Abstract
Blockchain technology was first created to enable a peer-to-peer payment system known as Bitcoin. Since its inception, blockchain technology has evolved to satisfy more diverse use cases, with blockchain development platforms like Ethereum, allowing for complex applications to be built using blockchain. However, despite its utility, blockchain has failed to gain widespread utilization outside of a few niche use cases. In this work, we analyze the most popular blockchain development platforms to identify the limitations of current blockchain technology; finding that the failure to adopt blockchain is due to scalability, data privacy protections, and complexity. To overcome the identified limitations we propose a new blockchain paradigm, Personal Blockchain Ledgers. In our this paradigm, each user stores data on a separate blockchain, in contrast to the traditional blockchain, where all users store data on a single large blockchain. To support our paradigm, we propose the PBL System, which creates and maintains Personal Blockchain Ledgers. We provide a theoretical soundness for our system. We then provide an extension to our system for sharing blockchain data. We show how users can utilize our extension to selectively share data with third parties who may not participate in the PBL System. Finally, we present a prototype implementation of our system. To show the effectiveness of our system, we conduct empirical evaluations to compare it to existing popular blockchain platforms. Likewise, to show the scalability of our system, we simulate high system load using a High Performance Computer. Through this work we have proposed a novel paradigm, a system for utilizing the paradigm, and an empirical implementation of the system.