Review Summary †Decrypting Distributed Ledger Design - Taxonomy, Classification & Community Evaluation. [arXiv] Mark Christopher Ballandies (ETH Zurich), Marcus Manfred Dapp (ETH Zurich), Evangelos Pournaras (University of Leeds) († Hot Topics accept, abstract & review summary to journal)
Paper summaries from the reviewers: “This paper presents a new taxonomy for Distributed Ledger Technologies. The usefulness of this taxonomy is backed up by a survey conducted on some actors in the blockchain community and using machine learning techniques. This approach qualitatively differs from existing taxonomies as it carefully considers relations between the categories. After proposing several classification categories, it verifies usefulness of the taxonomy (i.e., makes sure it has all the meaningful categories, and no unnecessary or redundant ones) by conducting surveys among blockchain community and analyzing data from classified systems.”
“Exhaustive survey of distributed ledger design practice and formulation of a taxonomy for evaluating ledger design decisions.”
Comments on the strength of the paper: “Rigorous and thoughtful approach to creating a formal taxonomy for distributed ledger design, can see this being useful both for further research and practitioners.”
“The taxonomy presented here is the most comprehensive and concise in the literature to date. Moreover, it conducts validity analysis, which many taxonomy papers lack. This paper provides a new framework on which further research will likely be built. Its biggest strength is that it carefully considers relations between the categories. Thoughtful, rigorous and useful for a variety of stakeholders. Could open up a conversation on the lexical accuracy of the taxonomy proposed and whether alternate/competing taxonomies may be better suited for non-DLT design stakeholders (like the regulatory community).”
“This methodology could become a standard for future taxonomy papers - which will provide even better, more precise taxonomies connected to better designed surveys.”
Critiques: “Given that this is not the first taxonomy paper proposed for blockchains, it would have been interesting to ask participants to compare the usefulness of different taxonomy proposed rather than simply evaluate this one. It could be the case that many different taxonomy seem useful to participants when asked; but ultimately what matters is that the community agrees on the same one.”
“the survey could have been better designed, especially to allow participants to compare different taxonomies. While the results should be of interest to the researchers, the survey should give us insight into the classification "in practice".”
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