Jamiel Sheikh

Congratulations to the winners!

I have done some work with HyperLedger proof of concepts but nothing in production. I do know of projects that use other chains for supply chain traceability and provenance.

Hi Serge,

I usually avoid the "who is better" debate because it's never easy to arrive at a definitive objective conclusion. Corda is one platform that has a set of features that may fit your use case. I built a traceability and provenance solution for the World Bank for Haitian mangoes and I used Corda for it. Would HyperLedger work as well? Absolutely. What I like about Corda is that it is JVM native and has strong scalability features, something most, if not all, blockchains are missing. There are no transaction fees like there are on Ethereum and you can always rest assure that any transaction data is private unless you give explicit permission for parties on a network to see that data. If these are features you need for your use case then Corda is something worth considering. In my book I describe a traceability design pattern that can be used to track shipping containers, payment obligations and payments.

Thank you!

Hi Rahim,

Thank you for your words. I recommend you read Mastering Bitcoin and Mastering Ethereum from O'Reilly as well, these are foundational books. Unfortunately, the blockchain space is moving fast and the literature lags behind. I also recommend reading the whitepapers, especially Bitcoin, Ethereum and Corda. Then build an app on Ethereum or Corda to get a more deeper appreciation. Medium.com is a great resource for the newest information but can be too much of a jungle if you are not sure what to read.

Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum do use energy but whether or not that energy consumption is justified or not is a philosophical question. Bitcoin has a hard supply limit of 21 million Bitcons, at which point mining (and the energy consumption) ceases. Ethereum is already moving to Ethereum 2.0 which uses a consensus algorithm that requires no energy consumption. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the Internet was hyped, lots of companies came and died, and we are seeing the same in blockchain and crypto. What we do know is that it has transcended beyond simple crypto trading to now taken the attention of governments and central banks. The Corda blockchain, for example, is processing over 200 million transactions  for Italian banks. Blockchain is not a solution for all use cases, but there are many use cases that will eventually bend to disruption and blockchain will become the new paradigm on how it is done. This is especially true for finance and healthcare, where synchronization of data across parties is critical and the lack of consistent data models across organizations lead to huge hidden reconciliation costs.

Hi Randy, projects like Midoin use blockchain concepts in varying degrees. There are many projects like this in the works. Which one will succeed in the future is anyone's guess because the nature of innovation, something new can come along and change the game. We are in the early stages of blockchain and the dust has not settled yet in terms of who the winners are. Right now Bitcoin, Ethereum and a few of the altcoins are dominating the market. On the Defi side, smart contracts like Uniswap and Compound have billions locked up, a very recent phenomenon. Part of what is exciting about blockchain is that the future is uncertain yet what is certain is that blockchain is altering our course.

George Gdgeorgiadis wrote:Interesting Book. Do you believe that blockchain technology is going to be implement in processes from other Business Industries ( Logistic , Sales , Telcos ,Insurarance etc) ?

Hi George, I personally believe the blockchain will change how we do business entirely within the next 10 years, just like how the internet changed how we do business today, across all the verticals you mentioned, but especially finance, supply chain, insurance and healthcare.

Vivek Ravi wrote:Hi Sheikh,
Congratulations on your book, much anticipated one.
Looking forward to order it and read.
Got a question though, Corda blockchain in built on Kotlin, and the title speaks about Corda mastery for Java Dev which implies that Kotlin will be referenced?

Hi Vivek, thanks for your kind words. Corda is a framework that is written in Kotlin but the book uses mostly Java to build apps on top of the platform. Therefore, little to no Kotlin knowledge is required. To study the framework, however, would require some basic knowledge of Kotlin. In the back of the book a Kotlin cheat sheet is provided giving you really what you need to know of Kotlin to read Corda framework source code.

Randy Tong wrote:Congratulations on your new book, Jamiel

Thank you Randy!

Hi Water,

Thank you for your kind words. All the cryptography you need to know is covered in 1 chapter and then the rest of the book builds upon that. Knowledge of the basics of hashes and public and private keys is sufficient to get through the entire book, but a deeper understanding of cryptography and structures like Merkle trees will give you a stronger appreciation of how blockchain works.

Hi Randy,

1. The book covers financial use cases and looks at tokens on a DLT and dealing with issues like coin selection, but the book is more generic and prepares the reader for other use cases. However, DeFi has grown over the past few months. I will be holding a DeFi conference called DEFiiCON to cover more topics (see http://defiicon.com) and will then do a book specifically on Defi.

2. I've created a framework called PyCorda and we are putting in the ability to use algos like regression and kNN against tokens, we are in early stages of this

Hi Jorge,

Great question! You can think of Bitcoin, HyperLedger and Corda as 3 different flavors of blockchain, each with different set of features. BitcoinJ is an implementation of the Bitcoin protocol initially defined by Satoshi Nakamoto in a whitepaper and evolved over a decade by the Bitcoin dev community. HyperLedger and Corda borrow ideas from Bitcoin and discard other ideas and focus on blockchain that is more useful in the enterprise. For example, Bitcoin espouses the idea of transactions being open and public, anyone can see transactions occurring although they may not know who is truly behind those transactions. For enterprise situations, this may not be ideal. Instead, KYC is required and who a business is transacting with cannot be anonymous. In addition, most businesses want their transactions with other businesses to be private and not public. HL and Corda therefore focus on private transactions.

Campbell Ritchie wrote:Welcome to the Ranch

You should have some questions soon, whenever the people whose posts were removed ask again.

Hi Campbell, thanks, bring them on!!

Hi I everyone! Thank you to the JavaRanch team for this opportunity to engaged with the community! I look forward to answering any questions you may have related to blockchain and/or Corda, a blockchain platform. For my info on my bio, see my bio page http://jamiel.io and feel free to add me on LinkedIn http://linkedin.com/in/jamiel