How to control ‘visibility’ of data?

Question

In a private/consortium blockchain setup where there are (say) 10 parties who trade amongst themselves, and another party that acts as a ‘regulator’ – how can we hide/encrypt/control transaction visibility such that the parties to a transaction can ‘see’ the transaction, while other parties cannot (maybe they just see an obfuscated transaction instead). At the same time, we want the regulator to be able to can see ALL transactions. Is this possible today with Multichain? If so, how?

Answer 1

In general this is not an easy use case for blockchains, if you want asset transfers to be settled directly on the chain - please see this blog post for more details:

http://www.multichain.com/blog/2016/03/blockchains-vs-centralized-databases/

However you can always embed encrypted transaction information on the chain, for the settlement to take place elsewhere, using the idea of a data stream:

http://www.multichain.com/developers/creating-data-streams/