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Comment by wayn3 | Hacker News Reader

blockchain is just a data structure, and its already being used by a bunch of financial institutions to do the distributed ledger thing.

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Financial institutions will use R3. "R3 is an alliance of the world’s largest insitutions, with a mission to realise the benefits of distributed ledger technology." They will not use a blockchain with mining. They want to use a distributed ledger in which if party A-B have a transaction, the pertinent information is only available to A and B and possibly government regulators.

I think the distributed ledger will take over (R3, Hyperledger, Ripple), noone is going to take mining based blockchains seriously in a few years.

Without mining (proof of work) how would the block chain be considered secure and immutable?

Consensus. And again, it is not a block chain. There are distributed ledgers. This is a whitepaper: https://ripple.com/files/ripple_consensus_whitepaper.pdf

Is there a good block chain implementation to play around with? I've looked but I don't know where to begin.

Probably hundreds, but I can't point a particularly great one out.

chain.com - it's all open source, despite their glossy fintech website.

BigchainDB is open-source; with same licensing as MongoDB which it wraps. http://github.com/bigchaindb/bigchaindb.

It has quickstart that takes about 20 min to do. By the time you're done, you'll have issued assets, transferred them, and more. https://docs.bigchaindb.com/projects/server/en/latest/quicks...

Live support is at gitter. https://gitter.im/bigchaindb/bigchaindb

(Note: I'm CTO of BigchainDB.)

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