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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
1. IntroductionWe investigated the application of combinatorial optimization (CO) methods in the maintenance of blockchain (BC) systems. BCs can be seen as public or private autonomous (unsupervised) distributed data storage systems with the property of immutability. Autonomy means that a BC should be maintained without any third party of absolute trust; instead, all participants may be responsible for BC maintenance. It is generally assumed that reliability, security, and consistency are in the interest of all participants; however, this may not always be the case. Therefore, BC communication protocols should be designed in such a way as to prevent malicious actions and data corruption. Digital signatures, time-stamping, and hashing (encoding) provide data security and consistency. Distribution in BC systems refers to the fact that each participant has a copy of the whole database in order to prevent data loss and misuse. Due to the delays in peer-to-peer (P2P) communication, it is very important to pay close attention to synchronization and data consistency when making decisions about BC maintenance. Immutability means that data stored in BCs cannot be changed anymore. This property is explored by checking the security and consistency of the whole BC system.The first BC implementation was related to the financial domain—performing transactions with Bitcoin cryptocurrency [1]. However, nowadays, BC systems have a wide range of applications, such as IoT, insurance, healthcare, smart contracts, smart property, digital identity, digital content distribution, voting, notary systems, Botnet, P2P broadcast protocols, and many others [2]. BC system maintenance is based on democratic principles, which are reflected in consensus algorithms and the self-governing of the BC. On the other hand, the BC itself represents a reliable tool for democracy [3] that can be used in electronic voting and administration. Digital forensics is another interesting BC application proposed in [4]. In order to trace the chain of custody in digital forensics, it is very important to prove that nobody has been tampering with the evidence at any point of the investigation. BCs seem to be very suitable for the storage of forensic evidence as their immutability guarantees that digital evidence is collected, stored, and transmitted
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