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ISYS3408 Blockchain For Business Tutorial Notes 2022 semester 1 Page 77
Tutorial 11 Blockchain Suitability Analysis
HAZARDOUS WASTE MANAGEMENT
The treatment and disposal of industrial waste is a very large part of any
industry. There are many laws governing the categorization of waste and
how each category of waste needs to be transported, processed, treated
and disposed. A high level description of the general steps is shown here:
1. Industry produces waste as part of normal operations (e.g. asbestos
emoval, used oil filters and tyres, medical waste, chemical/paint
unoff, used cooking oil etc)
2. Waste is collected by various waste collection/disposal services
3. Waste is categorized according to government regulations
4. Recycling companies may extract materials from the waste for
ecycling
euse
5. Some waste needs to be treated before disposal to make it safe
from contaminating soil/water etc. Treatment companies would do
this.
6. Remaining waste then needs to be disposed depending on the
category, usually being disposed to landfill once rendered safe.
7. There are different categories of landfill sites able to accept certain
types of waste but not others.
Recent events in Victoria have highlighted major flaws in the cu
ent
system. Several rogue waste disposal companies operated illegally for
years by collecting waste from companies and then instead of processing
and disposing of the waste properly, they stored the waste in huge
warehouses or buried the waste, untreated, on country properties. These
large stockpiles of waste have created several very dangerous toxic fires
and have required very expensive clean-up operations to render the waste
safe.
Blockchain Suitability
Analyse the scenario and discuss whether a blockchain solution would be
appropriate for this domain. You must refer to one or more of the
Blockchain Suitability flowcharts described in lecture 9.
You can’t just simply answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – neither answer is right or
wrong. Address the reasons and conditions that make this scenario
suitable or not suitable for a blockchain solution.
ISYS3408 Blockchain For Business Tutorial Notes 2022 semester 1 Page 78
Tutorial Evidence for Assessment
You are required to submit a report of your analysis findings in your submission
as part of labtask 3. You are welcome to incorporate the findings shared by the
groups in the tutorials.
Evaluating Suitability of Applying Blockchain
Evaluating Suitability of Applying Blockchain
Sin Kuang Lo
University of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
XXXXXXXXXX
Xiwei Xu
Data61, CSIRO
Sydney, Australia
XXXXXXXXXX
Yin Kia Chiam
Faculty of Computer Science and
Information Technology,
University of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
XXXXXXXXXX
Qinghua Lu
China University of
Petroleum(East China)
Beijing, China
XXXXXXXXXX
Abstract—Blockchain is an emerging technology for
decentralized and transactional data sharing across a large network
of untrusted participants. It enables new forms of distributed
software architectures, where agreement on shared states can be
established without trusting a central integration point. As a
database and computational platform, blockchain has both
advantages and disadvantages compared with conventional
techniques. Blockchain may be an appropriate choice for some use
cases while conventional technologies will be more appropriate for
other use cases. A major difficulty for practitioners to decide
whether or not to use blockchain is that limited product data or
eliable technology evaluation available to assess the suitability of
lockchains. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework
that comprises a list of criteria and a typical process for
practitioners to assess the suitability of applying blockchain using
these criteria based on the characteristics of the use cases. We then
use several existing industrial trails to evaluate the feasibility of our
framework.
Keywords—blockchain, suitability, evaluation
I. INTRODUCTION
Blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin [1], which
provides an append-only data store of transactions replicated
etween peers and enables new forms of distributed software
architectures, where agreement on shared state for
decentralised and transactional data can be established across a
large network of untrusted participants.
Blockchain has unique properties. When data is contained
in a committed transaction on the blockchain, it eventually
ecomes immutable in practice. The immutable chain of
cryptographically-signed historical transactions provides non-
epudiation of the stored data. Cryptographic tools also support
data integrity, the public access to blockchain provides data
transparency, and equal rights allow every participant the
same ability to access and manipulate the blockchain. Trust in
the blockchain is achieved from the interactions between nodes
within the network. The participants of blockchain network
ely on the blockchain network itself rather than relying on
trusted third-party to facilitate transactions, which has the
power to control and manipulate the system and is a single
point of failure.
