
For example, some researchers have studied the underlying technology of blockchain, such as distributed storage, peer-to-peer networking, cryptography, smart contracts, and consensus algorithms (Christidis and Devetsikiotis 2016 Cruz et al. 2017 Kim and Laskowski 2018 O'Dair and Beaven 2017 Radanovic and Likic 2018 Savelyev 2018).īlockchain technology has been studied by a wide variety of academic disciplines. The application of blockchain technology has extended from digital currency and into finance, and it has even gradually extended into health care, supply chain management, market monitoring, smart energy, and copyright protection (Engelhardt 2017 Hyvarinen et al. We provide more details on the three generations of blockchain in the Appendix. Blockchain is currently delimited to Blockchain 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, based on their applications.

The evolution of blockchain has been a progressive process. Some of the advantages of blockchain include its distributed ledger, decentralization, information transparency, tamper-proof construction, and openness. At first, the extremely high volatility of bitcoin and the attitudes of many countries toward its complexity restrained its development somewhat, but the advantages of blockchain-which is bitcoin’s underlying technology-attracted increasing attention.


The concepts of bitcoin and blockchain were first proposed in 2008 by someone using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who described how cryptology and an open distributed ledger can be combined into a digital currency application (Nakamoto 2008).
