Assessing the authenticity of subjective information in the blockchain: a survey and open issues

Blockchain, with its ever-increasing maturity and popularity, is being used in many different applied computing domains. To document the advancements made, researchers have conducted surveys on blockchain from many different viewpoints. However, one perspective which is missing from such surveys is how to assess the authenticity of subjective information and consider this in the processing of blockchain. The goal of this article is to highlight this gap as an open issue. We do this by surveying articles, both from the academic and grey literature and propose a taxonomy to classify the literature as focusing on either the inherent or add-on characteristics of a blockchain. We then focus on those works that aim to build authenticity in the application of blockchains and determine if they address the gap of considering subjective information in their analysis. Based on our findings from the survey, we propose future research directions in this area which are essential to achieve blockchain’s envisaged view of it being the single source of truth for all types of information.