Blockchain fundamentals and classifications - A pathway to the moon

Abstract

Since the first successful cryptocurrency, bitcoin, appeared in 2009, more than 18,000 cryptocurrencies are available now, providing innovative consensus mechanisms with various use cases. With the world wide public ledger nature, it is truly following the paths of the Internet and world wide web technologies in the financial sectors. As it is as idealistic as a pathway to the Moon, this study examines the fundamentals of blockchain in hyperledger, mining, and consensus mechanisms. The paper proposed two findings. First, four generations of blockchain are discussed with the advancement in innovations. Second, the classifications of blockchain are proposed in terms of participant's openness (public vs private) and network's control scheme (decentralized vs centralized).