I haven't read this paper yet, but I'm a fan of many things published by NIST. If you're a software engineer I'd suggest browsing their website [0]. They have a

I haven't read this paper yet, but I'm a fan of many things published by NIST. If you're a software engineer I'd suggest browsing their website [0]. They have a lot of great high quality content freely available. They run the US stations for (almost? not 100% sure) everything related to time-keeping [1] [2]. In particular I've found many of their publications on identity management and authN / authZ very helpful in helping me understand the needs of the enterprise. They have some great primers on role-based access control [3] with examples of some of the different kinds of edge-cases one runs into and how they can be solved. It's far too common to read an explanation that just tells you: you can do whatever you want! When you're getting started in a domain it can be incredibly helpful to know how others solved the same problems. Here's the publication link [4] on the NIST website. I was going to say that I thought it'd be better to link there so people could read the abstract without having to download the full PDF... But I just checked and the website and all its resources weight in over 1MB while the PDF is around 0.77MB. The state we're in is quite unfortunate; I remember their older website being quite nice and fast. Abstract: Blockchains are tamper evident and tamper resistant digital ledgers implemented in a distributed fashion (i.e., without a central repository) and usually without a central authority (i.e., a bank, company, or government). At their basic level, they enable a community of users to record transactions in a shared ledger within that community, such that under normal operation of the blockchain network no transaction can be changed once published. This document provides a high-level technical overview of blockchain technology. It discusses its application to cryptocurrency in depth, but also shows its broader applications. The purpose is to help readers understand how blockchain technology works, so that they can be applied to technology problems. [0] https://www.nist.gov/ https://www.nist.gov/ [1] https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-services https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se... [2] https://www.time.gov/aboutB.html https://www.time.gov/aboutB.html [3] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/role-based-access-control https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/role-based-access-control [4] https://www.nist.gov/publications/blockchain-technology-overview https://www.nist.gov/publications/blockchain-technology-over...