The Challenges and Trends of Deploying Blockchain in the Real World for the Users’ Need

Commentary The Challenges and Trends of Deploying Blockchain in the Real World for the Users’ Need Chun-Wei Chiang Eber Betanzos Saiph Savage* (Received 21 February 2019; accepted 14 July 2019) Abstract Blockchain technology is a decentralized and open database maintained by a peer-to-peer network, offering a “trustless trust” for untrusted parties. Despite the fact that some researchers consider blockchain as a bubble, blockchain technology has the genuine potential to solve problems across industries. In this article, we provide an overview of the development that Blockchain technology has had in 2018 and point out the challenges of deploying blockchain-based applications in the real world from a Human-Computer Interaction view. We propose that blockchain practitioners should design blockchain applications from users’ perspective, think about who the users are, and what they need. Furthermore, we also lay out possible future trends for blockchain based systems. Keywords: blockchain, decentralized, human centered design, humancomputer interaction, real world applications. Chun-Wei Chiang: HCI Lab, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA. Eber Betanzos: Cyber Ethics Center, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico| Federal Audit Office, Mexico. Saiph Savage: (Corresponding author) HCI Lab, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USAEmail: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (CC BY NC), which permits distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. Journal of Cyberspace Studies Volume 3 No. 2 July 2019 pp. 119 -128 . Web page: https://jcss.ut.ac.ir Email: Print ISSN: 2588 -5499 . e-ISSN: 2588 -5502 . DOI: 10.22059/JCSS.2019.72454 119 Journal of Cyberspace Studies Volume 3 No. 2 Jul. 2019 120 Chun-Wei Chiang, Eber Betanzos and Saiph Savage Introduction Blockchain technology is mainly known as the technology that supports cryptocurrencies. However, cryptocurrencies are just one of the possible Blockchain based applications that may exist. Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger that verifies and perpetually records the transactions on a distributed peer-to-peer network. Blockchains are used to solve the trust issues among different parties. Researchers and practitioners utilize blockchain technology to solve the existing difficulties in different areas, such as financial institutions, manufacturing industry, and public governance. Although blockchain technology has great potential to revolutionize internet systems and reformulate the industry and economies, only few blockchain-based systems successfully developed (Lavazova et al., 2019). People seldom use blockchain-based systems, and blockchain technology does not play an important role in the real world. Currently, most blockchain researchers focus on introducing blockchain technology in different scenarios or improving the deep infrastructures of the blockchains, while the studies on the users and the potential users of the blockchain systems are limited. It can be said that humans are one of the most important players in a system. A system will be worthless until people actually make use of it. The state of affairs has attracted the attention of numerous Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers to form workshops in order to identify the fundamental human challenges requisite in interactions with blockchain and distributed ledger technology (Elsden et al., 2018; Lavazova et al., 2019). The goal of both workshops is to help blockchain based systems to address people’s (including developers and end-users) needs. Still, the necessity to integrate the blockchain technology into user-centered interactive systems calls for an essential challenge for design and engineering. In this commentary, we will review key developments of blockchain technology and provide a guideline for the upcoming blockchain features in 2019 from an HCI perspective. Blockchain technology The concept of blockchains originated from the studies of Nakamoto (2008) that experimented with cryptography to link the current transaction data, called block, to the previous block by recording its cryptographic hash and timestamp. Blockchains ask different computers in the network to help verify the transactions and maintain the network, and these computers are called “node”. The blockchain technology cannot be dissociated from the electronic cash system until Buterin (2014) proposed Ethereum that allows the developers to create The state of blockchain in 2018 Compared to the early years of blockchain technology, enterprises focused more on applying blockchains than exploring them (Deloitte, 2018). Blockchains kept growing in popularity as people across multiple industries found new applications for it in 2018. Researchers and practitioners announced that they had advanced in blockchain applications. Both public and permissioned blockchains made remarkable headway. In the following section, we are going to outline different blockchain applications in different industries in 2018. Blockchain in financial services The financial sector was the first industry to explore blockchain technology. Beyond cryptocurrency, blockchain technology can be used in other financial services, such as foreign exchange, insurance, and loan. Both public blockchain and permissioned blockchain had a breakthrough. For permissioned blockchains, banks tried to unite to create blockchain platforms that can reduce the operation fee of foreign exchange and bilateral payments. For example, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley used IBM’s permissioned blockchain to reduce the cumbersome bilateral payments operations (Baydakova, 2018). Blockchain researchers also used blockchain and IoT for car autoinsurance claim and adjudication (Oham et al., 2018). Blockchain in government Governments also have a massive interest in Blockchain technology. They have used the technology for voting, land registry, and digital Volume 3 No. 2 Jul. 2019 Journal of Cyberspace Studies consensus-based applications. The applications, also known as smart contracts, allow the performance of credible, trackable and irreversible transactions without third parties. Given that Ethereum helped to reduce the difficulty in developing Blockchain applications, blockchain technology started to develop vigorously. Blockchains can be separated into two kinds of protocols based on the different types of participants in the blockchain network: “public blockchains” and “permissioned blockchains”. Public blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, enable anyone to become the nodes to verify the transaction. While the permissioned blockchains, such as Hyperledger, only allow the parties which are identified and have permission joining the network. Although permissioned blockchains have better capacity and higher speed than the publi (...truncated)