A Vademecum on Blockchain Technologies: When, Which, and How

Blockchain is a technology making the shared registry concept from distributed systems a reality for a number of application domains, from the cryptocurrency one to potentially any industrial system requiring decentralized, robust, trusted, and automated decision making in a multi-stakeholder situation. Nevertheless, the actual advantages in using blockchain instead of any other traditional solution (such as centralized databases) are not completely understood to date, or at least there is a strong need for a vademecum guiding designers toward the right decision about when to adopt blockchain or not, which kind of blockchain better meets use-case requirements, and how to use it. In this paper, we aim at…