Areas to address

Apart from security and privacy, which were discussed at length in Chapter 21, Scalability and Other Challenges, several other less technology-based obstacles should be addressed before broad adoption of blockchains can be achieved. We'll introduce some of these more specific areas to address in the following sections.

Regulation

Regulation is considered one of the most significant challenges to blockchain development. The core issue is that blockchains, and their associated cryptocurrencies, are not recognized as legal systems or forms of currency by any government. Even though in some cases, blockchain tokens have been classified as having monetary value, for example in the US and Germany, they is still far from being accepted as regular currencies. Moreover, blockchains in their current state are not recognized by financial regulatory bodies as platforms that are stable or reliable enough to be used by financial institutions.

There have been...