A UML Profile for Bitcoin Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain has received attention for its potential use in business. Bitcoin is powered by blockchain, and interest in it has surged in the past few years. It has many uses that need to be modeled. Modeling is used in many walks of life to share ideas, reduce complexity, achieve close alignment of one person viewpoint with another and provide abstractions of a system at some level of precision and detail. Software modeling is used in Model Driven Engineering (MDE), and Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) ease model development and provide intuitive syntax for domain experts. The present study has designed and evaluated a meta-model for the bitcoin application domain to facilitate application development and help in truly understanding bitcoin. The proposed meta-model, including stereotypes, tagged values, enumerations and a set of constraints defined by Object Constraint Language (OCL), was defined as a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile and was implemented in the Sparx Enterprise Architect (Sparx EA) modeling tool. A case study developed by our meta-model is also presented.