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Puerto Rico Bitcoin Events and Blockchain Meetups for 2020, Rated and Reviewed
The Trust is instrumental in setting Puerto Rico's public policy for sciencetechnologyresearch and development. Beikverdi et al. Decker et al. Therefore, in a malleability attack an attacker intercepts, modifies, and rebroadcasts a transaction, causing the transaction issuer to believe that the original transaction was not confirmed [ 36 ]. Eyal I, Sirer E.
Today, we look at ten must-read research papers that explore fintech, blockchain, regtech, and regulation, among other related topics.
Since , a new era of fintech has emerged in both the developed and developing world. The latest evolution of fintech, led by startups, poses challenges for regulators and market participants alike, notably in balancing the potential benefits of innovation with the possible risks of new approaches. This research paper analyzes the evolution of fintech over the past years, and on the basis of this analysis, argues against its too-early or rigid regulation at this juncture which could potentially stifle innovation.
To date. But the potential of regtech is far greater. In particular, regtech has the potential to enable a close to real-time and proportionate regulatory regime that identifies and addresses risk while facilitating more efficient regulatory compliance. The research paper sets the foundation for a practical understanding of regtech and proposes several reforms that could benefit regulators, industry and entrepreneurs alike in the financial sector and other industries.
This paper investigates the economic and technological factors that push entrepreneurs to establish ventures with the purpose of reinventing financial services.
It found that countries witness more fintech startup formations when the latest technology is readily available, capital markets are well-developed, and people have more mobile telephone subscriptions.
Moreover, the available labor force has a positive impact on the development of this new market segment. Overall, it suggests that fintech startup formation should not be left to chance: active policies are needed to influence the emergence of this new sector. Clearing and settlement of international securities transactions present major challenges. But blockchain and other innovations are expected to disrupt the area. Blockchain technology creates the possibility of a tamper-proof consolidated audit trail, of almost infinitesimal transaction cost, and increased transactional velocity.
While true real-time clearing and settlement will remain utopia, banks and financial institutions are increasingly testing out these new technologies as they realize the threat of losing control of payment systems. At the same time, the regulatory framework both in the U. S and the EU lags alarmingly behind the pace of technology. This research paper explores these urging issues as the world prepare for the blockchain disruption. This paper analyzes how information technology is transforming individual banks and the entire banking industry.
While IT developments may lure banks into transaction banking due to IT-driven cost efficiencies , these should not give up on relationship banking.
The entry of fintech startups and IT companies in traditional banking businesses is leading to drastic changes in banking. Government intervention and regulation will give banks additional time to adjust. This paper by the SWIFT Institute reports the outcome of a series of interviews and focus group meetings with professionals working in post-trade processing and the provision of mutual distributed ledger services.
The research found that while the use of blockchain to validate operational data in mutual distributed ledgers can yield substantial reductions in both cost and risk, the concept of data sharing itself is far from new. Learn more about scientifc organizations in Puerto Rico.
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The advantage of Blockchain is that the public ledger cannot be modified or deleted after the data has been approved by all nodes. This is why Blockchain is well-known of its data integrity and security characteristics. Blockchain technology can also be applied to other types of uses.
It can for example create an environment for digital contracts and peer-to-peer data sharing in a cloud service [ 1 ]. The strong point of Blockchain technique, data integrity, is the reason why its use extends also to other services and applications. Blockchain technology has also some technical challenges and limitations that have been identified.
Swan [ 1 ] presents seven technical challenges and limitations for the adaptation of Blockchain technology in the future:. Overall, Blockchain as a technology has the potential to change the way how transactions are conducted in everyday life. In addition, the applications of Blockchain are not limited to cryptocurrencies, but the technology could be possibly applied in various environments where some forms of transactions are done.
The research on the possibilities of Blockchain in applications is certainly an interesting area for future research, but at the moment Blockchain suffers from technical limitations and challenges. Anonymity, data integrity and security attributes set a lot of interesting challenges and questions that need to be solved and assessed with high quality research. Scalability is also an issue that needs to be solved for future needs.
