Security: Blockchain technology has three different requirements that need to be fulfilled. Availability, integrity, and confidentiality. Availability means that the data in the system has to be accessible to those who have access at any time, usually through private keys. Integrity guarantees that the data cannot be altered or deleted by unauthorized parties and that any mistakes that change the data can be undone by authorized parties. Finally, confidentiality means that sensitive information cannot be accessed by unauthorized parties.

Energy consumption, Too Expensive: Another determining factor that poses a threat to the full implementation of Blockchain technology is its scalability in terms of resources needed to set up a fully operational system. Many businesses around the world are already using the technology, so for instance, mining Bitcoin using Blockchains. Since Bitcoin endows a mining operation, the Blockchain is constantly running and that uses a lot of power, which is the main issue with energy consumption. It takes a lot of resources and power consumption to get started using a Blockchain setup and therefore that makes it a lot more expensive than our current data infrastructure setups we have in place. Moreover, since the system documents every transaction made at every step and duplicates it multiple times over the network, it takes a lot more energy to accomplish the job. This also causes redundancy in the system, which is another issue we will later discuss.

Regulation: The reason why regulation is on this list is because, in Blockchain technology, there is a lack thereof. Because the technology uses a peer-to-peer system, there is no real centralized regulation governing the system. There are no real standards to restrict the system in ways that can, for instance, retrieve a user’s assets stored in the system if they were to lose their password or credential information. This leaves the system in a vulnerable state.

Immutability: This can be both a solution and a problem. Most of the ledger system of this technology is also open for everyone to see. Even in private blockchains, there is common ledger information that anyone can see anytime so if the information is changed everyone will notice, but the data written is basically permanent and cannot be changed easily since it must be verified and copied throughout the system and all nodes must accept the changes as part of a consensus.