Decrypting Distributed Ledger Design -- Taxonomy, Classification and Blockchain Community Evaluation

More than 1000 distributed ledger projects raising $600 billion in investment in 2016 feature the unprecedented and disruptive potential of blockchain technology. A systematic and data-driven analysis, comparison and rigorous evaluation of the different design features of distributed ledgers and their implications is a challenge. The rapidly evolving nature of the blockchain landscape hinders reaching a common understanding of the techno-socio-economic design space of distributed ledgers and the cryptoeconomies they support. This paper contributes a conceptual architecture, a taxonomy, a quantitatively backed design guideline for and a classification of distributed ledger systems. Compared to related work and as defined in earlier taxonomy theory, the proposed taxonomy is highly comprehensive, robust, explanatory and extensible. This is validated by means of both, a crowdsourced study which uses feedback from the blockchain community, and a data-driven methodology. Moreover, the quantitative approach identifies key design choices in the observed DLT systems which are utilized to construct a design guideline that reduces the configuration space complexity of DLT systems.$