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What Blockchain Alternative Do You Need?

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Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (DPM 2018, CBT 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11025))

Abstract

With billions of dollars spent on blockchain, there clearly is a need to determine if this technology should be used, as demonstrated by the many proposals for decision schemes. In this work we rigorously analyze 30 existing schemes. Our analysis demonstrates contradictions between these schemes – so clearly they cannot all be right – and also highlights what we feel is a more structural flaw of most of them, namely that they ignore alternatives to blockchain-based solutions. To remedy this, we propose an improved scheme that does take alternatives into account, which we argue is more useful in practice to decide an optimal solution for a particular use case.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Tommy Koens & Erik Poll

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  1. Tommy Koens
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  2. Erik Poll
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Correspondence to Tommy Koens .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Télécom SudParis, Evry, France

    Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro

  2. Enginyeria de la Informacio I de les Com, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

    Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí

  3. Università degli Studi di Milano, Crema, Italy

    Giovanni Livraga

  4. Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    Ruben Rios

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Koens, T., Poll, E. (2018). What Blockchain Alternative Do You Need?. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Herrera-Joancomartí, J., Livraga, G., Rios, R. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM CBT 2018 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11025. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00305-0_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00305-0_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00304-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00305-0

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