Sustainability in Blockchain: A Systematic Literature Review on Scalability and Power Consumption Issues

Hani Alshahrani, Noman Islam, Darakhshan Syed, Adel Sulaiman, Mana Saleh Al Reshan, Khairan Rajab (), Asadullah Shaikh, Jaweed Shuja-Uddin and Aadar Soomro
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Hani Alshahrani: Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Najran University, Najran 61441, Saudi Arabia
Noman Islam: Computer Science Department, Karachi Institute of Economics and Technology, Karachi 75500, Pakistan
Darakhshan Syed: Computer Science Department, Bahria University, Karachi 75260, Pakistan
Adel Sulaiman: Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Najran University, Najran 61441, Saudi Arabia
Mana Saleh Al Reshan: Department of Information Systems, College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Najran University, Najran 61441, Saudi Arabia
Khairan Rajab: Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Najran University, Najran 61441, Saudi Arabia
Asadullah Shaikh: Department of Information Systems, College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Najran University, Najran 61441, Saudi Arabia
Jaweed Shuja-Uddin: Computer Science and Information Technlogy, NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi 75270, Pakistan
Aadar Soomro: Computer Science and Information Technlogy, NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi 75270, Pakistan

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 3, 1-24

Abstract: Blockchain is a peer-to-peer trustless network that keeps records of digital assets without any central authority. With the passage of time, the sustainability issue of blockchain is rising. This paper discusses two major sustainability issues of blockchain: power consumption and scalability. It discusses the challenge of power consumption by analyzing various approaches to estimating power consumption in the literature. A case study of bitcoin is presented for this purpose. The study presents a review of the growing energy consumption of bitcoin along with a solution for immersion cooling in blockchain mining. The second challenge addressed in this research is scalability. With the increase in network size, scalability issues are also increasing as the number of transactions per second is decreasing. In other words, blockchain is observing low throughput with its increase in size. The paper discusses research studies and techniques proposed in the literature. The paper then investigates how to scale blockchain for better performance.

Keywords: blockchain; bitcoin; scalability; power consumption; immersion cooling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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