Blockchain consensus protocols: Towards a review of practical constraints for implementation in developing countries

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.