Blockchain technology is being widely used in business areas and for other research purposes. To understand various challenges with this technology in Bitcoins or any other blockchain technology enabled applications.
I have co-authored a paper that was recently published in "Future Internet" in which we develop seven research propositions related to the impact of Blockchain (in a wide sense) on IoT.
Article Leveraging the Internet of Things and Blockchain Technology ...
Future research is needed to closely investigate these hypotheses. I agree that security and scalability are two pending problems but there are many innovative ideas in the Blockchain (DLT) ecosystem which tackle them. In any case, Blockchain and IoT (and AI) will be a very interesting combination for the years to come.
Blockchain can combine with other technologies to address critical issues of both worlds, such as security, privacy, network performance, etc. Some of these technologies can include Machine learning , Edge computing, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Big data. The convergence of blockchain and these technologies can open up a wide range of opportunities to future services and applications. Such future directions have been analyzed comprehensively in our very recent survey paper (Section VI). Hope that it is useful to everyone interested in this promising area.
Preprint Integration of Blockchain and Cloud of Things: Architecture,...