is Ethereum Private Blockchian

Question

We have seen the development of Private and Public blockchain (Permission vs Permission less). BitCoin the best example of a Public blockchain where any one can read the transactions, create transaction, become a node or miner. How can we best describe Ethereum a Public or Private BC or it can be either any running the EVN in a closed environment. Why I am asking this, as I am creating a dapp, which has all the supply chain parties as nodes in the Private, newly created chain (Monax BC). So, it is possible to have out Private, Permission based BC in Ethereum also ?

And also how is the Microsoft Azure service BaaS which runs on top of Ethereum provides a private BC ?

Answer 1

Ethereum can be a public or private blockchain. The Ethereum Main network is obviously a public blockchain. You can spin up your own Ethereum blockchain by creating your own genesis file, and setting up a unique network id.

To make a private blockchain you might want to setup strict firewall rules across commonly used RPC ports. If you are familiar with Azure, there is a template available for you to host a private blockchain consortium for applications like yours.

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/microsoft-azure-blockchain.azure-blockchain-service

Answer 2

Ethereum (as it is now) is designed as a public blockchain. It's designed to operate in a trust-less environment and is secured through the difficulty of mining blocks and the economic reward associated with mining. If you reduce the difficulty of mining and the ether has no real value in a private context, you'll lose a lot of the security of the chain.

You can deploy a private Ethereum blockchain for testing and experimentation. But beyond that I wouldn't use Ethereum as a production level private blockchain when security is important.

Ethereum (via the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance) is working on pluggable consensus that will be better suited for private blockchains.