Blockchain Technology: Features, Challenges, and Applications

Running head: BITCOIN AND ETHEREUM
Bitcoin and Ethereum
Name of the Student
Name of the University
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1BITCOIN AND ETHEREUM
Table of Contents
Introduction:..........................................................................................................................................2
Architecture of Blockchain Technology:................................................................................................2
Blockchain Features:..............................................................................................................................3
Attack Resistance:..............................................................................................................................3
Transparency:....................................................................................................................................3
Fault Tolerance:.................................................................................................................................3
Elimination of Third Party:.................................................................................................................3
Blockchain Challenges:..........................................................................................................................3
Integration with Old System:.............................................................................................................3
Cost of Initial Implementation:..........................................................................................................4
High Energy Consumption:................................................................................................................4
Blockchain Applications:........................................................................................................................4
Currency Related Application:...........................................................................................................4
Smart Contracts:................................................................................................................................4
Socio-Technical Aspects:........................................................................................................................5
Conclusion:............................................................................................................................................5
Referencing:..........................................................................................................................................7

2BITCOIN AND ETHEREUM
Introduction:
The Blockchain technology is a new emerging technology in the field of security solutions.
The blockchain technology is based on the cryptography securities [1]. The blockchain technology
was announced for supporting the crypto-currency for the security related issues but now the
blockchain technology used by many sectors including some business sector also. This type of
blockchain is named as private blockchain. Other than this the blockchain is also used for marketing
strategies and this type of blockchain is termed as “Snake Oil”. The blockchain technology
introduced in the year of 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto [11]. The blockchain technology holds the
records of the data and this list of this growing record is termed as a block. Each of these blocks is
secured by the cryptographic hash which depends on the previous block of it. Also, these block
contains a timestamp and a transaction data. The transaction data of this blockchain is represented
as the Merkle tree root hash. The main purpose of this document is to evaluate the blockchain
technology and discussing its uses network application management. Further, the challenges,
features and architecture of the blockchain will be evaluated in details. Thereafter, socio-technical
aspects of the blockchain and the application of it will be discussed.
Architecture of Blockchain Technology:
The blockchain technology is decentralized, distributed and open nature. The distributed
nature of the blockchain defines that this blockchain divides the data into several batches. This batch
is also termed as the blocks. All of the block holds a cryptographic hash of its preceding block and
this sequence continues till the last block of the blockchain. To decrypt every data, the cryptographic
hash is a must needed factor, and the cryptographic hash of a block is presented in the next block of
it [2]. In this way, the blockchain technology is ensuring the data integrity. Depending on the data
stream many times a separate block is produced for a temporary fork purpose. The blockchain
technology does not follow the parallel manner for the communication purpose, rather than it is
done redundantly.
The decentralized nature of the blockchain provides a feature to this system which is that it
does not have any central point of data storage. The main advantage of not having any central point
of data is that it will not face any attack or failure which can collapse the whole system [3]. The
decentralization of the data is achieved by peer to peer data storing. As it does not have any
centralized database system, it is challenging to maintain the quality of the data. For solving this
case, the decentralized system uses replication of database and the computational trust.