Research Problems and Methods in Blockchain and Trusted Data Management

As a supporting technology of Bitcoin for decentralized ledger management, blockchain has gain much attention in financial domain. Blockchain achieves trusted data management in not fully trusted computation environments. It has the advantage of decentralization, immutability, strong consistency and integrity, however, also suffers from poor performance with high latency and low throughput. With ever growing Internet technology and applications, the success of blockchain technology in cryptocurrency may shed light on the research of new trusted data management theories, technologies and systems. This paper introduces the blockchain related technologies, including distributed consensus, smart contract and data provenance, from the perspective of trusted data management. The requirements and research challenges of trusted data management are also analyzed.