New distribution methods are available for the insurance industry such as peer-to-peer insurance, parametric insurance and microinsurance following the adoption of blockchain.[71][72] The sharing economy and IoT are also set to benefit from blockchains because they involve many collaborating peers.[73] Online voting is another application of the blockchain.[74][75]
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At Iryo, we consider databases and blockchains that are not opened to the public to be insecure they, can easily be altered by the business running it, at their discretion and it goes against the ethos of the open and transparent cryptocurrency space. Designed to keep public out and introducing “trusted” middlemen, private chains forget that trusted third parties are security holes.
“The only reason the banks have gotten to the point of thinking about permissioned ledger is because they finally reached the stage of bargaining, third stage in five stages of grief, for industry they’re about to lose. They start with denial, and the basis of denial is, well, this thing isn’t gonna work, it’s gonna die any day soon, and it doesn’t. And then they say, it’s just silly money and it doesn’t have any value, until it does; and no one else is gonna play with it, except they are; serious investors won’t put money into this, except they did; and it still refuses to die. We go from denial to bargaining. Somewhere in between might be anger, some depression, and eventually they’re going to reach acceptance, but it’s gonna take a long time. 

In general, so far there has been little emphasis on the distinction between consortium blockchains and fully private blockchains, although it is important: the former provides a hybrid between the “low-trust” provided by public blockchains and the “single highly-trusted entity” model of private blockchains, whereas the latter can be more accurately described as a traditional centralized system with a degree of cryptographic auditability attached. However, to some degree there is good reason for the focus on consortium over private: the fundamental value of blockchains in a fully private context, aside from the replicated state machine functionality, is cryptographic authentication, and there is no reason to believe that the optimal format of such authentication provision should consist of a series of hash-linked data packets containing Merkle tree roots; generalized zero knowledge proof technology provides a much broader array of exciting possibilities about the kinds of cryptographic assurances that applications can provide their users. In general, I would even argue that generalized zero-knowledge-proofs are, in the corporate financial world, greatly underhyped compared to private blockchains.

Ethereum is an open-source blockchain platform that allows anyone to build and use decentralized applications running on blockchain technology. Ethereum is a programmable blockchain - it allows users to create their own operations. These operations, coded as Smart Contracts, are deployed and executed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) running inside every node.
Another promise of sidechains is the ability to have a stronger and faster mainchain, as transactions can happen on one of the sidechains. If users or developers are dissatisfied with the costs of sending a transaction and the transaction speed of the mainchain, they can use and or deploy their dapp on one of the sidechains. This leads to a more diversified network and a stronger, faster and more robust mainchain.
Using Rootstock as an example, in order to transfer assets from one chain to the other a user on the parent first has to send their coins to a special output address where they will consequently become locked and un-spendable. Once the transaction is completed, SPV then confirms it across the chains and after waiting out a contest period, which is just a secondary method to help prevent double spending, the equivalent amount will be credited and spendable on the Sidechain and vice versa.
Let's explore if there is a hybrid blockchain concept (third type). A consortium blockchain would be a mix of both the public and private. Wherein the ability to read & write could be extended to a certain number of people/nodes. This could be used by groups of organization/firms, who get together, work on developing different models by collaborating with each other. Hence, they could gain a blockchain with restricted access, work on their solutions and maintain the intellectual property rights within the consortium.
Unfortunately our second option cannot be done yet, because to use these sidechains, main chain (here it is bitcoin) needs to do some upgrade (soft fork). By the way, upgrades in public blockchains are very painful yet. There will be a user activated soft fork (UASF) on August 1. All bitcoin forms’ trend topic is this soft fork which is about a code change for Segregated Witness Adoption.
The public blockchain is open to anyone who wants to deploy smart contracts and have their executions performed by public mining nodes. Bitcoin is one of the largest public blockchain networks today. As such, there is limited privacy in the public blockchain. Mining nodes in the public blockchain requires a substantial amount of computational power to maintain the distributed ledger at a large scale. In the Ethereum public blockchain, smart contract codes can be viewed openly.
Blockstream recently released a whitepaper on “strong federations,” which is essentially their vision of a federated two-way peg system. Liquid is a sidechain created by Blockstream that uses the strong federations model. The sidechain is used to transfer bitcoins between centralized bitcoin institutions, such as exchanges, at a faster pace than the public Bitcoin blockchain.
Por ello, con este escenario sobre la mesa y con el objetivo de aunar esfuerzos, algunos se han preguntado: ¿Sería posible crear blockchains que sean utilizadas para casos de usos concretos, pero conectadas en todo momento a la de Bitcoin? ¿Podemos crear piezas de software que desde una blockchain se pueda saltar a otra de manera transparente, segura y descentralizada? Esto generaría, para que te hagas una imagen mental, algo así como las ruedas dentadas interconectadas de un motor, cada rueda una blockchain, todas trabajando juntas.
What if we could run heavy computations in a more centralized fashion, say on a single server, and then periodically integrate the results onto the main blockchain for posterity. We temporarily expose some vulnerability while the parallel server runs the heavy computation, but we get a massive benefit in that we don’t have to run the computation on chain, and simply need to store the results for future verification. This is the general premise behind Truebit. We won’t get into all the details of Truebit but there is a concept of challengers, who check to see the computations that were made have high fidelity.
Put simply, sidechaining is any mechanism that allows tokens from one blockchain to be securely used within a completely separate blockchain but still moved back to the original chain if necessary. By convention the original chain is normally referred to as the "main chain", while any additional blockchains which allow users to transact within them in the tokens of the main chain are referred to as "sidechains". For example, a private Ethereum-based network that had a linkage allowing ether to be securely moved from the public Ethereum main chain onto it and back would be considered to be a sidechain of the public network.
I said above that you can build sophisticated rules into Bitcoin transactions to specify how ownership is proved. However, the Bitcoin scripting language is deliberately limited and many ideas in the Smart Contracts space are difficult or impossible to implement. So projects such as Ethereum are building an entirely new infrastructure to explore these ideas
The consensus mechanism involves ascertaining transaction validity and uniqueness. Smart contracts address the validity portion. To ensure uniqueness, the protocol program in Corda checks whether any other transaction has used any of the input states of this transaction. If no other transaction has used any of the input states, that this transaction is unique.

