Dynamics 365 Business Central: Blockchain in Azure

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Blockchain in Azure

Hey everyone, we're going to keep going on blockchain this is going to be the last for now. 

We're going to get into something else next but at the end of this video we're going to go into a screen share where I'm going to show you where we can create a blockchain within the Azure cloud. 

 Microsoft's allow Microsoft allows you to create block chain using straddle in the Azure cloud, so it hosted in the Azure cloud, but it's very technical so if you're going to extend that you're going to have to code, you're going to create your own storage through code and contracts etc. there's also a website out there which I'll show you as well where you can go in and create a blockchain visually, and it shows you how the peer network synchronizes and the messages between the peers which I think is very interesting. 

But let's take a moment and think about blockchain for a second, what is watching blockchain? so blockchain became very hyped when we got crypto currencies like Bitcoin right? and Bitcoin served the purpose as you know being extremely secure distributed and it's for you know money but slow moving money not fast moving money, bitcoin network is is not fast enough to handle transactions just like credit cards or even bank transactions so there is a negative to that.  

The blockchain concept became popularized and now everybody wants to solve everything with a block, which I think is kind of wrong, sort of like if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, if the only thing you have is a hammer. There is a public blockchains which means that they are distributed all over and different servers are synchronizing and then there are private blockchains which are probably just a handful of servers. There's a difference between those the public ones are very slow and synchronizing and validating the data whereas the private ones could be tweaked to be faster, they serve a specific purpose. 

I'm going to put just two things up there, first you have let's say Bitcoin which is sort of public right, it's all over it's being shared and the proof-of-work algorithm which when you add a new block chain into the chain it goes through this proof-of-work algorithm is slow, it's slow if you have a lot of notes every note has to be informed they all have to make sure that it's correct etc. 

If you have something called private blockchain and I'm going to put an example here as the IBM Food Trust because we are working in food and perishables a lot and we're now working with IBM food trusts, Microsoft IBM friends of course. IBM's food trust is meant to be a traceability database public possibility where you can actually push lot numbers into IBM's blockchain and you have a full string of blocks and traceability for that, so for example, if you're shipping a pallet of apples to a grocery store, that that pallet has a lot number it gets shipped from a farm to a distributor and then to a grocery store and you can then query that lot number all the way back. You would know exactly what farm produce those apples and to which stores it went. 

This is traceability and this is of course currency, I’ll just put currency.  For traceability sake, no one is going to really hack that, no one really cares to change the information about the expiration date of a couple of pallets of apples. I mean I don't think we're going to have a huge team of hackers trying to change that, although we do have a huge team of hackers trying to crack the currency because that's money. This doesn't have to be the proof-of-work algorithm, I'm going to put that here is slow because it's validating the slower it is the better it is, whereas the proof-of-work algorithm here could be fast because we don't have to be as secure. This is sort of a niche implementation of a blockchain and I think now we're starting to use the term blockchain loosely, we have two versions and I think what's going to happen in the future, is the whole blockchain concept is going to break up into all types of different applications of blockchain, they're going to have different technical implementations that are specific to what the subject is. 

For right now although the market is kind of throwing this back and forth and we do have availability in Azure to create our own and play around with it and this is being developed and Walmart is actually going to take this on and require everybody to use this blockchain by October this year so let's see what happens. 

Hey guys so we're now going to go into the system, I've actually locked into the Azure portal and so this is kind of the back end of Microsoft's cloud and you can actually get into building your own machines in here, create active directory, a lot of technical stuff. Just as a point I'm going to look up here straddle and what I get is a blockchain, so Microsoft Azure allows you to get into Blockchain in the Azure, and  you can create your own blockchain in here, all you have to do is just hit create and then start connecting to the blockchain using programming. I really don't get into coding in this new series but I want you to understand that you can create your own blockchain using Azure, so if you're developer if you have a developer autumn staff or you are a developer or you have a company that you work with, they can set that up for you and you can use Azure for that. 

Also what I wanted to touch base on is, you can get here into a blockchain demo on the net and this is actually a cool site that I looked at, here we have a blockchain, I've created a blockchain and I have three peers in my blockchain, which means that I have three nodes which are synchronizing the block or the blockchain. This is a blockchain I have the Genesis block where the previous hash is zero, the hash for this particular block is this long string here, that turns out to be the previous hash of next block and then the next one here. You can see it visually pretty well, if I want to add data for example coffee mug add new block now this becomes a new block on the chain and it gets a new hash, it's connected to the previous one and if I look up into trouble, trouble is one of the nodes, if I go to Marco, I can see that Marco has already synchronized this chain and if I go to Satoshi and I get here a promo just click that out,  I can see Satoshi has already synchronized as well. 

All of the chains are now in harmony and these could be all around the world, I could go ahead and take a look at what's going on here and you can see the connection string that happened as the blockchains were communicating and moving the blocks around, you can read through that here, so it's a really good graphical example of a distributed storage system which blockchain is, with the crypto security it comes with blockchain. Essentially if you wanted to do this yourself, you can build one here in Azure, but you have to know programming because, once you build this blockchain up it basically says, okay so what contracts would you like to code for me? or what type of storage would you like to code for me? and you have to do that with programming and compile it to actually get it to do something meaningful this is just the basis and it hosts the blockchain so the engine is there, so I hope that explained a little bit where we can go with this block change them until next time thank you.