Blockchain: Basics

Aljosha Judmayer, Nicholas Stifter, Philipp Schindler and Edgar Weippl ()
Additional contact information
Aljosha Judmayer: SBA Research
Nicholas Stifter: TU Wien, CDL-SQI
Philipp Schindler: SBA Research
Edgar Weippl: TU Wien, FH St. Pölten

Chapter 13 in Business Transformation through Blockchain, 2019, pp 339-355 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Over the last decade, the principle of blockchains has risen from relative obscurity in what was at the time a comparatively small community of Bitcoin users to worldwide prominence. The recent success of Bitcoin has led to extensive news coverage in mainstream media and widespread interest from the general public. Reports, videos and myths surrounding Bitcoin show how difficult the fundamentals are to understand for non-expert users, not to mention the fact that there is still very little awareness or understanding of systems other than cryptocurrencies that rely on the principle of blockchains. We hope this chapter will help demystify the concept and provide a sound introduction to the underlying technologies and consensus mechanisms of the blockchain. Although the term blockchain is closely linked to Bitcoin (to the point where many laypeople consider them quasi-synonymous), the term was not introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in the original paper that presented Bitcoin (Nakamoto 2008) as a prototype for a decentralized cryptocurrency. The term emerged in the Bitcoin community to describe the principle of the new cryptocurrency, and is therefore not standardized terminology. Therefore, there are two common spelling variants: blockchain and block chain. Although the latter was used by Satoshi Nakamoto in a comment in the original source code, the former is more frequently used in academic literature, for example, in publications such as Croman et al. (2016) and press reports, and can be regarded as a de facto standard. Therefore, we will use the spelling blockchain.

Keywords: Blockchain; Bitcoin; Cryptocurrencies; Nakamoto consensus; Proof-of-work; Proof-of-stake (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-99058-3_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319990583

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-99058-3_13

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().