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Blockchain has become a buzzword in IT sector. The technology behind blockchain has become so powerful that applications are being built on top of it, making them decentralized, block based and resistant to censorship. The increasing number of people handling bitcoin digital currency has resulted in launch of various new initiatives based on blockchain principle. Bitcoin is a digital money ecosystem where users transfer bitcoins for buying or selling of goods (Nakamoto, 2008). Unlike traditional currencies, bitcoins are entirely virtual i.e. no physical coins. The digital coins only signify a transfer value from a sender to a receiver (Antonopoulos, 2014). Various other cryptocurrencies came to market after the success of Bitcoin. Success of bitcoin that were based on blockchain, providing highly robust and secure system is being adopted widely by both academia and industry facilitating enterprises, healthcare market, manufacturing industries and much more.
Apart from cryptocurrencies, blockchain is being implemented in a variety of application areas because of its robustness and data security features. In the field of Internet of Things, blockchain can be used for providing security and privacy to the users for their data within the network (Khan & Salah, 2018). In the area of Big Data, blockchain can be used in increasing data security and improving the quality of data (Azaria et al., 2016). Blockchain is also being used in machine learning, to create smart contracts for trustless machine learning (Kurtulmus & Daniel, 2018). Also in the area of Cloud Computing, blockchain is used to provide user privacy and data security (Park & Park, 2017). For data security, blockchain is also used in the area of fog computing and edge computing (Tuli et al., 2019).
Our Contributions
The main objective of the article is to define the concepts of blockchain technology and to highlight the huge number of real time applications available. The major contributions of our work include detailed understanding of Blockchain technology and describing the underlying concepts. We identified the pre-requisites and challenges involved in adopting blockchain technology. Also, new application areas have been proposed where blockchain technology is being adopted. Finally a novel blockchain system BirthChain, has been proposed for automating the process of generating Birth certificates by the government body and hospitals which will ease the work flow and reduce parent’s hassle. This article will be highly beneficial for the academicians, the researchers and the people from industry who want to start working in the area of Blockchain. They can incorporate blockchain technology in various new application areas that have been identified. The proposed system will motivate the readers and give them a direction to use blockchain technology in their application domains.
Organization of the Paper
The structure of the paper is as follows. The current section describes in detail the blockchain architecture and its features. The types of nodes and various categories of blockchain are also discussed in this section. The working of blockchain and various other important concepts like smart contract, consensus protocol etc. are also explained to provide better understanding of the technology. The authors have also identified various pre-requisites and challenges involved in adopting the technology. In Background section, the detailed literature of the various consensus protocols and other application based techniques of blockchain are discussed. The article also lists the various applications areas where blockchain has been implemented and projected some novel areas that can be benefited from the technology. A new application area to automate the process of generation of birth certificate has been proposed along with detailed step wise implementation of blockchain. In the end, the article is concluded along with the scope of future work.