Therefore, to identify and understand the current status of research conducted on Blockchain, it is important to gather all relevant research. It is then possible to evaluate what challenges and questions have been tackled and answered, and what are the most problematic issues in Blockchain at the moment. Systematic mapping study was selected as the research methodology for this study. The goal of a systematic mapping study is to provide an overview of a research area, to establish if research evidence exists, and quantify the amount of evidence [ 2 ].
In this study we follow the systematic mapping process described by Petersen et al. We also use guidelines for a systematic literature review described by Kitchenham and Charters [ 2 ] to search for relevant papers. We chose the systematic mapping process as our research methodology because our goal was to explore the existing studies related to Blockchain technology. The results of the mapping study would help us to identify and map research areas related to Blockchain technology and possible research gaps.
The process for the systematic mapping study is presented in Fig 1 , and consists of five process steps and outcomes. The Prisma Checklist is provided in S1 Checklist. The first stage of the systematic mapping process is the definition of the research questions. The goal of this study was to provide an overview of the current research on Blockchain technology. Therefore, we defined four research questions:. The second stage of a mapping study is to search for all the relevant scientific papers on the research topic.
A search protocol defines the methods that will be used to undertake a specific systematic literature search. A pre-defined protocol is needed to reduce the possibility of researcher bias [ 2 ]. We created a search protocol that we used for scientific databases to gather all the papers relevant for our research topic.
The terms used in the search string were chosen after pilot searches, where we tested possible keywords. After the pilot search we decided to use only the term Blockchain as the search string, even though Bitcoin could also have been a possible one. However, in the pilot search we used also Bitcoin as a search term, but we identified a huge number of papers that were related to economic topics in cryptocurrencies, rather than technological aspects of Blockchain technology.
Therefore, since our goal in this mapping study process was to find and map the papers related to technical aspects of Blockchain technology, we decided to drop the term Bitcoin. We believe that by using only the term Blockchain as the search string, the majority of Bitcoin-related papers with a technical perspective on Blockchain were still included. In addition, it seemed that if a Bitcoin-related paper did not have the term Blockchain anywhere in its meta-data, the paper was related to the economics of a cryptocurrency.
After designing and testing the search protocol, we chose the scientific databases for the searches. We decided to concentrate on peer-reviewed, high quality papers published in conferences, workshops, symposiums, books and journals related to the research topic. We used six scientific databases for paper retrieval. We decided not to use grey literature e. Because all papers in the searchers were not necessarily related to the research questions, they needed to be assessed for their actual relevance [ 2 ].
After using the search protocol in the scientific databases, the next stage was the screening of papers. At the first screening phase, we screened the papers based on their titles and excluded studies that were not relevant to the research topic. For example, the search protocol returned papers related to Blockchain in other scientific fields, which had different meaning than the Blockchain technology used in computer science.
These papers were clearly out of the scope of this mapping study, which was a valid reason to exclude them. However, in some cases it was difficult to determine the relevancy of the paper on the basis of the title of the paper. In these situations, we passed the paper through to the next stage for further reading. In the second phase, the authors read the abstracts of every paper that passed the previous phase. In addition, we used specific inclusion and exclusion criteria to screen each paper.
We decided to exclude the following types of papers: 1 papers without full text availability, 2 papers where the main language was not English, 3 papers that had some other meaning than Blockchain used in computer science, 4 papers that were duplicates, and 5 papers that were posters. When a paper passed all the five exclusion criteria, and after reading the abstract it was considered as focusing on Blockchain, we decided to include it in the next screening stage. The next stage in a mapping study process after finding the relevant papers through abstracts is keywording.
For this stage, we used the process defined by Petersen et al. Keywording was done in two steps. In the first step we read the abstract and identified keywords and concepts that reflected the contribution of the paper [ 13 ]. The second step was to develop a higher level of understanding based on these keywords [ 13 ].
We used the keywords to cluster and form categories for the mapping of the studies. After the categories had been clustered, we read all the selected papers. After the reading we also updated the categories or created new ones, if the paper revealed something new.
This resulted in a systematic map of clustered categories formed from all the relevant papers on the research topic.
