Title
When Can a Distributed Ledger Replace a Trusted Third Party?
Abstract
The functionality that distributed ledger technology provides, i.e., an immutable and fraud-resistant registry with validation and verification mechanisms, has traditionally been implemented with a trusted third party. Due to the distributed nature of ledger technology, there is a strong recent trend towards using ledgers to implement novel decentralized applications for a wide range of use cases, e.g., in the financial sector and sharing economy. While there can be several arguments for the use of a ledger, the key question is whether it can fully replace any single trusted party in the system as otherwise a (potentially simpler)solution can be built around the trusted party. In this paper, we introduce an abstract view on ledger use cases and present two fundamental criteria that must be met for any use case to be implemented using a ledger-based approach without having to rely on any particular party in the system. Moreover, we evaluate several ledger use cases that have recently received considerable attention according to these criteria, revealing that often participants need to trust each other despite using a distributed ledger. Consequently, the potential of using a ledger as a replacement for a trusted party is limited for these use cases.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/Cybermatics_2018.2018.00197
2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Distributed ledger,Smart contracts,Blockchain,Bitcoin
Trusted third party,Use case,Verification and validation,Computer security,Ledger,Computer science,Sharing economy,Blockchain,Financial sector,Distributed ledger
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1806.10929
2
0.36
References 
Authors
9
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Thomas Locher120.36
Sebastian Obermeier2141.86
Yvonne Anne Pignolet311821.26