread attention from the financial, technology and blockchain industries. In addition to IBM, the project's participants come from influential companies in the financial technology and banking industries, such as Intel, Cisco, London Stock Exchange Group, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and State Street. This week, the project's participants have increased to 30, including ABN AMRO, Bank of New York Mellon, Chicago Board of Trade, ConsenSys, NTT Data, Red Hat, Symbiont, etc.

约翰·沃伯特, IBM’s global blockchain distribution director, delivered a keynote address at the conference, describing the problems with the approaches used by blockchain developers today and why he believes it will take collaboration to bring blockchain technology into the mainstream.

IBM is leveraging its existing brand influence to position itself as a leader in enterprise-grade blockchain solutions.

In his speech, John Wolpert outlined IBM's theoretical views on the technology. Wolpert said that blockchain projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are the first generation of the concept of "blockchain" and have flaws in both technology and prospects, so they have not been able to attract corporate adoption.

Wolpert told the audience:

“We thought, what if we could fix the problems of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain projects? Just like we fixed Linux and Java in the past. So blockchain projects are not completely new to us. We think these [projects] are awesome, and we want to work together to make it a reality.”

Many Bitcoin supporters and developers compare the Bitcoin protocol to the Internet, but Wolpert disagrees. He believes that the Bitcoin blockchain is different from the Internet.

Wolpert said that bitcoin's early adopters were not radical, but rather ideologically misguided. There are central forces on the Internet, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit created in 1998 and responsible for IP addresses, is a frequent point of contact.

“There are a lot of smart and talented minds behind Bitcoin, but [they] got some of the logic wrong. [You don’t need] to change everything from trust to trustless. I think that’s an honest disagreement… The internet is a permissioned ‘walled garden.’ Ever heard of ICANN? It’s permissioned, but it requires permission. What’s anonymous? The dark web.”

Wolpert said the Hyperledger project aims to bring together “all the best ideas” in the ecosystem into one solution, which he believes is necessary given the need for a widely used transaction protocol.

“It’s not an email, it’s not a website. It’s your money, that’s everything.”

trust

In his speech, Wolpert also tried to correct some misconceptions, such as the view that IBM is not a company that embraces innovation, citing the example of IBM's support for the programming language Java and the open source Linux operating system.

"Our approach is to be open and often support things that we are not responsible for, Java is not something we are responsible for, (but) we are still behind it."

Wolpert stressed that IBM has expertise in consensus algorithms and distributed computing, noting that some of its members have been working in the field for “30 years.”

Wolpert sees Bitcoin as more like Napster or BitTorrent, which will lead to products like Spotify or Netflix. He praised Bitcoin for popularizing the concept of blockchain.

“Bitcoin has made people realize that, it’s made people think again. I think if it’s for that reason, of course, Bitcoin is very important.”

Wolpert gave vague hints about IBM’s strategy for the Hyperledger project.

“It has to be immutable, modular, I can’t (be sure) this is the consensus algorithm, this is the token, all of this has to be modular. It has to be scalable. Interledger-ing is important, you have to have interoperability between different chains and things.”

Wolpert clearly communicated his belief in the need to build an open source blockchain platform that is widely used for a variety of use cases, just like Linux.

He said:

“We need a structure that allows for a lot of platform competition and competition for solutions, and we need to evolve the internet into an economic consciousness where the internet is not going to be an application, it’s going to be a structure.”

The key is getting different stakeholders involved, Wolpert said, something the Hyperledger project has done to some extent with the expertise of IBM.

“We have built pilot projects for each blockchain, we have been doing this for several years, and now we want to launch a unified platform, and we announced a collaboration with the Linux Foundation,” he said, adding:

“At this point, we’re betting big on blockchain.”

opportunity

Since the Linux Foundation announced the Hyperledger project, Wolpert said they have received 2,300 applications from companies wanting to join the project, which is four times more than any previous project.

Wolpert believes this rush to innovate means traditional financial service providers are forced to innovate in order to survive.

"A lot of bankers are smart. They don't care if they succeed every time. But they try to improve themselves fundamentally as much as possible before the changes."

Although more and more people are participating, Wolpert admits that the road ahead is still unclear and not easy.

Wolpert concluded:

“It may become a revolutionary trend worth remembering, or it may change the world.”

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/ibm-director-all-in-blockchain/
By Pete Rizzo
Translator: printemps
Editor: printemps
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/ibm-blockchain-2)