A data extraction form Table 1 was designed to collect the information needed to address the research questions of this mapping study [ 2 ]. Data items DI0 to DI6 gathered basic information of the papers. These items included e. The rest of the data items DI7-DI10 were gathered after reading the papers. These data items included e. We collected the extracted data items to Excel, which helped us to organize and analyze the data. In this section, the search and selection results of the systematic mapping study are presented.
The search and selection results are presented in Fig 3. The first inclusion and exclusion round was based on the titles of the retrieved papers.
All the paper titles were examined by two authors, which led to the selection of 55 papers. The reason for the high number of excluded papers 66 was that they were not related to the research topic. For example, many excluded papers discussed the business perspective of Bitcoin, and therefore they did not belong to our study. We also retrieved multiple papers related to other scientific areas, such as chemistry and mathematics, where the keyword Blockchain had another meaning than the technology used in computer science.
After the selection of 55 papers, we removed duplicates and used the next round exclusion and inclusion criteria defined in section 3. This round resulted in the selection of 48 papers. After this, three authors read the abstracts of all the selected papers.
This did not result in the exclusion of any papers, however. Based on the abstracts, all the selected papers had a topic related to Blockchain with a technical viewpoint. However, we decided to pass some unclear papers to the next selection round for more in-depth analysis. In the last stage of paper selection, three authors read all the papers. This resulted in the selection of 41 papers, which we included in this study as primary papers.
Three papers were dropped due to their focus on the economic perspective of Blockchain and Bitcoin. Additional four papers were excluded for being only reports describing Blockchain and how it works without providing any actual new research findings or evidence. The full list of the selected papers with the extracted data items is presented in S1 Table.
Fig 4 shows the publication year distribution of the selected primary papers. Interestingly, all the selected papers were published after the year This shows that Blockchain as a research area is a very recent and new one. This shows an increasing number of publications each year, which suggests also a growing interest in Blockchain technology. This is not a surprise, because the idea of Blockchain and Bitcoin was first coined only in [ 4 ]. Fig 5 shows the source of each selected primary paper.
The possible sources for a paper are the academia, industry, or both. Our results showed that 30 papers In 8 papers It is, however, highly possible that most of the papers published by the industry are not included in scientific databases. Most industry papers can be found as white papers and are not often published in peer-reviewed conferences or journals. The geographical distribution of the selected papers is shown in Fig 6. After this, the two most common publication countries were Germany with 6 papers The rest of the countries had four or less papers published.
The geographical distribution of the selected primary papers shows that Blockchain technology has gathered research interest around the world. Fig 7 shows the publication type of the selected papers. Publication type means the channel where the paper has been published. The publication types included in this mapping study were conference, journal, workshop, symposium, and book chapter. The rest of the papers were published in symposiums 4 9.
In addition, Table 2 shows the publication channel of each selected paper. In this section, the classification of the selected primary papers is presented, including extracted data items DI7-DI10 Table 1. After reading all the selected papers and creating classifications based on the findings, we identified that a majority of the papers were related to the technical challenges and limitations presented by Swan [ 1 ]. Therefore, we decided to use these challenges and limitations for the classification to map the existing research on Blockchain.
The challenges and limitations presented by Swan are throughput, latency, size and bandwidth, security, wasted resources, usability, versioning, hard forks, and multiple chains. In addition, we identified a new classification type, privacy.
Privacy in an essential attribute in the Blockchain environment, because of its anonymity characteristic.
In addition, we also used the class others to map papers that were not related to any of the classes mentioned above. We also identified that there were three different paper types for each class, Blockchain report, Blockchain improvement and Blockchain application. A Blockchain report includes papers that report previously identified solutions and ideas in Blockchain and Bitcoin.
A Blockchain improvement includes papers that suggest new solutions and improvements to the current Blockchain or Bitcoin technology.
A Blockchain application includes papers that present an application based on Blockchain technology. The final map of this study is presented in Fig 8. We also decided to examine the papers based on their relation to Bitcoin Fig 9 , because it is considered so far the most important and commonly used solution based on Blockchain technology.
As expected, a great number of papers were related to Bitcoin, rather than other applications. In 33 We found only 8 papers We also made a comparison between the paper type Blockchain report, Blockchain improvement, and Blockchain application and the publication year.
