In usual blockchain frameworks there are two major ways of defining the general visibility:
- public blockchain: the nodes can be run by anybody, even by hackers. The transactions are visible to everybody as well and practically the whole world can participate.
- consortium blockchain: the nodes are operated by certain consortium members, and these members have access to the transactions and the whole blockchain content as well.
There might be a third solution between public and consortium scenarios, let we call it a semi public blockchain. In this version the peers are operated by a consortium with known members, but the network itself fully public meaning that everybody can participate on the transaction side and everybody can deploy and operate smart contracts or decentralized applications on top of the network without requiring a permission from the consortium of the infrastructure side. Such scenario is proposed for example by the Hedera Hashgraph.
