I respectfully disagree.<p>I think there is a big role for open blockchains, but if 20 traders want to sit under a buttonwood tree and run their own blockchain there is no problem with that.<p>One of the reasons why blockchains took so long to arrive is that from a conventional "distributed systems" point of view they are a nonstarter. If you double the number of nodes, you don't increase the capacity of the system to do work. You increase the security, you avoid the "long tail" latency problem, and you can execute "smart contracts" without adding communications overhead, but the economics are not favorable to execute your "smart contract" on 10,000 nodes at the same time.<p>If you really want to crush permissioned blockchains you need to figure out some way to keep the security benefits of blockchains but shard them in such a way that you can add more nodes and increase the workload capacity. If you don't do that, permissioned blockchains will win for most applications./