Award Date

May 2017

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer Science

Department

Computer Science

First Committee Member

Yoohwan Kim

Second Committee Member

Ajoy K. Datta

Third Committee Member

Ju-Yeon Jo

Fourth Committee Member

Venkatesan Muthukumar

Number of Pages

66

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a surge of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoins, litecoin, dogecoin, peercoin, bitcoin being the most popular amongst them. Enthusiasts and skeptics have debated and come up with disparate opinions to contest both the success and failures of such currencies. However, the veracity of such opinions can only be derived after true analysis of the technological breakthroughs that have occurred in this domain. Blockchains being the backbone of such currencies is a broad subject that encompasses economics, law, cryptography and software engineering. Most of these technologies are decentralized and are open source algorithms. Blockchains popularity is largely based on its tremendous potential of carrying huge amount of data securely over a peer to peer network. This feature of blockchains has leveraged its value in the market for many companies who want to use blockchains for enterprise goals and profit making. For a more comprehensive understanding of blockchains and how the block generation algorithm works , how transactions are included in a block we must understand the genesis of the blockchain technology, what exactly it represents and its relevance to the real world. Despite its advantages, blockchains still remain a novel technology and their remains areas of concerns that can be bettered for attaining ideal efficiency. This research delves into the scalability issue of blockchains and provides a comparative analysis of several blockchain parameters with real time data . It delves into the factors that make block chains largely non-scalable. This is done by the simulation of blockchain. It then addresses the various mechanisms that can be employed to resolve this limitation through measuring the differences between the simulator and real time scenarios.

Keywords

Bitcoin; Blockchains; Cryptocurrency; Cryptography; Decentralized; Scalability

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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