Abstract
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has the potential to change organization and collaboration in the economy, society, and industry. This chapter introduces the technical background and use cases of DLT. It presents the major innovations originating from DLT since the introduction of the blockchain concept. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies’ historical background as a driver of fully decentralized distributed ledgers is outlined from their origins in the 1990s until the blockchain concept’s introduction in 2009. DLT’s technical principles are introduced to provide a sound understanding. Subsequently, the functioning of DLT is illustrated by means of the Bitcoin blockchain example, which was the first fully decentralized cryptocurrency to not require a trusted authority (i.e., banks). Thereafter, smart contracts and the idea of decentralized applications are explained. Selected use cases for DLT’s application are subsequently discussed. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the prevailing challenges in the field of DLT.
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Notes
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The term blockchain generation is normally used. However, since blockchain can be considered a DLT concept, the more general term DLT generation is used.
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Turing completeness (named after the British computer scientist Alan Turing) describes a system’s ability to simulate any other Turing machine. Turing completeness enables the use of loops in programming, which is the multiple execution of programing code until a defined condition is fulfilled. The concept of loops is important in programming to increase flexibility and to decrease code duplications.
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Multicasting is a group communication in which data transmission is simultaneously directed at a group of target computers. Multicasting can be a distribution of data from one-to-many devices or from many-to-many devices.
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Further Reading
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Sunyaev A, Kannengießer N, Beck R, Treiblmaier H, Lacity M, Kranz J, Fridgen G, Spankowski U, Luckow A (2021) Token economy. Bus Inf Syst Eng 63:457–478
Yeow K, Gani A, Ahmad RW et al (2018) Decentralized consensus for edge-centric Internet of things: a review, taxonomy, and research issues. IEEE Access 6:1513–1524
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Sunyaev, A. (2024). Distributed Ledger Technology. In: Internet Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61014-1_8
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