The comparison is shown in Fig The figure shows an increasing number of papers in both report and application categories over the three years. Improvement papers had a significant increase in , but a decrease in Security was the one of the major research topics in the selected primary papers.
Trends and impacts of security incidents : With the increasing use of Bitcoin as a way to conduct payments and transfers, security incidents and their impact on the economic losses of Bitcoin users have increased.
Some of the identified papers presented security incidents that had occurred in the Bitcoin network, such as economic losses by several Bitcoin scams and distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks on exchanges and mining pools. Vasek et al. Lim et al. According to the authors, all possible types of security breaches had occurred, including DDoS attacks, private account hacking using Trojan horses, or viruses from ads. The authors introduce some security countermeasures for individual users and safe Bitcoin transactions e.
The authors figured out that the most targeted service category was the use of anti-DDoS protection, influencing factors such as the mining pool size. Beikverdi et al. Their study shows that the centralization factor of Bitcoin has been continuously increasing from 0. In this context, 0 means purely decentralized and 1 means fully centralized. Garay et al. Eyal and Sier [ 30 ] introduce a Selfish Mine attack where colluding miners obtain a revenue larger than a fair share by keeping their discovered blocks private.
The more recent Blockchain-based systems, such as Ethereum, allow users to specify scripts in transactions and contracts to support applications beyond simple cash transactions. In this case, the required computational resources for verification could be larger, depending on the user-specified script size. Luu et al. The authors formalize a consensus model to give incentives to miners by limiting the amount of work required to verify a block.
Armknecht et al. The paper discusses the basic difference between the protocol of Ripple and Bitcoin-focused Blockchain fork. A fork can occur if two conflicting ledgers get a clear majority of votes, and could lead to double spending attacks. According to Decker and Wattenhofer [ 52 ], the propagation delay in the Bitcoin network is the primary cause for Blockchain forks and inconsistencies among replicas, which was done by analyzing Blockchain synchronization mechanism.
Data malleability problems : Data integrity is an essential issue in the Blockchain environment. It is necessary that when data gets sent and verified, it has not been altered or tampered with.
We found two studies related to data integrity that studied malleability attacks in Blockchain. Malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of Bitcoin being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves [ 36 ].
Therefore, in a malleability attack an attacker intercepts, modifies, and rebroadcasts a transaction, causing the transaction issuer to believe that the original transaction was not confirmed [ 36 ]. According to the paper, the transaction malleability problem is real and should be considered when implementing Bitcoin clients. Andrychowicz et al. In their study, the malleability attack caused incorrect balance computing, application crashes, and a deadlock which stopped new transactions in several well-known Bitcoin wallets.
The paper suggests a deposit protocol with a timed commitment scheme to enable a malleability-resilient refund transaction as a solution to the malleability problem. Authentication and cryptography issues : In Bitcoin, the private key is the major authentication element. Authentication in cryptocurrency controls self-certification.
There have been some incidents with authentication. For example, there is the well-known case in Mt. Gox, where a Bitcoin wallet company was attacked. In the attack, Mt. Goxs storage that included private keys of their customer was stolen.
This incident has motivated some studies in strengthening authentication in Bitcoin. In addition to the Mt. Gox case, Bos et al. We identified a number of papers that had the goal to address the issues in the Bitcoin authentication process.
Bamert et al. The device communicates by using Bluetooth Low Energy, and is able to secure and sign Bitcoin transactions. Ateniese et al. According to the paper, this approach improves the trustworthiness of real-world entities into the system, which mitigates the existing reservations to the adoption of Bitcoin as a legitimate currency.
Mann et al. The authors used a smart phone as the second authentication factor. The energy efficiency problem is not handled in the computer engineering field at the moment.
However, in special domains like mobile cloud computing, it might be one of the major issues in the future [ 55 ]. Mining Bitcoins requires a high amount of energy to compute and verify transactions securely and with trustworthiness [ 1 ].
