Hybrid Google Cloud and Blockchain Smart Contract Apps

In the Google Cloud Blog, they suggest we can create cloud-Blockchain hybrids, and integrate them with smart contracts. Want to see some real life examples of this.  Pass them along.  The examples below the fold are interesting:

Further commentary in Gartner: https://blogs.gartner.com/avivah-litan/2019/07/23/google-in-blockchain/ 

Building hybrid blockchain/cloud applications with Ethereum and Google Cloud   By Allen Day ... Developer Advocate, Google Cloud

Adoption of blockchain protocols and technologies can be accelerated by integrating with modern internet resources and public cloud services. In this blog post, we describe a few applications of making internet-hosted data available inside an immutable public blockchain: placing BigQuery data available on-chain using a Chainlink oracle smart contract. Possible applications are innumerable, but we've focused this post on a few that we think are of high and immediate utility: prediction marketplaces, futures contracts, and transaction privacy.

Hybrid cloud-blockchain applications
Blockchains focus on mathematical effort to create a shared consensus. Ideas quickly sprang up to extend this model to allow party-to-party agreements, i.e. contracts. This concept of smart contracts was first described in a 1997 article by computer scientist Nick Szabo. An early example of inscribing agreements into blocks was popularized by efforts such as Colored Coins on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Smart contracts are embedded into the source of truth of the blockchain, and are therefore effectively immutable after they’re a few blocks deep. This provides a mechanism to allow participants to commit crypto-economic resources to an agreement with a counterparty, and to trust that contract terms will be enforced automatically and without requiring third party execution or arbitration, if desired.

But none of this addresses a fundamental issue: where to get the variables with which the contract is evaluated. If the data are not derived from recently added on-chain data, a trusted source of external data is required. Such a source is called an oracle.

In previous work, we made public blockchain data freely available in BigQuery through the Google Cloud Public Datasets Program for eight different cryptocurrencies. In this article, we'll refer to that work as Google's crypto public datasets. You can find more details and samples of these datasets in the GCP Marketplace. This dataset resource has resulted in a number of GCP customers developing business processes based on automated analysis of the indexed blockchain data, such as SaaS profit sharing, mitigating service abuse by characterizing network participants, and using static analysis techniques to detect software vulnerabilities and malware. However, these applications share a common attribute: they're all using the crypto public datasets as an input to an off-chain business process. .... 

Chainlink for Smart Contracts

New developments in Smart Contracts.  Addressing some of the difficult issues with the concept of a smart contract.    Good discussion at the link:

Blockchain Smart Contacts Finally Good for Something in the Real World    In MIT Technology Review   By Mike Orcutt

Startup Chainlink has partnered with Cornell University's Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts to find a reliable way for smart contracts—blockchain-stored computer programs—to connect with real-world events. The concept involves combining smart contracts with real-time "oracle" data feeds so blockchain-based services can interact with events with significantly higher levels of trust. Chainlink's Sergey Nazarov said current oracle services hinder blockchain use because they are centralized and prone to tampering, barring smart contracts' access to real-world data. To overcome this, Chainlink and Cornell developed Town Crier, a "high-trust bridge" between the Ethereum blockchain and HTTPS-enabled online data sources; Town Crier's centerpiece is a program running within an isolated piece of hardware, or secure enclave, that is shielded from attacks while maintaining computation confidentiality. Chainlink's software coordinates decentralized oracle networks harnessing multiple sources of data for smart-contract-based services so that they have no dependence on a single source. ... "