Summary

The chapter started with a concept-enhancing discussion on private, consortium, and public blockchains. We saw that public blockchains are mostly permissionless by nature, while private blockchains are strictly permissioned. Hence, industries prefer the middle way of consortium blockchaining, to achieve a democracy among stakeholders. We then listed a few developmental platforms that help us in setting up such consortium blockchains. Hyperledger from IBM, Azure from Microsoft, and AWS Cloud promised us an exciting road map for consortium blockchains. We then explored the concepts of money laundering, and how dark web marketplaces have been used since the beginning of the cryptocurrency evolution to fuel this ever-increasing economic plague. We ended the chapter with a balanced note about how the concepts of smart contracts and blockchains have opened up a new set of Pandora...