New research directions for blockchain networks

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Blockchain technology has attracted a lot of attention for Industry and Academia in past decade since it implements distributed and replicated ledger which is immutable, decentralized, auditable and fault tolerant. After launch of Bitcoin in 2009 it has grown into network covering the whole globe with steady increase in the number of active nodes and block size. We have also witnessed huge proliferation of new crypto-currencies and new applications of blockchain technology in areas where secure transfer of digital assets and distributed storage with guaranteed data integrity is needed. However future growth of this technology is hindered by scalability and centralization problems which result in huge energy consumption and security vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. In two most popular  crypto-currency networks Bitcoin and Ethereum  there  are powerful mining pools of nodes  which prevent  other nodes from getting mining fees. Some mining pools may deploy selfish mining techniques which can cause pruning of already mined blocks. These problems will be subject of first part of my research work in next five years. Deployment of blockchain technology in Internet of Things (IoT) is next step in development of IoT technology after it has successfully joined physical web through CoAP protocol family. This development brings a plenty of challenges regarding the architecture of blockchain, consensus protocols and security which need to be addressed. I plan to address these challenges in the second part of  this five year research program.