A Survey of Blockchain From the Perspectives of Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities

TLDR

Blockchain is a decentralized, immutable, transparent, and auditable chain of blocks that underpins digital cryptocurrencies and is increasingly applied beyond finance to domains such as risk management and healthcare. This paper conducts a comparative study of blockchain tradeoffs, taxonomy, architecture, and consensus mechanisms, while outlining future directions for the technology. The authors analyze different consensus mechanisms and evaluate challenges related to scalability, privacy, interoperability, energy consumption, and regulatory issues.

Abstract

Blockchain is the underlying technology of a number of digital cryptocurrencies. Blockchain is a chain of blocks that store information with digital signatures in a decentralized and distributed network. The features of blockchain, including decentralization, immutability, transparency and auditability, make transactions more secure and tamper proof. Apart from cryptocurrency, blockchain technology can be used in financial and social services, risk management, healthcare facilities, and so on. A number of research studies focus on the opportunity that blockchain provides in various application domains. This paper presents a comparative study of the tradeoffs of blockchain and also explains the taxonomy and architecture of blockchain, provides a comparison among different consensus mechanisms and discusses challenges, including scalability, privacy, interoperability, energy consumption and regulatory issues. In addition, this paper also notes the future scope of blockchain technology.