Questions concerning implementation of MultiChain

Question

Hello,

Currently I am doing a research on blockchain for DAF trucks/PACCAR Inc. and I am making an IoT PoC.

While reading about MultiChain, some questions popped up:

1. Costs of implementation

   1. Adoption costs

   2. Operational costs

2. What type of blockchain(open, private, consortium) does the platform use?

   1. Is it possible to decide yourself what type of blockchain there would be used?

3. For how long has there been worked on the blockchain project?

4. Are there confirmations from ‘centralized parties’that approve the platform

5. Is it necessary to have certain systems running? (E.g., Ubuntu for nodes or is it compatible with Windows)

6. Does the platform offer training? (E.g., blockchain training for management)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Thanks for your questions, which we'll answer in brief:

1. The adoption costs depend on your internal development costs in terms of developing the application on top of MultiChain – this is not something that we can assess for you. The operational costs are simply the costs of running and maintaining whatever server/s you choose to run MultiChain on. It does not have any special or unusual requirements beyond the published system requirements, and of course you need enough disk capacity for your chain's long-term growth.

2. Yes, MultiChain can be extensively configured to make it open or permissioned along many axes. See the anyone-can-* blockchain parameters: https://www.multichain.com/developers/blockchain-parameters/

3. MultiChain has been in development since the end of 2014, so almost 3 years. The first alpha release of MultiChain 1.0 was in June 2015.

4. You do not need any approval from us or any other centralized party to use the platform. MultiChain is simply a piece of software that the blockchain members run for themselves.

5. MultiChain runs on any modern 64-bit Linux distribution or 64-bit Windows – see system requirements at the top of this page: https://www.multichain.com/download-install/

6. Please discuss training with us in private correspondence. But in general our recommendation would be to start with the 'Getting Started' guide and see how you get along – MultiChain is designed to be quite intuitive and easy to use: https://www.multichain.com/getting-started/

Comments

Thanks for the quick reaction!

I have read that MultiChain is Bitcoin based, does this mean that each transaction would cost around 7 euro's each?

If I am wrong, on what is MultiChain based, or is it a unique blockchain?

If I am correct and it is indeed Bitcoin based, how will the Lightning Network update affect MultiChain? I'd imagine that the speed of transactions and the cost would go down a lot. Are you able to give any insight on the impact of the Lightning Network on MultiChain?

Additation on question 4: Seeing that a 'trusted' party verifies a blockchain project increases trust by for example management or the public. I completely agree with you that it is not necessary.

Thanks for taking the time for responding, I appreciate it a lot :)

---

MultiChain's protocol, formats and cryptography are compatible with bitcoin's, but it creates entirely separate blockchain networks that do not suffer from bitcoin's capacity limits or costs. Certainly in a permissioned blockchain there's no meaningful per-transaction cost, unless you deliberately choose to impose one.

For similar reasons the Lightning Network does not affect MultiChain blockchains.