A Survey Paper on Blockchain Technology and Consensus Algorithms

Abstract

Blockchain is a decentralized technology. It is a public, immutable append only ledger. The data can be verified by all the participants which makes the system transparent and secured. This paper provides information about history of blockchain, various cyprtographic primitives including digital signature and public key cryptography, which are used in blockchain and different consensus algorithms. The consensus algorithms used in blockchain is a focus in this paper. Particularly we studied about consensus algorithms like proof of work, proof of stake, delegated proof of stake, proof of burn, proof of capacity, proof of activity, proof of elapsed time, byzantine fault tolerance, delegated byzantine fault tolerance, seieve and directed acrylic graph from various points of views like security, scalability, power consumption, fault tolerance, throughput, speed, node identity management, application platform etc. We also tabulated the comparison of various consensus algorithms.