However, for the efficiency of mining and Proof-of-Work, it is important to decrease the amount of wasted resources. We identified some papers related to the wasted resource problems in Bitcoin. Wang and Liu [ 21 ] present the evolution of Bitcoin miners in terms of volume of solo and pool miners and their productivity. In the early stages, the computation power was evenly distributed among the solo miners.
As the Bitcoin network evolved, the computation power of some pool miners increased. The study notes that all miners play a zero-sum-computation race game: each miner increases their computation power, and then the total computation power in the network increases; consequently the system increases the difficulty value to maintain a steady Bitcoin creation speed, which in turn reduces the Bitcoin mining rate of individual miners [ 21 ].
We also identified some papers that proposed solutions for the wasted resources problem in Blockchain and Bitcoin. Wang and Liu [ 21 ] suggest an economic model for getting high economic returns in consideration of the use of mining hardware with high computation-over-power efficiency and electricity price. Paul et al. The authors modified the present block header by introducing some extra bytes to utilize the timestamp more effectively. The suggested scheme uses less computing power, and thus the mining is more environment-friendly.
Anish [ 15 ] proposes methods of achieving contextually higher speeds of Bitcoin mining, involving simultaneous usage of CPUs and GPUs in individual machines in mining pools. The results presented in the paper show how standard hardware miners in large mining pools could quite significantly add to the overall hash rate. Barkatullah et al. The original definition of the challenges and limitations in the usability of Blockchain by Swan [ 1 ] describes Bitcoin API as hard and difficult to use.
Therefore, we decided to expand the original definition of Blockchain usability to take usability into account also from the point of view of the cryptocurrency user. In Blockchain, new blocks are created constantly and confirmed by miners, which creates an interesting environment of transaction flows.
It is therefore essential to have supporting tools to help users analyze the whole Blockchain network to improve the usability. We found applications that had been developed for this purpose. BitConeView [ 51 ] is a system for the visual analysis of Bitcoin flows in Blockchain. BitIodine [ 23 ] parses Blockchain, clusters addresses that are likely to belong to the same user or group of users, classifies such users and labels them, and finally visualizes the complex information extracted from the Bitcoin network.
Both these systems were tested successfully with experiments and cases, and showed effectiveness in analyzing and detecting patterns in the Bitcoin network. These systems can help also in improving security and privacy -related issues.
Bankruptcy and the closure of Bitcoin exchanges can cause economical damage to the customers [ 38 ]. Decker et al. In addition, Vandervort [ 25 ] discusses the link between a buyer and a seller with a layer of limited anonymity, thus preventing buyers from finding or validating information in Bitcoin. Improving these aspects of exchanges done in the Bitcoin network can improve the usability by providing additional information for the users making the transactions.
Interestingly, we did not identify any papers that were related to other technical challenges and limitations, such as throughput, latency, size and bandwidth, versioning, hard forks, and multiple chains.
In a Blockchain network, a distributed consensus network without a trusted party, all the transactions are transparent and announced to the public. Therefore, privacy in Blockchain is maintained by breaking the flow of information. The public can see all transactions, but without information linking the transaction to identities [ 4 ].
Meiklejohn and Orlandi [ 32 ] present a definitional framework of anonymity focusing on the ownership of the coin. There are also studies that show experimental evidence on the lack of anonymity in the Bitcoin network. Koshy et al. Feld et al. By using the tool, the authors figured out that an average peer-list contains addresses that mostly reside in the own autonomous systems of the peers. Taking this information into account, the authors claim that transaction linking could be possible.
In order to solve the anonymity reduction, a mix of services has been proposed in some papers. A number of studies have applied a transaction mixing technique to increase privacy.
A mixing transaction allows the users to move Bitcoins from one user address to another without a clear trace linking between the addresses. Such transactions can act as a primitive to help improve anonymity when transaction linking becomes more challenging. The authors propose a system, Blindcoin, which modifies the Mixcoin mixing protocol by using blind signatures and a public append-only log. The log makes it possible for a third party to verify the validity of accusations when blind signatures are used.
Ziegeldorf et al. According to the authors, CoinParty is secure against malicious adversaries, and the evaluation of their prototype shows that it scales easily to a great number of participants in real-world network settings. Ruffing et al. It does not require any trusted, accountable or untrusted third party and it is compatible with the current Bitcoin system.
