Blockchain has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its potential to revolutionize various industries by providing trustlessness. To comprehensively examine blockchain systems, this article presents both a macro-level overview on the most popular blockchain systems, and a micro-level analysis on a general blockchain framework and its crucial components. The macro-level exploration provides a big picture on the endeavors made by blockchain professionals over the years to enhance the blockchain performance while the micro-level investigation details the blockchain building blocks for deep technology comprehension. More specifically, this article introduces a general modular blockchain analytic framework that decomposes a blockchain system into interacting modules and then examines the major modules to cover the essential blockchain components of network, consensus, and distributed ledger at the micro-level. The framework as well as the modular analysis jointly build a foundation for designing scalable, flexible, and application-adaptive blockchains that can meet diverse requirements. Additionally, this article explores popular technologies that can be integrated with blockchain to expand functionality and highlights major challenges. Such a study provides critical insights to overcome the obstacles in designing novel blockchain systems and facilitates the further development of blockchain as a digital infrastructure to service new applications.
翻译:区块链因其提供无需信任便可实现的潜力而引起了人们的关注。为全面检验区块链系统,本文既提供了最流行的区块链系统的宏观概述,又提供了一个通用的区块链框架及其关键组件的微观分析。宏观探索提供了区块链专业人士多年来为提高区块链性能所做的努力的大局观,而微观分析则详细说明了区块链构建块,以深入理解区块链组件的基本原理。更具体地说,本文介绍了一个通用的模块化区块链分析框架,将一个区块链系统分解成相互作用的模块,然后在微观水平上检查主要模块,以涵盖网络、共识和分布式分类账等基本的区块链组件。该框架及模块化分析共同构建了一个设计可扩展、灵活、适用于不同需求的区块链的基础,这种区块链有望成为服务新应用的数字基础设施。此外,本文探讨了可以与区块链集成以扩展功能的流行技术,并强调了主要挑战。这样的研究为克服设计新型区块链系统的障碍提供了关键的见解,并促进了区块链作为数字基础设施的进一步发展。