An Exploration of Bitcoin Mining Practices:Miners’ Trust Challenges and Motivations

Bitcoin blockchain technology is a distributed ledger of nodes authorizing transactions between anonymous parties. Its key actors are miners using computational power to solve mathematical problems for validating transactions. By sharing blockchain's characteristics, mining is a decentralized, transparent and unregulated practice, less explored in HCI, so we know little about miners' motivations and experiences, and how these may impact on different dimensions of trust. This paper reports on interviews with 20 bitcoin miners about their practices and trust challenges. Findings contribute to HCI theories by extending the exploration of blockchain's characteristics relevant to trust with the competitiveness dimension underpinning the social organization of mining. We discuss the risks of collaborative mining due to centralization and dishonest administrators, and conclude with design implications highlighting the need for tools monitoring the distribution of rewards in collaborative mining, tools tracking data centers' authorization and reputation, and tools supporting the development of decentralized pools

Integrated platforms for blockchain enablement

The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing an exponential growth in a wide variety of use-cases in multiple application domains, such as healthcare, agriculture, smart cities, smart homes, supply chain, and so on. To harness its full potential, it must be based upon a resilient network architecture with strong support for security, privacy, and trust. Most of these issues still remain to be addressed carefully for the IoT systems. Blockchain technology has recently emerged as a breakthrough technology with the potential to deliver some valuable properties such as resiliency, support for integrity, anonymity, decentralization, and autonomous control. A number of blockchain platforms are proposed that may be suitable for different use-cases including IoT applications. In such, the possibility to integrate the IoT and blockchain technology is seen as a potential solution to address some crucial issues. However, to achieve this, there must be a clear understanding of the requirements of different IoT applications and the suitability of a blockchain platform for a particular application satisfying its underlying requirements. This chapter aims to achieve this goal by describing an evaluation framework which can be utilized to select a suitable blockchain platform for a given IoT application