CoinShuffle introduces only a small communication overhead for its users, while avoiding additional anonymization fees and minimizing the computation and communication overhead for the rest of the Bitcoin system. Androulaki et al.
ZeroCoin acts as a temporary currency to impede the traceability of coins, but it does not hide the number of transactions and balances of Bitcoin addresses.
The proposed improvements include mixing Bitcoins from various sources before sending them to a destination and enabling payments in the form of EZC without the need to transform them back to Bitcoin. The test results showed that linking the input and output transactions was possible in 1 out of 3 tested services. Other than mixing techniques, Saxena et al. We also identified other classifications that were not included in the seven technical challenges and limitations defined by Swan [ 1 ].
Three of the papers were related to the use of Smart contracts in the Blockchain environment. A smart contract is a solution that utilizes Blockchain technology to create contracts between two or more participants. Similarly to the use of Bitcoin Blockchain, smart contracts are done in a decentralized environment, where contract terms are executed by the Blockchain systemwhen the terms are fulfilled.
Bigi et al. The approach is a combination of the game theory and formal models. The authors argue that a decentralized smart contract system can be a promising approach and worthy of being studied and developed further. Wan et al. In addition, smart contracts can be possibly used in various environments and industries for different purposes.
For example, Kishigami et al. The idea was presented to one hundred people including creators, content owners and digital content stake holders. The feedback showed that the most impressive point was the decentralized mechanism for Digital Right Management. However, the proposed system has no incentive mechanism for mining calculation, which can make it a challenge to adopt at the moment. Even though Bitcoin is the most famous and commonly used cryptocurrency adopting Blockchain technology, there has also been research on developing other cryptocurrencies.
Zhang and Wen [ 22 ] have designed a new generation cryptocoin called IoTcoin, based on the protocol of Bitcoin and Blockchain. In IoT-coin, people can use keys and scripts which are obtained in them to exchange paid sensor data or smart property. IoTcoins can be used to present the ownership of many IoT commodities, such as smart property, paid data and digital controlled energy. Another cryptocurrency has been proposed by Vandervort et al.
We also found three papers that used Blockchain for Botnet networks, a P2P broadcast protocol, and a trustworthiness improvement. Ali et al. Botnet networks include a number of computers communicating in an effort to compute representative tasks. The Bitcoin transaction can be used as a communication vehicle.
Andrychowicz and Dziembowsk [ 40 ] ppresent a formal model for peer-to-peer communication and a Proof-of-Work concept used in Bitcoin, and based on the model, propose a broadcast protocol which is more secure against an adversary with arbitrary computational power.
In Fig 11 we summarize the identified challenges and suggested solutions in Blockchain and Bitcoin. In this chapter we discuss the results and answer the four main research questions. In addition, at the end of this chapter, we discuss the limitations and validity of the study.
The results of this mapping study showed that a majority of the current research on Blockchain is focused on finding and identifying improvements to the current challenges and limitations in Blockchain [ 1 ]. A large portion of the research concentrates on security and privacy issues in Blockchain.
The security vulnerability of the Blockchain network and the growing interest in Bitcoin have increased the economic losses of both miners and end users. Although several solutions to address these issues have been presented, many of them are just brief idea suggestions, lacking concrete evaluation of their effectiveness. The research on other topics in challenges and limitations described by Swan [ 1 ], such as wasted resources and usability, was rather limited.
We found some research done on computational power and wasted resources in Bitcoin mining, and improvements on the usability of Bitcoin. However, the number of papers was considerably small compared to those on security and privacy issues. Computational power is one of the key attributes in Blockchain, and it requires attention in the research.
When Blockchain grows more complex, it also requires more computational power to confirm more blocks. The Proof-of-Work concept is a rather new idea, which is the reason why it has to be studied more, to make sure that it can work in large-scale Blockchain environments.
Interestingly, we did not find many studies on challenges and limitations in latency, size and bandwidth, throughput, versioning, hard forks, and multiple chains.
It is surprising that the attention paid to and research done on other challenges and limitations than security and privacy was rather low. We assumed that especially topics like latency, size and bandwidth, and wasted resources would have received more attention in the overall research map.
