IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-319-99058-3_13.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Blockchain: Basics

In: Business Transformation through Blockchain

Author

Listed:
  • Aljosha Judmayer

    (SBA Research)

  • Nicholas Stifter

    (TU Wien, CDL-SQI)

  • Philipp Schindler

    (SBA Research)

  • Edgar Weippl

    (TU Wien, FH St. Pölten)

Abstract

Over the last decade, the principle of blockchains has risen from relative obscurity in what was at the time a comparatively small community of Bitcoin users to worldwide prominence. The recent success of Bitcoin has led to extensive news coverage in mainstream media and widespread interest from the general public. Reports, videos and myths surrounding Bitcoin show how difficult the fundamentals are to understand for non-expert users, not to mention the fact that there is still very little awareness or understanding of systems other than cryptocurrencies that rely on the principle of blockchains. We hope this chapter will help demystify the concept and provide a sound introduction to the underlying technologies and consensus mechanisms of the blockchain. Although the term blockchain is closely linked to Bitcoin (to the point where many laypeople consider them quasi-synonymous), the term was not introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in the original paper that presented Bitcoin (Nakamoto 2008) as a prototype for a decentralized cryptocurrency. The term emerged in the Bitcoin community to describe the principle of the new cryptocurrency, and is therefore not standardized terminology. Therefore, there are two common spelling variants: blockchain and block chain. Although the latter was used by Satoshi Nakamoto in a comment in the original source code, the former is more frequently used in academic literature, for example, in publications such as Croman et al. (2016) and press reports, and can be regarded as a de facto standard. Therefore, we will use the spelling blockchain.

Suggested Citation

  • Aljosha Judmayer & Nicholas Stifter & Philipp Schindler & Edgar Weippl, 2019. "Blockchain: Basics," Springer Books, in: Horst Treiblmaier & Roman Beck (ed.), Business Transformation through Blockchain, chapter 13, pages 339-355, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-99058-3_13
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-99058-3_13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-99058-3_13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.