This segment is where we have seen the most rapid metamorphosis in the past year, mostly in financial services. These solutions are industry-specific, and they are based on private blockchain or ledger infrastructures. A caveat here is that some of these are not full blockchains. Rather, they are distributed ledgers, which are a subset of blockchain capabilities. And some don’t even include a consensus element, which takes the implementation another level down from distributed ledger tech.

A public blockchain is a platform where anyone on the platform would be able to read or write to the platform, provided they are able to show the proof of work for the same. There has been a lot of activity in this space as the number of potential users that any technology in this space could generate is high.  Also, a public blockchain is considered to be a fully decentralized blockchain. Some of the examples are:
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What Bitcoin’s development team is essentially doing through feature-creep is forcing everyone in the non-tech world to use Bitcoin through commercial proxies to avoid all this complexity (crypto-what? security? sidechain?), which effectively results in the loss of security, relative anonymity and decentralized properties that helped to make it interesting in the first place.
The great thing about Bitcoin, for a tech columnist like me, is that it’s simultaneously over-the-top cinematic and technically dense. Richard Branson recently hosted a “Blockchain Summit” at his private Caribbean island. There’s a Bitcoin Jet. At the same time, 2015 has seen the release of a whole slew of technically gnarly–and technically fascinating–proposals built atop the Bitcoin blockchain.

Note: This is also a pioneering effort towards increased adoption of smart contracts because while the traditional contracts have been around for a long time, smart contracts are relatively new, and there are gaps in how they are structured. If the smart contracts have the necessary legal expressions then that could serve as a template to bridge this gap in future.

A public blockchain has absolutely no access restrictions. Anyone with an internet connection can send transactions[disambiguation needed] to it as well as become a validator (i.e., participate in the execution of a consensus protocol).[84][self-published source?] Usually, such networks offer economic incentives for those who secure them and utilize some type of a Proof of Stake or Proof of Work algorithm.
The information on every public blockchain is subsequently replicated to sometimes thousands of nodes on the network. No one power administers it centrally, hence, hackers can’t destroy the network by crippling one central server. Read this article “What is Blockchain technology? A step-by-step Guide For Beginners”, for a more detailed description of the technology.
The paper outlines some critical developments and associated problems that were both currently trending and forward-thinking at the time, many of them still very much relevant today. At the time, altcoins were quickly gaining prominence and the problems associated with their volatility, security, and lack of interoperability with Bitcoin raised concerns. The paper primarily addressed 6 issues that pegged sidechains aimed to provide a solution:
Nikolai Hampton pointed out in Computerworld that "There is also no need for a '51 percent' attack on a private blockchain, as the private blockchain (most likely) already controls 100 percent of all block creation resources. If you could attack or damage the blockchain creation tools on a private corporate server, you could effectively control 100 percent of their network and alter transactions however you wished."[9] This has a set of particularly profound adverse implications during a financial crisis or debt crisis like the financial crisis of 2007–08, where politically powerful actors may make decisions that favor some groups at the expense of others,[51][52] and "the bitcoin blockchain is protected by the massive group mining effort. It's unlikely that any private blockchain will try to protect records using gigawatts of computing power—it's time consuming and expensive."[9] He also said, "Within a private blockchain there is also no 'race'; there's no incentive to use more power or discover blocks faster than competitors. This means that many in-house blockchain solutions will be nothing more than cumbersome databases."[9]
Cohen recently noted that before blockchain is practical in retail, brands have to understand its relevance. NPD said it’s not just about payment methods or sourcing transparency. It also has the potential to touch all areas of a company. Cohen highlights a few areas where blockchain has the ability to impact retail including revolutionizing supply chain management, preventing against counterfeiting, simplifying payments and creating safer data security.
Many blockchain enthusiasts believe in the value of networks that are not only decentralized — which most closely resembles the current model of the Internet — but distributed. This includes Tim Berners-Lee, who founded the World Wide Web in 1989. Berners-Lee has proposed that blockchains can be used to reinvent the web in a more distributed and peer-to-peer fashion.