# Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Insurance: Is the Technology Nature Enough?
## 4 A SWOT Analysis
In addition, the amount of energy consumed by network nodes, and the cost of the hardware required to validate new blocks is extremely high, estimated around 6$ per transaction [58] (though it must be underlined that several initiatives to limit the amount of consumed energy are currently under development [59]).  
The fact that, once information is encoded in the blockchain, it is immutable and accessible by everyone is another weakness, and could harm users' privacy. To make an example, everyone could check the amount of money owned by a person, by analyzing his/her incoming transactions. Should other types of information be stored in the blockchain (e.g., medical records), this issue would become even more relevant. To cope with privacy issues, some solutions to anonymize payments/transactions have been proposed [60; 61; 62; 63].  
The immutability and self-execution of code could be another weakness for blockchain, since smart contracts could become \"candy for hackers\" [9]. In fact, hackers could exploit bugs in smart contracts to steal money, as it recently happened on the Ethereum network, where, in the most famous attack of this kind, around $60 million were \"stolen\" in June 2016. Even assuming that smart contracts are free of bugs, some applications would still need external oracles to inject information in the blockchain. The weakest point, in this case, would become the oracle. As said, the consequences of injecting in the blockchain wrong information could be partially mitigated by relying on more than one oracle, each getting information from different sources. Apart from technical aspects discussed above, other weaknesses affect blockchain usability. First of all, the impossibility to receive assistance in case of credentials loss (even though this weakness could be partially removed by relying on trusted services, as explained in Section 3). Another aspect is cryptocurrencies volatility, which could become a limitation to the adoption of blockchain-based payments. In fact, given the fact that cryptocurrencies are subject of speculation and considering \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline  & & **Positive** & & **Negative** \\ \hline
**Internal** & **Strengths** & & **Weaknesses** \\  & - & Fast and low-cost money transfers & - & Scalability \\  & - & No need for intermediaries & - & Low performance \\  & - & Automation (by means of & - & Energy consumption \\  & - & smart contracts) & - & Reduced users’ privacy \\  & - & Accessible worldwide & - & Autonomous code is “candy for hackers” \\  & - & Transparency & - & Need to rely to external oracles \\  & - & Platform for data analytics & - & No intermediary to contact in case of loss of \\  & - & No data & users’ credentials \\  & & loss/modification/falsification & - & Volatility of cryptocurrencies \\  & - & Non-repudiation & - & Still in an early stage (no “winning” \\  & & & blockchain, need of programming skills to \\  & & & read code, blockchain concepts difficult to \\  & & & be mastered) \\  & & & - & Same results achieved with \\  & & & well-mastered technologies \\ \hline
**External** & **Opportunities** & **Threats** \\  & - & Competitive advantage (if efforts to & - & Could be perceived as unsecure/unreliable \\  & - & reduce/hide the complexity behind & - & Low adoption from external actors means \\  & - & blockchain are successful, or in case of & lack of information \\  & - & diffusion of IoT) & - & Governments could consider blockchain and \\  & - & Possibility to address new markets & - & smart contracts “dangerous” \\  & (e.g., supporting car and house & - & Medium-long term investment \\  & - & sharing, disk storage rental, etc.) & - & Not suitable for all existing processes \\  & - & Availability of a huge amount of & - & Customers would still consider personal \\  & - & heterogeneous data, pushed in the & interaction important \\  & - & blockchain by different actors & \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: SWOT analysis of the adoption of blockchain.