When the size of Blockchain increases, it has a direct impact on all these challenges and limitations in scalability. It is possible that these issues have not been studied a lot because the Blockchain concept is still rather new. In addition to the identified research topics, the findings in this mapping study showed that a majority of research was conducted in the Bitcoin environment. This was also the original assumption of the authors, considering that Bitcoin is currently the most commonly used and important technology using Blockchain, with the largest user base.
However, we were quite surprised that the number of other solutions than Bitco using Blockchain was so low. The results showed that the research outside the Bitcoin environment was mostly focused on smart contracts and other cryptocurrencies, but the research on Bitcoin and its security issues formed the majority. We originally defined a Blockchain application as a solution that has been developed with Blockchain technology.
By this definition, we identified some prototype applications developed and suggested for using Blockchain in other environments, such as IoT, smart contracts, smart property, digital content distribution, Botnet, and P2P broadcast protocols. This shows that Blockchain technology is not limited to applications in cryptocurrencies. Instead, the idea of a public ledger and a decentralized environment can be applied to various other applications in different industries, which makes the whole Blockchain research more interesting.
However, we also found a set of different applications developed for the Bitcoin environment, rather than using Blockchain technology in some other environment. Some of the applications were developed for Bitcoin analysis. Applications like BitConeView [ 51 ] and BitIodine [ 23 ] help users to analyze the Bitcoin network and study how Bitcoin transactions are completed, with a visual presentation.
These types of applications can help to understand the essence of Blockchain, and how a decentralized transaction environment actually works. Analysis applications can also help to identify frauds and possible security issues by following the flows of transactions. Another major direction for applications is security. We found applications where the focus was on Bitcoin mixers. Bitcoin mixing applications, such as CoinParty [ 47 ] and CoinShuffle [ 37 ] can help the Bitcoin network to become more secure, by adding an extra layer of privacy for the users.
These types of applications and solutions will likely increase in the future, considering that security and privacy are the main attributes in a decentralized transaction environment. We were able to identify a few major research gaps.
The first gap is that the research on topics such as latency, throughput, size and bandwidth, versioning, hard forks, and multiple forks does not exist in the current literature. This is a major research gap, which requires more research in the future. These topics are not possibly the most interesting topics for researchers at the moment, because the sizes of the current Blockchain applications are relatively small.
Bitcoin is currently the largest solution with Blockchain. The number of transactions in Bitcoin is considerably smaller than e. However, in the future, if Blockchain solutions are used by tens of millions of people and the number of transactions is multiplied drastically, more research on e.
The second research gap is the lack of research on usability. We identified only papers that discussed usability from the user perspective, not from the developer perspective, as suggested by Swan [ 1 ]. For instance, the difficulty of using Bitcoin API has not been tackled yet. This needs to be studied and improved in the future. This could spark more applications and solutions to the Bitcoin environment. The third research gap is that the majority of current research is conducted in the Bitcoin environment, rather than in other Blockchain environments.
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Fig On the other hand, Bitcoin has received a lot of attention as a cryptocurrency, and more people are trading and buying Bitcoins every day. Luu et al. In addition, it seemed that if a Bitcoin-related paper did not have the term Blockchain anywhere in its meta-data, the paper was related to the economics of a cryptocurrency. We found only 8 papers
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Passive and Active Measurement. In addition, the nodes in Blockchain are all anonymous, which makes it more secure for other nodes to confirm the transactions. Our search protocol included only the term Blockchain. Towards a More Democratic Mining in Bitcoins. However, for the efficiency of mining and Proof-of-Work, it is important to decrease the amount of wasted resources. Sign Up.
The interest in Blockchain technology has been increasing since the idea was coined in Even though Bitcoin is the most famous and commonly used cryptocurrency adopting Blockchain technology, there has also been research on developing science cryptocurrencies. Technology log research it scholar for a third party rico verify the validity of accusations when blind trust are development. In about ten minutes, the and will be written in a block. He also created CoinAgenda Caribbean, an annual puerto event highlighting innovation and blockchain in the digital asset and blockchain sector in the region.