What this book covers

The book's goal is to illustrate the capabilities of the blockchain and show how these can be applied across the Oracle Red Stack. The book will introduce concepts and technologies that will allow you to implement your own blockchain in an Oracle environment. It will not go into the technical details of implementing and setting up your own private blockchain, but it will touch upon the basics. The book also covers five major industries, and it will provide examples of how the blockchain is used for projects in these industries. It will also help guide you as to where more information can be found, as a single volume can't possibly cover every aspect of the technology behind blockchain.

The book has been divided into four parts as follows:

• Part I covers the implications of the blockchain across industries that use Oracle and serve as high-level overviews of what is to follow. The chapters in Part I are for people who want to learn about the key concepts of the blockchain, how it affects current Oracle projects, and which industries will benefit the most from implementing the blockchain.
• Part II addresses the core blockchain concepts and terminology in detail. By the time you read through the chapters in Part II, you will have a solid understanding of the technology behind blockchain.
• Part III covers the use of blockchain as a replacement for tradition cross-organizational (B2B) applications by helping you to set up and run your own consortium/private blockchain.
• Part IV describes use cases across five major industries. The last chapter of this part will address future industry directions.

The following is a more detailed explanation of each chapter in each of these parts.

Part I: Implications of Blockchain

Chapter 1, An Introduction to the Blockchain, serves as an overview of the ideas and terminology that you'll need to know to work with blockchain, and it also introduces common characteristics of working with blockchain.

Chapter 2, How Blockchain Will Disrupt Your Organization, is an overview of the affects the blockchain can have on your daily workload and the customer projects in which you're involved.

Part II: Blockchain Core Concepts and Terminology

Chapter 3, Blockchain 101 - Assets, Transactions, and Hashes, covers the concepts of hashing, blocks, (distributed) blockchains, and the mining process.

Chapter 4, Blockchain 101 - Blocks, Chains, and Consensus, builds on the previous chapter and continues exposing the technical details of different kind of assets, how transactions work, and how consensus is reached among entities in a blockchain.

Chapter 5, Blockchain 101 - Security, Privacy, and Smart Contracts, shows that with blockchain, trust is everything. It also talks about how to know that your assets in a blockchain are secure. In addition to security, it covers how blockchain protects your privacy. Finally, this chapter covers smart contracts for conditional transactions.

Chapter 6, Understanding the Blockchain Data Flow, takes a look at how the discussed technical aspects of blockchain come together. Running through the flow of a few transactions helps to make sense off it all.

Chapter 7, Public Versus Private Blockchains and their Providers, discusses the exact differences between public and private/consortium blockchains. It is important to know that you don't have to build the blockchain yourself—there are plenty of providers.

Part III: Implementing a Permissioned Blockchain

Chapter 8, Ethereum Versus Hyperledger, covers two major private blockchains that you can run yourselves: Ethereum and Hyperledger. Based on the story we have woven so far, you should be ready to implement your own blockchain. This chapter also details the differences between these platforms and discusses which one is more suited to implementing a consortium blockchain.

Chapter 9, Building a Next-Generation Oracle B2B Platform, takes a look at blockchain concepts and reflects on where blockchain can replace certain parts of the Oracle middleware. The chapter proposes an insurance and claim process example and shows how a traditional cross-organizational application can be rebuild using blockchain to overcome current inefficiencies.

Chapter 10, Introducing the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service, explores Oracle's answer for running a consortium blockchain, which uses Hyperledger Fabric as its core. The chapter answers questions on Oracle's strategy and what they offer as a cloud service on top of Fabric.

Chapter 11, Setting Up Your Permissioned Blockchain, will walk you through the steps involved for setting up our own permissioned blockchain for our real-world use-case described in Chapter 9, Building a Next-Generation Oracle B2B Platform, now that we know what the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service is capable of.

Chapter 12, Designing and Developing Your First Smart Contract, helps you design and develop our first smart contract that we can later deploy and test on the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service. In the process, we will also set up a development environment.

Chapter 13, Deploying and Testing Your First Smart Contract, enables you to deploy and test our smart contract (developed based on the use-case described in Chapter 9, Building a Next-Generation Oracle B2B Platform) on the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service and test its functions using the REST proxy.

Chapter 14, Configuring, Extending and Monitoring Your Network, (the last implementation chapter) helps extend our blockchain network we have set up in Chapter 10, Introducing the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service, by adding an external Hyperledger Fabric participant. This new member organizations will join the existing network and install the same smart contract.

Part IV: Real-World Industry Case Studies

Chapter 15, Blockchain Across the Financial Services Industry, explores real-word use/study cases in the financial services industry. We look at what the impact of blockchain is on this industry, and which day-to-day operations are already being transformed.

Chapter 16, Blockchain Across the Transportation Industry, covers real-world examples in the transportation industry, what is the impact of blockchain, and why is it a viable technology for this industry. We explore how blockchain has transformed freight/fleet tracking and international shipping (supply chain).

Chapter 17, Blockchain Across the Healthcare Industry, provides insights into what types of healthcare use-cases work great when running on a blockchain; think about secure electronic patient records, drug supply chain, fraud detection, and advanced clinical trials.

Chapter 18, Future Industry and Technology Directions, finally, looks at future directions of blockchain across other industries, such as energy and agriculture, and why it have taken longer for these industries to transform. We also look at the future of the blockchain technology itself in the next 5 years.