IT Megatrends: Blockchain Technology

 

IT Megatrends: Blockchain Technology Example

PI Network (new social cryptocurrency) is another example following the blockchain technology that comes under the recent IT Megatrends all over the world. It is launched by Stanford graduates Nicolas Kokkalis Ph.D., Chengdiao Fan Ph.D., and Vince McPhilip M.B.A on 14 March 2019. Currently, the PI network is having more than 1,000,000 users that are accessible to everyone through smartphones (Silva, F. G., & de Sousa, S. B. D. S. (2018). It is one of the rising cryptocurrencies / digital currencies networks that remove the barriers where mostly rely on the third parties to have a reliable, safe, and guarantee financial transactions on buying goods and services. This third party can be a bank or a PayPal that often charges a certain amount on each transaction with some limitations. Hence, the main purpose of cryptocurrencies using blockchain technology is the removal of all these third parties with their fees and rules to ensure free financial interactions and beneficial for both parties like PI Network is doing so (Fernando, E. 2019). Bitcoin is one of the main inspirations behind building the Pi Network that has standardized to re-imagine it as a social and mobile (digital) currency.

According to A. Bahga, V. Madisetti (2016), blockchain and cryptocurrency are enriched with decentralization platforms for performing and providing all the legal and financial transactions/services the same as the internet media and information (A. Bahga, V. Madisetti, 2014). Unfortunately, most of the cryptocurrencies are not in the access of common people hence deprived to take financial benefits from this technology. To overcome this situation, Pi makes it possible to allow everyone who belongs to every walk of life in contributing to the success of its global community and the security of its cryptocurrency network. It is building a peer-to-peer global marketplace where all of its community will be directly spending Pi in buying goods and services. They aim to initiate experimenting with their building user-friendly App that transfers Pi as of Q4 2021. Hence, they are making it possible for exchanging Pi digital currency on cryptocurrency through blockchain technology (Golosova, J., & Romanovs, A., 2018).

The vision of the Pi team is to provide new digital cryptocurrency in access of every person that they can mine using their smartphones. This is the only network where users are putting value through its app with no confusion on its authenticity because we are not required to invest any amount of money in it. The only matter of concern is the user time and data that have to be spent on its app on daily basis. From the users end, it involves limited battery drain, low/no financial cost with a light footprint. It enables every user to make digital money through mining crypto coins using their smartphones (W. Fauvel, 2017).

Limitations of Blockchain Technology during this pandemic of COVID-19

High Energy Consumption

 

According to W. Fauvel (2017), high energy consumption is another limitation that has been observed during the pandemic using blockchain technology. It is to be understood that energy is often required for the maintenance of its time ledger empowered by blockchain technology. It is found that this has consumed substantial power on the maintenance of a real-time ledger during COVID-19. Because the creation of each new node does require a communication system with another node. It enables the creation of transparency and functionality. So, it often requires an additional amount of power to validate the transactions. The function of each node displays fault tolerance, no change, zero downtime and it takes time to store the data on blockchain including validation, transparency, signature verification, public key, private key, hash value, processing, and transactions. All these are time-consuming as well as high power consumption. This would require a high cost of maintenance and needs extra resources that were not available during the period of a pandemic. Thus, the validation of the sealing process using blockchain technology during COVID-19 consumed high energy and power (A. Bahga, V. Madisetti, 2016).

 

High energy consumption would be considered as the main limitation of blockchain technology due to the higher response rate from the community during the period of a pandemic. When the whole world was experiencing the crisis and it has badly affected the lives of everyday people due to lack of financial resources in hands. Due to the dramatic increase in unemployment, digital cryptocurrencies have grabbed the attention of the majority of people from all over the world to make money online. This has transferred pressure on keeping the real-time ledger more transparent and energy-efficient. The network miners were found attempting to have solutions in just a few seconds to validate their transactions. This has erupted the speed and efficiency of the blockchain technology that was not equipped with such a higher response to perform the transactions with low or minimum energy consumptions. The founders of cryptocurrencies are forced to utilize essential amounts of computer power.  They have faced many burning electricity issues that were time constraints even (Zheng, Z., Xie, S., Dai, H., Chen, X., & Wang, H. (2017).

