ABSTRACT
Public ledger technology has been a part of the history of technological evolution. Blockchain technology is a public ledger of distributed records that facilitates transactions. Early adopters of blockchain technology have experienced breakthroughs in many daily activities and business processes. blockchain technology can be used for a variety of applications beyond just financial transactions, such as supply chain management, identity verification, or voting systems, among others. Some advantages of blockchain technology include constructing a shared repository of data that is maintained by peers (no third-party intermediary), embracing trust among users through digital signatures and validations ensure every node and user behaves ethically, building potential infrastructure that transforms the next digital fabric of the world by creating a worldwide repository of data that can potentially be accessed by everyone, creating transparency and guaranteeing that everyone on the platform can read the final state of the transactions and have full access to the history of the transaction, automation with infusing smart contracts. Immutability ensures that data cannot be erased or changed, and decentralization creates consensus and removes one central authority. Although there are several advantages of blockchain, there are some notable disadvantages as well including high power consumption that is attributed to the algorithms built in for mining that requires expensive hardware that require a massive amount of computation is required for data mining, since a current copy of the blockchain is available to all users, the data replication requires more space, immutability and transparency eliminate users who do not meet the standards, while a positive for the industry and a negative for the user who had the potential to change business practices but can no longer participate because of some negative data, smart contracts must rely upon external data – this process needs to be either streamlined or the data needs to be injected into the blockchain and, a lack of data governance can cause strong reputational issues and become the weakest part of the process.
