2529a126

2017 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Networks
An Overview of the Emerging Technology:

Blockchain
Rishav Chatterjee Rajdeep Chatterjee
School of Computer Engineering School of Computer Engineering
KIIT University KIIT University
Bhubaneswar, India Bhubaneswar, India
[email protected] [email protected]
Abstract—A Blockchain is basically a decentralized, dis- and as a result, they can add on blocks to the chain. So, it can
tributed ledger of all the transactions or events which takes also be defined as a consensus oriented secured distributed
place only after involving multiple parties. It ensures high level public/private ledger which stored data over a peer to peer
of security as the transactions which takes place are entirely
anonymous. Each transactions or digital events taking place in network.
a Blockchain network is verified, only if it is agreed upon by
the consensus of the majority party of the users participating A. Advantages of Blockchain
in this process. Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies The Blockchain protocols has several features. We have
in today’s world and a lot of revolution and research has just
began regarding this distributed technology. Bitcoin has been the listed out few of them.
most popular cryptographic currency since it was invented and 1) Immutable: It means that it is really difficult to tamper
it is the best example that uses the Blockchain technology. In this or alter a block.
paper, we will discuss about the research being done on this new 2) Irreversible: This feature prevents double spending.
domain of Computer Science. We will outline the underlining
concepts about this new technology. We will try to peek a bit 3) Distributed system: It means that a copy of the ledger
into its applications in the financial and non financial sector. It is present with all its members.
is not only the most popular topic to discuss about, but is the 4) No Centralized Authority: It doesn’t depend on a central
most technological breakthrough, that is all set to revolutionize server to dominate and hence, a peer to peer system.
the entire world.
Index Terms—decentralized; distributed; ledger; consensus;
5) Resilient: This feature shows that it is not prone to any
sort of major attacks.
I. I NTRODUCTION
II. H ISTORY AND E VOLUTION OF B LOCKCHAIN
Blockchain is a decentralized ledger or data structure. It
can be referred as blocks in a chain where the corresponding The history of the Blockchain can be showed by considering
blocks refer to the blocks, prior to them. Once the details the example of one of its counterparts. We are talking about
of the transactions or events are fed into the Blockchain, the Bitcoin Blockchain. Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin
it is impossible to tamper the details are shared with the and since then, it is the most popular and used Cryptocurrency.
members of the network.Users of the Blockchain network is He developed the concept of Bitcoin as a currency, as resilient
completely aware of the transactions taking place. We will and trustworthy. But it had few anomalies.
draw an analogy to justify the concept. We consider it to be 1) One kind of asset: It was primarily built as a currency.
a book based data structure where each page of the book It isn’t applicable for other modes or assets.
refer to its previous page by a page. Here, book refers to 2) Time taking: Satoshi Nakamoto’s aim was to achieve the
the Blockchain, page refers to the book and an entry in any maximum possible consensus in order to pass a transaction.
page refers to the blockchain transaction. It is easy to detect It doesn’t give attention to the time taken to validate the
whether a page or a block has been tampered or not. Pages same.Hence, the process is getting slow. The developers of
can be arranged in any manner so pages aren’t important in Blockchain are working on different kind of technologies. We
a distributed ledger. Now, In Blockchain, each block is built have cited few examples here.
on top of the previous block and it uses the latter’s nonce and
signature as a key for going into the next block. Miners of A. Colored Coins
the network does the job of building a block and adding it to The protocols which allows the digital assets other than
the chain. It is easy for the miners to guess a random string Bitcoin to be transferred in the Bitcoin Blockchain using
or nonce in order to tamper the block just by knowing the the Bitcoins as “tokens”. Bitcoins can be used as a transfer
signature in a Public Blockchain. It is not easy to add blocks element for the Bitcoin transaction where it can be regarded
in the Blockchain and there is a reward of 12.5 bitcoins for a meta data for representation of shares, property and other
that. In a Private Blockchain, the miners are given a contract instances.
978-1-5386-2529-3/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE 126