Trust and Privacy Concerns

Some of the researchers (J.Light; A. Kosba; A. Miller; E. Shi; Z. Wen and C. Papamanthou, 2017) found that there were substantial trust and privacy concerns have been aroused while the use of cryptocurrency is empowered by blockchain technology during the COVID-19. Because the community that shown intentions to join these networks during the pandemic are mostly well experienced and educated. They were having the necessary awareness using these digital currencies and were often questioned about their reliability and other confidential issues. Since blockchain technology requires following the mining protocol that is helpful for its execution. It has challenged the architecture of trust that how the technology is depending upon the mutual mistrust on both parties (A. Biryukov, D. Khovratovich, and I. Pustogarov, 2014). It has become more prominent due to the indulgence of the high cost of a transaction that was between 75-160 dollars that have to be covered using additional resources. It has also increased the initial capital cost of using blockchain technology these days. There is a large number of communities that often raised questions on the privacy of the private and public keys that how they can transact it without exposing their real identity. While on the other hand, blockchain was not providing any transactional privacy to the users since the values of the balances and the transactions for each public key to be publicly visible. These are the things that have created many doubts and confusion in the minds of its new and existing users during COVID-19. The users became reluctant to pursue this technology due to the leakage of their privacy and other confidential information (J.Light, 2017).

In recent studies, it has been shown that one user’s transactions are linked to reveal their private information. Moreover, the user’s IP address is also not secured and traceable behind the firewalls and other network address translations (NAT). This technology is providing a unique identity for each user through a set of nodes they are connected with. However, this process can be used and learned to find the real origin of each transaction performed by users (S. Meiklejohn et. al, 2013)

 

Ways to Overcome the Limitations

Golosova, J., & Romanovs, A. (2018) stated that there are certain ways to improve energy consumption, trust, and privacy concerns that are explained below.

How to Improve Energy Consumption

 

One of the researchers, W. Fauvel (2017) argued that the higher management dealing with the digital currencies should have to install enough data storage devices and services that can provide optimized solutions to serve the global market. They will have to work on improving their systems and infrastructure for better employment and functions. They must be equipped with energy and power-efficient input and output devices that can deliver optimal results during and after the transaction process. The system must be handling approximately 60 transactions in a second comparatively pales to 47,000/second visa’s peak rate. Blockchain needs to be expanded with the same ubiquitous role as fiat currency where cryptocurrency must be capable enough to process a greater number of transactions at the same time. With the use of energy-efficient servers, blockchain can easily process more than 1000 transactions within every eight minutes in comparison with the global visa network and ripple network. This will help you to achieve massive scalability while utilizing this technology in payment solutions as well as it will expand the scale and resulting in higher volume (A. Bahga, V. Madisetti, 2016).

 

Concerning Bitcoin, it has been claimed in 2019 that the computing power has consumed as much energy as it was used by 159 nations of the world. Blockchain often required 5,000 nuclear reactors to meet its energy and power consumption to increase the reach of its transactions. Though blockchain is a new type of technology it is one of the most decentralized digital ledgers, transparent, capable of copying multiple transactions, and very trusty. It will become more reliable and valid if it could offer energy-efficient solutions that are not destructible. It could brighten our future without any deception and fraudulent activities (A. Bahga, V. Madisetti, 2014).

 

How to Improve Trust and Privacy Concerns

 

According to A. Kosba, A. Miller, E. Shi, Z. Wen, and C. Papamanthou, (2020), to improve the user’s trust and privacy concerns, the authorities need to introduce certain rules and regulations for blockchain and crypto all over the world. Everyone needs to have a set of rules and regulations that have to comply in true letter and spirit. There should be a proper framework that has to be demonstrated for all the concerned organizations and companies using blockchain technology. If it is to be introduced then there will be amazing possibilities and ways to increase the trust level of users and resolve their privacy concerns. Further to the addition, there are proper guidelines and instructions more specifically in their build-in smartphone apps where users can reach out the required information and its process to function the digital currency transactions. The expert team of cryptocurrencies must be providing updated information and remain in contact with each user around the globe (A. Biryukov, D. Khovratovich, and I. Pustogarov, 2014).

