Consensus-as-a-service: a brief report on the emergence of permissioned,distributed ledger systems

The purpose of this short report is to describe the divergence between ‘permissionless’ cryptocurrency systems (such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Peercoin) and ‘permissioned’ distributed ledger systems (such as Ripple, Hyperledger). Consequently, we will briefly explore some of the use-cases that distributed ledger systems could play, specifically in the financial services industry. This document assumes that the reader is already familiar with Bitcoin (the blockchain) and bitcoin (the commodity, currency or asset). If you are unfamiliar with these concepts, then some of the vocabulary, concepts and analogies may not make sense.