Research

Blockchain consensus mechanisms: the case of natural disaster

How much can a blockchain solution and its consensus mechanism resist unusual behaviour before they behave erratically? Finding out involves analysing design parameters and translating parameters from a natural disaster into a simulation to run tests. Overall, this study explores if blockchain is a compatible solution to the difficulties in natural disaster response. This was obtained by conducting a qualitative study and developing a prototype and simulating disaster parameters in the prototype blockchain network. A set of test cases was created.

The results show that the resilience to disasters differ significantly depending on consensus mechanism. Key parameters include consensus finality, scalability, byzantine tolerance, performance and blockchain type. Blockchain is well suited to handle typical
challenges in natural disaster response: it results in faster allocation of medical care and more accurate information collection, as well as in a system which allows seamlessly for the integration of external organisations in the blockchain network.

Blockchain solves a lot of the problems regarding disaster medical response. It reduces the time to involve new actors in the response, enhances confidentiality of records, gives the patient the ownership of his/her data to quickly share it with consent and it can handle the load of requests for medical records. Knowledge about the effects of disasters are known, yet the systems today are not prepared for them. The information is scattered across databases in different physical locations and when they are destroyed, the data is lost.