Moreover, privacy will remain a huge concern for blockchain because its deliver transparency. You are unknown with your competition and the community to whom you are doing this digital business. Therefore, there should be a higher degree of synonymity and traceability for your digital coins (S. Meiklejohn, M. Pomarole, G. Jordan, K. Levchenko, D. McCoy, G. M. Voelker, and S. Savage, 2013). The companies should have to ensure all the confidential information of each user safe and sound and should not publically display it. They will have to be responsible for the leakage of user’s data to be used for any fraudulent activities. Hence, we can improve the trust and privacy concerns of the global community that are digitally attached through blockchain technology (Fernando, E., 2019).

It is pertinent to note that we will keep exploring the development and application of blockchain technology in other fields like education. It is because this new technology will be very helpful in resolving many problems that is disturbing and preventing us to keep correcting information systems work (Silva, F. G., & de Sousa, S. B. D. S., 2018).

 

 References

A. Bahga, V. Madisetti, “Internet of Things: A Hands-On Approach”, Atlanta, 2014

 

A. Kosba, A. Miller, E. Shi, Z. Wen, and C. Papamanthou, “Hawk: The blockchain model of cryptography and privacy-preserving smart

contracts,” in Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), San Jose, CA, USA, 2016, pp. 839–858.

 

A. Biryukov, D. Khovratovich, and I. Pustogarov, “Deanonymisation of clients in bitcoin p2p network,” in Proceedings of the 2014 ACM

SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, New York, NY, USA, 2014, pp. 15–29.

 

A. Bahga, V. Madisetti, “Blockchain Platform for Industrial Internet of Things”, Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, No. 9, pp. [36]533-546, 2016

 

Bitcoinwiki; 2015. Accessed: 24/3/2016. https://en.bitcoin.it.

Blockchaintechnology, “Advantages & Disadvantages of Blockchain Technology” [online]. 2016. Available from: https://blockchaintechnologycom.wordpress.com/2016/11/21/advantages-disadvantages/

 

Dataflair team, “Advantages and disadvantages of Blockchain Technology” [online]. 2018. Available from: https://data-flair.training/blogs/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-blockchain/

 

Dataflair team, “Advantages and disadvantages of Blockchain Technology” [online]. 2018. Available from: https://data- flair.training/blogs/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-blockchain/

 

Fernando, E. (2019, September). Blockchain Technology Implementation In Raspberry Pi For Private Network. In 2019 International Conference on Sustainable Information Engineering and Technology (SIET) (pp. 154-158). IEEE.

Golosova, J., & Romanovs, A. (2018, November). The advantages and disadvantages of the blockchain technology. In 2018 IEEE 6th workshop on advances in information, electronic and electrical engineering (AIEEE) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

 

J.Light, “The differences between a hard fork, a soft fork, and a chain split, and what they mean for the future of bitcoin” [online]. September 2017. Available from: https://medium.com/@lightcoin/the-differences-between-a-hard-fork-a-soft-fork-and-a-chain-split-and-what-they-mean-for-the-769273f358c9

 

S. Meiklejohn, M. Pomarole, G. Jordan, K. Levchenko, D. McCoy, G. M. Voelker, and S. Savage, “A fistful of bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names,” in Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference (IMC’13), New York, NY, USA, 2013.

 

Silva, F. G., & de Sousa, S. B. D. S. (2018). A New Design Methodology of a Triband Pi-Network Based on Multiresonant Networks. Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing, 37(2), 459-474.

W. Fauvel, “Blockchain Advantages and Disadvantages” [online]. August 2017. Available from: https://medium.com/nudjed/blockchain-advantage-and-disadvantages-e76dfde3bbc0

 

W. Fauvel, “Blockchain Advantages and Disadvantages” [online]. August 2017. Available from:  https://medium.com/nudjed/blockchain-advantage-and-disadvantages-e76dfde3bbc0.

 

Zheng, Z., Xie, S., Dai, H., Chen, X., & Wang, H. (2017, June). An overview of blockchain technology: Architecture, consensus, and future trends. In 2017 IEEE international congress on big data (BigData congress) (pp. 557-564). IEEE.