About centralized access control permission in MultiChain

Question

For the best of my understanding, MultiChain use a central node to give permissions to the other nodes in a permissioned Blockchain. This central node is the miner of the first block.

It seems that centralization is contradictory with the principal design of blockchain (remove the single point of failure), but I think this centralization is only about  given rights to to the other nodes to access the network, and not affect the distribution of how transaction and blocks are validated and added to the blockchain.

Is my understanding correct? Could you please give  more insight about the subject?

Answer 1

This is how a blockchain starts, but it is easy to assign admin (and activate) permissions to other addresses, owned by other nodes, to decentralize access permissions. Important permissions changes can also be made subject to consensus between administrators – see the admin-consensus-* blockchain parameters: https://www.multichain.com/developers/blockchain-parameters/

Comments

Thanks for the clarification. Therefore, even the access permissions is decentralized in MultiChain, contrary to Hyperledger Fabric that use a CA to distribute certificate between members, is that correct?

---

I can't comment about Hyperledger but MultiChain can support centralized or decentralized access permissions.