Deploying Blockchain and Smart Contract based Solutions

As discussed before, the blockchain-based solution is built to provide strong integrity and independent verifiability. An exception to the independent verifiability is private blockchain solutions. In this part, we discuss both of these technological dimensions and detail their applicability and limitations.

Public distributed blockchain provides the most robust integrity assurance and independent verifiability feature. Deploying a service on a public distributed blockchain has to take into consideration:

1. The benefit the deployed service would like to gain from the blockchain (smart contract) technology.
2. What information the deployed service would push onto the blockchain. There is a limitat of how much information can be contained in a single block. So, considering blockchain as a repository will not be an excellent design solution.
3. Information pushed on to blockchain should go through privacy-preservation analysis. Any information put on the public distributed blockchain will be openly accessible.
4. Cost of blockchain usage. Putting information on the blockchain has an associated cost. This cost is incurred by the charges that the block miner requires. In some instances, it is referred to as the GAS charges.
5. There is a delay between the data being pushed to the blockchain, and it is becoming part of the chain. This delay is the time that it takes a miner to mine the block and append it to the blockchain. The actual duration is dependent on which blockchain network the organisation is using and how much it is willing to pay for mining individual blocks.

For any organisation considering blockchain technology, a thorough consideration of what competitive benefit it will give has to be clear. For example, in healthcare services, putting patient data onto the blockchain is impractical but also violates privacy requirements. Therefore, a potential architecture might use blockchains for integrity protection. Now the challenge comes whether healthcare (Read more...)