A comprehensive review of blockchain technology: Underlying principles and historical background with future challenges

Blockchain is a distributed digital ledger technology that has revolutionized businesses, industries, and commerce by eliminating the need for a central storage and control authority. Blockchain presents time-stamped and immutable blocks of data that are not owned by any single entity but rather managed by a group of nodes or computers where each block is secured and linked using cryptographic principles. The immutable and decentralized nature of blockchain has redefined trust, ownership, identity, and financial systems by providing a secure, fast, transparent, and pseudo-anonymous solution. This paper provides a comprehensive review of blockchain technology focusing on the historical background, underlying principles, and the sudden rise in the popularity of blockchain technology. The paper also discusses the various consensus algorithms of blockchain technology. Next, the paper focuses on the various application areas and prospective use cases of blockchain technology with the underlying challenges and issues. Further, the paper presents some unconventional use cases of blockchain technology. The study also reviews state-of-the-art articles to provide a comprehensive overview of the various aspects of blockchain technology in varied domains. The comparison between traditional database systems and blockchain technology is presented, and the appropriate scenarios where blockchain-based solutions may or may not provide the best solutions are also discussed. Further, it discusses some of the most infamous security breaches that impacted the blockchain industry in the recent past.