According to the person in charge of the blockchain technology research and development team of China Enterprise Tongbao: Blockchain can be divided into three categories according to the degree of decentralization, namely public chain, private chain and alliance chain. Let's take a good look at it below.
The public chain is that any node is open to anyone, everyone can participate in the calculation in this blockchain, and anyone can download and obtain the complete blockchain data (all ledgers). However, in some blockchain application scenarios, it is not expected that anyone can participate in this system, and anyone can view all data, and only permissioned nodes can participate and view all data. Then this blockchain structure is called a private chain.
The alliance chain means that the permissions of participating in each node are completely equal, and everyone can realize the trusted exchange of data without complete mutual trust. The bank blockchain alliance formed by R3 is to build a typical alliance chain.
However, with the rapid development of blockchain technology, it cannot be ruled out that the boundaries between public chains and private chains will become blurred in the future. Because each node can have more complex read and write permissions, some nodes with some permissions may be developed for everyone, while some nodes with accounting or core permissions can only be opened to permissioned nodes, which will no longer be pure public or private chain.
To sum up, do you have a deep understanding of the concepts of public chain, private chain and alliance chain?