Blockchain technology concepts and applications
Jorge Lopes · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · 2018
The increasing popularity of Blockchain technology has captured the attention of many industries and organizations. In simple terms, Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that allows digital assets to be transacted in a peer-to-peer decentralized network, those transactions are verified and registered by every node of the network. Creating this way, a transparent and immutable history of records whose veracity is provided by the consensus protocol. By enabling smart contracts to be deployed into a Blockchain platform, the number of possible use cases for this technology improves considerably. Eliminating the need for third parties and, therefore, allowing many processes, in both the public and the private sectors, to become more efficient and economical. In this document, some of these applications are described by presenting examples of projects already implemented or in the development stage Although the rapid development of the technology, there are still a lot of limitations regarding its governance, scalability, and many other challenges, being them technical, legal or social-economic, that need to be overcome in order to achieve mass adoption. To gain a comprehensive understanding of Blockchain technology and smart contracts, a proof of concept was developed, being the use case electronic voting systems. The objective is to develop a decentralized application as an example sufficiently demonstrative of the potential advantages of Blockchain solutions.