Secure Delivery System : Traditional Approach and Comparison to the Blockchain Model

Abstract: Blockchain technologies have gradually gained popularity since the beginning of 2010. As of 2018, many companies and financial institutions are redesigning and building new sys-tems with blockchain technologies as major foundation. On paper, the blockchain has nu-merous advantages over the traditional centralized approach, however, this study showed, that there are some large drawbacks, which are associated with usage of blockchain. Themost significant downsides are blockchain’s low performance, enormous cost and highenvironmental impact, compared to traditional client-server based systems. Therefore, the overall goal of this study was to highlight the importance of consider-ing these drawbacks and discuss, how performing of a detailed feature analysis during the design phase, might guide application developers to the correct path, during theimplementation phase of a system, when blockchain is considered being an alternativeto the traditional client-server approach. As the result of this study, it turned out, thatboth client-server and blockchain based approaches do have their respective use casesand disadvantages. A conclusion was drawn, that the best approach would be eitherto use a mix of both technologies, or to use the blockchain as a verification mechanismbehind a client-server backend, in order to improve its data integrity and persistencequality attributes.