Applications built on blockchains can take advantage of
these properties of the blockchain. Many banks are involved in
trials of blockchain technology, including through the global
R3 consortium1 which is applying blockchain to trade finance
and cross-border payments. Financial transactions are the first,
ut not the only use case being investigated for blockchain
technology. A blockchain implements a distributed ledger,
which can verify and store any kind of transactions, in general
[2]. Many startups, enterprises, and governments [3] are
exploring blockchain applications in areas as diverse as supply
chain, electronic health records, voting, energy supply,
ownership management, identity management, and protecting
critical civil infrastructure.
Data privacy and scalability are two points of criticism of
lockchain. The privacy setting is limited since there are no
privileged users, and every participant can join the network to
access all the information on the blockchain. For throughput
scalability, mainstream public blockchains to date can only
handle on average 3-20 transactions per second 2 , whereas
mainstream payment services, like VISA, can handle an
average of 1,700 transactions per second3.Thus, blockchains
cannot by themselves meet the requirements for all usage
scenarios, for example, applications that require real-time
processing or used within a single organizational unit. Gartner
estimated that 90% of enterprise blockchain projects launched
in 2015 would fail within 18 to 24 months [4].
In practice, there is a gap where no proper evident-based
guideline that could be used to evaluate the suitability of
lockchain use cases. Hence, this paper provides insights on
the trade-offs on non-functional requirements when
implementing blockchain-based applications and develops a
lockchain suitability evaluation framework based on a list of
criteria. Several industrial trails are selected to validate the
suitability of blockchain using our evaluation framework.
II. SUITABILITY EVALUATION FRAMEWORK
The first step of architecting a blockchain-based application
is to assess the suitability of applying blockchain against the
equirements of use cases. Fig. 1 shows the framework
proposed based on existing industrial products, technical
forums, academic literature and our own experience of using
lockchains and developing prototypes. The process to
evaluate the suitability of blockchain comprises mainly seven
questions that need to be answered, which are denoted as white
1 http:
www.r3cev.com/
2 https:
log.ethereum.org/2016/01/15/privacy-on-the-blockchain/
3 https:
usa.visa.com
un-your-business/small-business-tools
etail.html
2017 International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems
XXXXXXXXXX/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE
DOI XXXXXXXXXX/ICECCS XXXXXXXXXX
158
decision nodes. The subquestions derived from the main
questions are denoted as grey decision nodes.
Fig. 1. Suitability evaluation framework.
A. Multi-party
The first question is whether multiple parties are involved
in the scenario. The operations or transactions between parties
are normally governed by intermediaries. Supply chain is one
of the examples as it consists of complex, dynamic, multi-party
a
angements with regulatory and logistical constraints
spanning across different jurisdictional boundaries. Blockchain
provides a shared infrastructure with a neutral stand where
none of the participated organization dictates it. Thus,
lockchain is suitable for scenarios involving multiple parties,
potentially where there are intermediaries acting within the
cu
ent systems. It would
eak down the silos of information
controlled by individual parties while at the same time make
the process faster and cheaper. A system within a single entity
can use other relatively cheaper mechanisms to achieve the
same properties provided by blockchains.
B. Trusted authority
The second question is whether a trusted authority is
equired in the scenario. Trusted authority is an entity that is
authorized to execute a certain operation or alter a policy or
configuration of an operation. Examples of the trusted
authorities would be the bank and government. The issue arises
from having a trusted authority is that it may become a single
point of failure. When the trusted authority experiences
problems, all the users accessing the services from it would be
affected. Blockchain is suitable for scenarios without any
trusted authority or the cu
ent trusted authority has potential to
e decentralized. Using a blockchain does not remove trust
ecause users are still exposed to risk in their use of blockchain
technology. Users are shifting their trust from the third-party
intermediaries or central governing organization to the
lockchain software, the incentive that motivates “good
ehavior” of the processing nodes, and the trusted third parties
that act as “oracles” which record information about the
external world on the blockchain. Blockchain removes the need
to trust a single specific third party to maintain the ledger of a
transaction, and so is sometimes called a “distributed trust”.
C. Centralized operation
The third question is whether the operations on the
application is centralized. In blockchain-based systems that use
smart contracts, system operation is harder to implement for
the smart contracts than regular distributed systems. This is
ecause smart contracts comprise code that regulates the
interactions between mutually untrusting