Dr. C Mohan, IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center, Silicon Valley and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, China gave a talk on State of permissionless and permissioned blockchains: myths and reality on 23 January.

Over the years, numerous myths have developed with respect to the purported utility and the need for permissionless blockchains. The adoption and further adaptation of blockchains and smart contracts for use in the permissioned or private environments is what Dr. Mohan considers to be useful and of practical consequences. Hence, the technical aspects of only private blockchain systems were focused in his talk. He cleared many myths associated with permissionless blockchains and compared traditional database technologies with blockchain systems’ features and identified desirable future research topics.

Dr. C Mohan is currently an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in China. He has been an IBM researcher for 38 years in the database and related areas, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the well-known ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort distributed commit protocol. He is currently focused on Blockchain, Big Data and HTAP technologies.