Private data

Although often confused with transient data, private data is a completely different mechanism provided by Hyperledger Fabric. While transient data keeps transaction inputs off the ledger, private data keeps transaction outputs off the ledger.

To see why private data is useful, it helps to look at a concrete example:

Figure 8.5: In a network consortium, ledgers can be shared by all organizations or restricted to subsets of organizations

In Figure 8.5, the Vehicle network contains a consortium comprising eight organizations sharing transactional information about vehicles. These organizations include motor manufacturers, a car retailer, an insurance company, the police, and a national vehicle registration agency.

Up to this point, we've mostly concerned ourselves with ledger data like that shown in PUBLIC: all cars, where current values are shared by all organizations in the network. For example, everyone can see that car3 is a 1987 PEUGEOT 205GT...