DOI 10.1109/CINE.2017.33
B. Alternative Blokchains
This is also termed as “Sidechains”. In the Alternative
Blockchain feature, we can shift the bitcoins of the Bitcoin
Blockchain to a new Blockchain. We can transfer using
Bitcoins having said that, we have to adapt to the new rules
as well. We might have lesser time for Validation, more easily
programmable and most importantly, a separate consensus
mechanism. It ensures user scalability.
C. Ethereum Blockchain Fig. 1. Workflow of the Blockchain Mechanism
It is the newly developed Blockchain and it operates using

digital contracts known as “Smart Contracts”. The protocol IV. B LOCKCHAIN R ESEARCH IN THE M ODERN W ORLD
for Ethereum is different from Bitcoin Blockchain. Smart
Blockchain is the newest topic in the domain of Computer
Contracts are basically small computer programs that accounts
Science and Security, as far as research is concerned. Many
for a deal between a client and an end user. Blockchain
pioneer work has been done to improve the effiecieny of
has a wide range of financial and non financial applications.
Blockchain [4]. According to the research done by Zhao et
It has been used largely by Multinational companies like
al. (2016), we have found that there has been an large scale
IBM, Amazon etc. and will be used further in the coming
increase in the number of research papers on Blockchains.
years. Many banks have collaborated in order to implement
Blockchains has been considered as vulnerable to many of the
Blockchain technologies in their system.
attacks. Most of them have been unique and it could resist till
D. Hyperledger Blockchain now. chain.com is a startup backed by NASDAQ, which built
a platform for equity markets on top of Blockchain. This is
Hyperledger is an umbrella project of Open Source
one of remarkable examples to show its excellence.
Blockchain and related tools [1], started in 2015 by Linux
Foundation [2] to support the collaborative development of
Blockchain based Distributed ledgers [3]. It has four platforms
like Iroha, Fabric, Sawtooth and Burrow. IBM owns the
Hyperledger Fabric and Intel owns the Sawtooth project of
Hyperledger.
III. W ORKING OF B LOCKCHAINS
We will illustrate the working of Bitcoin transactions pri-
marily in order to elucidate the working of Blockchain mech- Fig. 2. Increase in the research of Blockchains
anism. Bitcoin uses some sort of proof under Cryptographic
primitives rather than entirely trusting on the third party.
V. C ONCLUSION
Hence, the concept of “digital signature was introduced”. The
sender sends using his private key and the receiver receives Blockchain is still prevailing at its early stage of its research
using his public key and the person needs to know the private and development. Pioneer researchers in the domain of secu-
key and the digital signature, if he wishes to spend the money. rity and Cryptography have come forward to take it further
The peer nodes present in the Bitcoin network is completely to newer highs. It is going to a great help for the Financial
aware of the transactions being taking place. The transactions and Non Financial sectors. It will pay heed to the issues of
must be “endorsed” and “validated” in order to be reflected in reliability, security and shared knowledge at the same time.
a public ledger. Firstly, the validator must know that the sender It has been one of the most attractive technologies since its
has the right to spend it. Secondly, the validators must be aware inception. This paper could conclude that there are numerous
that the sender has enough money in his account to make opportunities of research in this area and there is an urgent
a “legit” transaction. The transactions in a Bitcoin network need to explore and seek for betterment just by minimizing
are not ordered. So, there is a chance of double spending the flaws and by enhancing its efficiency.
and it could be removed by the introduction of Blockchain R EFERENCES
Technology. In Blockchain, the transactions are ordered in
[1] Ehsani and Farzam, “Blockchain in Finance: From Buzzword to Watch-
form of blocks in a linear chain, which are linked to each word,” CoinDesk (News), 22 December, 2016.
other. Every block contains the hash of the block prior to it. [2] Linux Foundation unites the Industry leaders to advance Blockchain
We have introduced a concept called “Proof of Work”. In this, Technology, 2016.
[3] Open Source Blockchain Effort for the Enterprise Elects Leadership
the task of the node is to find the random string or nonce. Positions and Gains New Investments, 2016.
This random string has to be hashed with the transactions and [4] Zhao et al., “Financial Innovation,” 2-28, 2016.
the hashes of the previous blocks and then, it produces a hash
with certain number of leading zeroes.
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2017 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Networks

An Overview of the Emerging Technology:

978-1-5386-2529-3/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE 126

It is the newly developed Blockchain and it operates using

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