Intel: The ‘Magic’ in Blockchain Can Remove Intermediaries

Intel is bullish on blockchain. The tech giant made waves last month when a new filing revealed the company wants to patent a Bitcoin mining hardware accelerator.

Now, the director of Intel’s Blockchain Program is offering some fresh insight on how the company views decentralized ledger technology, and how it plans to expand its reach in the field moving forward.

In an interview with CRN, director Michael Reed describes the blockchain as a “revolutionary new technology that offers enterprises in general an opportunity to change the way they work.” Reed says the “magic in blockchain – it started with Bitcoin back in 2008 – is that it can settle transactions without the use of an intermediary.”

According to Reed, his team’s top priority is to make sure enterprise blockchain workloads perform best on chips manufactured by Intel.

“Our focus is on the enterprise opportunity. We see the cryptocurrency innovation that came from Bitcoin and evolved to Ethereum as creating the framework for this new capability that can settle transactions without an intermediary. And we see opportunity to apply that to corporations and corporate workloads, where Intel processors are currently running many, many different enterprise workloads and basically apply that cryptocurrency innovation to these enterprise blockchains…

There is absolutely a role for the CPU… What Intel has developed is a consensus algorithm called PoET, [which stands for] Proof of Elasped Time. If you look at the mining algorithms that Ethereum and Bitcoin have developed, they’re generally referred to as Proof of Work and that a miner can demonstrate that they solve the puzzle and proved that they worked through it. Proof of Elapsed Time is a technique that enterprises could use to actually deliver a very similar capability to Bitcoin and Ethereum mining but do it with very little compute power.”

Intel has a long history in the blockchain world. In 2016, the company added its distributed ledger platform called Sawtooth Lake to the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project. It has also teamed up with Tencent to develop an Internet of Things blockchain solution, and it is working with Microsoft on its R3 blockchain enterprise solution.

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