Abstract
There is currently a big rush in the research and practice communities to investigate the blockchain technology towards leveraging its security, immutability and transparency features to create new services or improve existing ones. In developing countries, which are seen as a fertile ground for field testing disruptive technologies, blockchain is viewed as the “trust machine” that is necessary for accelerating development. Unfortunately, the internal working of blockchain as well as its constraints are often overlooked in the design of services. This, in conjunction with a poor regulatory framework, slows down any concrete attempt to build upon the technology. In this paper, we contribute towards accelerating the concrete adoption of blockchain by making explicit the constraints that affect their practical use in the context of developing countries such as African sub-saharan countries. Overall we recommend that the technology should be adjusted to the real-world constraints, in particular those that we currently witness on network latency, computation power as well as cultural gaps.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
cf. Preface of Joël de Rosney in the book “La blockchain décryptée - les clefs d’une révolution” by Blockchain France.
- 2.
Figure elements borrowed from https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-blockchain-technology/.
- 3.
References
Latour, B.: Technology is society made durable. Sociol. Rev. 38(1–suppl), 103–131 (1990)
Bell, D.: The coming of the post-industrial society. Educ. Forum. 40(4), 574–579 (1976)
Brito, J., Castillo, C.: Bitcoin: A Primer for Policymakers. Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Arlington (2013)
Vitalik buterin about ethereum, smart contracts, and himself, May 2016. https://goo.gl/C58nJZ
Lamport, L.: The byzantine generals problem. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 4(3), 382–401 (1982). http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=357176
Bheemaiah, K.: Block chain 2.0: the renaissance of money. Wired, January 2015
Economist Staff: Blockchains: the great chain of being sure about things. The Economist, 31 October 2015. https://goo.gl/PwLDsw
Dwork, C., Naor, M.: Pricing via processing or combatting junk mail. In: Brickell, E.F. (ed.) CRYPTO 1992. LNCS, vol. 740, pp. 139–147. Springer, Heidelberg (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48071-4_10
Jakobsson, M., Juels, A.: Proofs of work and bread pudding protocols. In: Communications and Multimedia Security, pp. 258–272. Kluwer Academic Publishers (1999)
Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, October 2008. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Popov, S.: A probabilistic analysis of the Nxt forging algorithm. Ledger 1, 69–83 (2016). https://doi.org/10.5195/LEDGER.2016.46. ISSN 2379–5980
Vitalik, B.: What proof of stake is and why it matters. Bitcoin Mag
Narayanan, B.: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies. Princeton University Press, Princeton (2016)
Chepurnoy, A.: PoS forging algorithms: formal approach and multibranch forging. https://www.scribd.com/doc/248208963/Multibranch-forging
Castro, M., Liskov, B.: Practical byzantine fault tolerance. In: OSDI, vol. 99 (1999)
Vukolić, M.: The quest for scalable blockchain fabric: proof-of-work vs. BFT replication. In: Camenisch, J., Kesdoğan, D. (eds.) iNetSec 2015. LNCS, vol. 9591, pp. 112–125. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39028-4_9
Mazieres, D.: The stellar consensus protocol: federated model for internet level consensus. Stellar Development Foundation (2015)
Bentov, I.: Proof of activity: extending Bitcoin’s proof of work via proof of stake. ACM SIGMETRICS Perform. Eval. Rev. 42(3), 34–37 (2014)
P4Titan: Slimcoin: a peer-to-peer crypto-currency with proof-of-burn, May 2014. http://www.slimcoin.club/whitepaper.pdf
BURST’s proof of capacity mining. Bitcoin Talk. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=731923.0
Underwood, S.: Blockchain beyond bitcoin. Commun. ACM 59(11), 15–17 (2016)
Yli-Huumo, J., et al.: Where is current research on blockchain technology? A systematic review. PLoS one 11(10) (2016)
CoinDesk: Carbon footprint of bitcoin. http://www.coindesk.com/carbon-footprint-bitcoin/
Ouoba, J., Bissyandé, T.F.: Leveraging the cultural model for opportunistic networking in sub-saharan Africa. In: Jonas, K., Rai, I.A., Tchuente, M. (eds.) AFRICOMM 2012. LNICST, vol. 119, pp. 163–173. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41178-6_17
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ouattara, H.F., Ahmat, D., Ouédraogo, F.T., Bissyandé, T.F., Sié, O. (2018). Blockchain Consensus Protocols. In: Odumuyiwa, V., Adegboyega, O., Uwadia, C. (eds) e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries. AFRICOMM 2017. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 250. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98827-6_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98827-6_29
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98826-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-98827-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)