Identifying the Challenges of the Blockchain Community from StackExchange Topics and Trends

Software developers around the globe have shown tremendous interests in blockchain with more than seven thousand active blockchain software (BCS) projects on Github. Yet, little research has focused on understanding the challenges encountered by the developers of those projects as well as its' users. Therefore, the objective of this study is to better understand the primary areas of challenges encountered by the BCS community. Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation based topic modeling, we identify discussion topics from the two Blockchain related StackExchange sites. We manually investigated the posts belonging to each topic to understand challenges encountered by the developers. The results of our study revealed that while the ratios of posts on BCS development are increasing, the ratios of posts on mining cryptocurrencies are decreasing. Due to the scarcity of expert blockchain developers, posts on BCS development are more likely to go either answered or encounter more delays than posts on other topics. Based on our findings, we recommend project maintainers to spend efforts to improve documentations on BCS development as the community lacks supporting materials on that area the most.

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