BLOCKCHAIN: MULTI-APPLICATION VIEWPOINTS AND OPPORTUNITIES

I don’t see specific challenges, at the best of my knowledge. If anything, blockchain can be used to implement a variety of security services, see this link.

I do think that for many application domains there is a question of commiting potentially private data to the public ledger. If we could augment this integrity tool with mechanisms for confidentiality - it would be a step forward.

Onchain storage is not a good idea even in private setting, not only for privacy and GDPR compliance, but also for avoiding performances and scalability issues. .

What is published to the public blockchain, remains on the public blockchain by definition. Although Bitcoin was not originally meant to store generic data, it has been (mis)used on many occasions to provide integrity to some data not directly relevant to btc exchange. There are studies that look into this data - it's part of the Bitcoin chain and must be available to verify the chain. .

The common challenges organisations face when implementing blockchain technology is simply caused by insufficient internal blockchain knowledge. Most companies do not understand what blockchain is, they do not understand the benefits that blockchain can provide, and they do not know how to apply this technology in their business model. Indeed, blockchain is a new technology still on the rise, most of the solutions coming up are novel, and most importantly, they are too technical to the majority of people in this industry. This is aggravated when it comes to SMEs and start-ups, the organisations simply lack technical skills, IT specialists and knowledge on blockchain technology. On top of that, experts on blockchain technology tend to become freelancers or turn to global companies, SMEs cannot compete with these companies monetary speaking. In summary, the major challenge that SMEs face when implementing blockchain in different sectors is the lack of technical skills. Certainly, blockchain technology is able to solve many issues on almost all types of industry, but organisations need to be clear on their blockchain needs so they can choose the best blockchain platform. Another obstacle that SMEs face when implementing blockchain technologies is the “interoperability” challenge. Interoperability refers to the capability to work with different interfaces. Many organisations are creating their own blockchain technology solutions and competing to give priority to their solutions, this leads to the existence of many different standards, hindering a high level of interoperability. Although the interoperability challenge is not blockchain-specific, it is a broad issue for SMEs, especially when it comes to the adaptation of new technology and software to their business model. Following that thought, although the adaptation of blockchain technologies into business models can be beneficial to SMEs, the academia has addressed in many occasions that these organisations should be sceptical while evaluating the appropriate blockchain solution to their business model. Due to the different specifications of each companies, blockchain technologies can be beneficial to some businesses and less relevant for others. In that sense, coming back to our first idea, considering SMEs lack digital technological skills, an unstructured process to adopt blockchain will most definitely end in a waste of resources for the companies, but also, finding out the correct solution for the company can result to be highly costly on top of time-consuming and resource-wasting.

I think one challenge is ensuring interoperability across different service providers and blockchain-based architecture. Also, data interoperability is a key issue that needs to be addressed if we want to make the most out of decentralised data management architectures.

In voting industry I see 2 challenges: a) publishing election audit data to blockchain in voter privacy/ballot secrecy preserving manner b) under the assumption that private permissioned technology is used - having a trustworthy quorum of blockchain nodes for an election/set of elections to avoid the trusted-third-party problem.

Both programs have or will have calls relevant for implementing research and innovation in the blockchain space.

There is an interesting call to develop a Blueprint on blockchain which aims at skills development and industry cooperation with education providers. Also, the European Commission runs DLT for social competition where blockchain start-ups which have solutions that create societal added value can participate. This gives visibility to companies that participate in the competition Regarding start-ups and SMEs, it might be interesting to look at Cascade Funding Schemes ran by other H2020 projects. You can get to network, meet the EU project community for future projects, get some financing for your ideas. There are going to be different calls for such projects concerning blockchain in this case by Block.IS and Blockpool.EU.

The raise data volumes and the risks with it will come into play when we put data in the blockchain we have the approach that only hashes (fingerprints of data) will be put in blockchain. Also our approach is that DL and BC is used for granting access and trace of the activities. The data transport is done on the regular means so the data volume does not affect the performance.

In fact, the best practice is to not store any health data on the blockchain, but only metadata, information about data transactions, hash and pointers to data. The reason for doing so is twofold: on the one hand, this facilitate compliance with regulation and privacy preservation, on the other hand, iot also avoid performance and scalability issues. Replicating huge amount of data in every node participating in a blockchain for healthcare does not appear a practical solution. Health data and Personal identifier are better and more securely managed off-chain. Innovative or more efficient data storage solutions might be explored in combination with blockchain in order to maximise data availability and usability where and when needed. In MHMD we adopted this approach, creating local driver at the data controllers’ side, where data can be pre-processed and where the connection between a pointer in the blockchain and the actual data can be completed. On the blockchain we only record the proof of existence of given dataset in the network, without revealing anything else about it, including the location/provenance of the dataset. The only party that can then make the match is the relevant data controller..