IBM offer the IBM Blockchain, based on the Hyperledger. This appears to be a distributed database which is “blockchain technology” in that it uses Merkle trees to verify that the versions of the ledger match. Smart contracts are bodged in there too, somehow.

Finding out the substance of what companies are selling as “Blockchain” is not so easy. I spent half an hour dredging hyperledger.org and could not find one clear statement anywhere of what this software actually does, let alone similarities and differences compared to existing blockchains. It’s a corporate open source Potemkin village of the sort IBM favours heavily – the illusion of a project, with no “there” there. Even Bitcoin promotional blog CoinDesk notes: “Among the doubts facing Hyperledger is a perceived lack of clarity on what might be ultimately produced by the initiative.”

If you click on enough random mislabeled links, you'll find a page where some of the participating companies have dumped their unfinished blockchain experiments. Intel's contribution, Sawtooth Lake, replaces the blitheringly stupid Proof of Work with something called Proof of Elapsed Time. It’s not as secure against hostile participants as Proof of Work, because private blockchains won’t need that, being oriented to fast transaction resolution amongst a few trusted participants. You might think that at that point you don’t need a blockchain at all, but you’re hardly going to sell any consultant hours with that sort of thinking.

To run it, you need a Trusted Execution Environment, i.e., the bit of an Intel CPU that Intel don’t let you access. The white paper is an extended advertisement for Intel® Software Guard Extensions™ (SGX™). It's like they invented something actually worse than Bitcoin.

It is possible I have some elements of this arse-backwards (I still can't work out what the fuck and how the fuck TEE/SGX is), but it's not for want of wading through a paper swamp of Dilbertian bullshit. So what, if anything, are these things?