public blockchain [English]

Syndetic Relationships

InterPARES Definition

No definition in earlier IP projects. ITrust definition not yet developed.

Other Definitions

  • BlockchainHub Glossary (†807 s.v. "Public Blockchains"): a public blockchain is a blockchain that anyone in the world can read, anyone in the world can send transactions to and expect to see them included if they are valid, and anyone in the world can participate in the consensus process – the process for determining what blocks get added to the chain and what the current state is. As a substitute for centralized or quasi-centralized trust, public blockchains are secured by cryptoeconomics – the combination of economic incentives and cryptographic verification using mechanisms such as proof of work or proof of stake, following a general principle that the degree to which someone can have an influence in the consensus process is proportional to the quantity of economic resources that they can bring to bear. These blockchains are generally considered to be “fully decentralized”.
  • Seibold et al. 2016 (†821 p.18): A network in which anyone can participate by reading data, submitting transactions, and participating in the validation process.

Citations

  • Stubbs and Ankeemana 2016 (†773 ): A public blockchain mirrors this distributed trust model. It’s often called a distributed ledger, a fancy way of saying that every record is shared by everyone who’s involved in any given blockchain. Participation is open to any interested party and updates can be triggered by anyone but need to be validated by a majority of participants before they’re written to the blockchain. And, as every update is dependent on one earlier in the ledger, it creates a lineage of transactions; a “chain” of “blocks”, if you will. (†1957)