Private/owned/controlled blockchains come under many names on many different platforms but a good working definition is: any blockchain where there is an entity or a small set of entities who can plausibly censor the network.
Examples are corporate internal blockchains, as well as inter-corporate (say, a blockchain for banks) or government-controlled blockchains.
Such blockchains defeat the purpose of blockchains because they can be censored, so whether they will survive has remained a legitimate question since they were first proposed.
We propose that they might, but that the reason why is not related at all to the reasons why they are typically introduced and how they are marketed.
They are marketed as bestowing on the (usually corporate) entities that introduce them some of the aura of public blockchains and the character traits they are associated with: trustworthiness, clarity and transparency, immutability, solidity and robustness.
It is extremely unlikely that anyone is being fooled and that any of that matters at all.
But there is an avenue through which controlled blockchains might still survive and prove useful, and it is because blockchains have travel companions, and the foremost among them is an ethos of sharing and collaboration, and quality, often open-source, tooling that is borne out of that.
Corporate-owned databases like Oracle and IBM DB2 suffer from astonishingly lousy software stacks. Those behemoths are known to buy up companies that build apps on top of their databases, which their corporate culture subsequently kills, strangling them slowly and draining them of vigor until the founders leave and they’re effectively dead. Big corporations are where software goes to die.
That’s it, that’s the thesis. Blockchains, even though in almost every way inferior to legacy databases, might still win out simply because the accompanying tools and apps ecosystem is growing and evolving rapidly and has probably already eclipsed legacy-database-oriented tooling in both quantity and quality.