Blockchain was originally devised for Bitcoin, the digital currency everyone is talking about, but as of now, the concept is currently spreading its wings to reach various other potential uses.
So what is blockchain?
It is a distributed database that is duplicated across a network of computers. The data is not stored in a single location, but distributed across thousands of locations (according to Bitcoin). The changes in the records are handled using hash values that link records with each other. This makes the records easily verifiable and ensures that there is no single point of failure, thus making it difficult for a hacker to alter any record.
Durability, robustness, transparency are the some of the key good features that comes with the blockchain technology. However, according to this research paper, it has been found that the current research done on blockchains is relatively low, possibly because it is a new concept in the world with the first research paper written in 2013.
This research paper analyses the research papers on the topic blockchains and compares and contrasts the content, subtopics, challenges and future directions of the blockchain technology. The authors have developed a search protocol that first conducted a pilot search with the keyword “blockchain” and they have found out that 80% of the results were focused on Bitcoin, the first implementation of blockchains, rather than the concept of blockchains itself. Then the search protocol was customized to look for papers that discussed about the technology and the target was narrowed down to 41 papers.
The authors have emphasized on the fact that the research on blockchains is comparatively low. The research paper mainly identifies 4 questions to which the solutions are sought by analysing the research papers. The results obtained by the analysis show that the publications were slowly increasing starting from the year 2013, that 80% of the papers are from academic sources, that the papers on the applications are increasing gradually than on the improvements and that 80% of the papers focus on overlapping aspects of blockchains such as security and privacy. The authors conclude that there exist research topics that have not been covered yet, such as throughput, latency, usability from the developer’s perspective, wasted resources and versioning and multiple chains.
The authors have comprehensively analysed the current research topics related to blockchain and the results are significantly useful for future researchers since the paper discusses the potential future directions in the blockchain field. Rather than simply pointing out, the authors have analysed in details what’s missing in the current literature with regard to the importance of the missed topics and the subtopics that are related to them.
I participated in a tech talk about blockchains organised by SLASSCOM Technology Forum held on 31st January 2017 at Dialog. As an undergraduate preparing for the final year research project, I found the tech talk to be very informative.
