  The popularity of blockchain technology continues to grow rapidly in both
industrial and academic fields. Most studies of blockchain focus on the
improvements of security, usability, or efficiency of blockchain protocols, or
the applications of blockchain in finance, Internet of Things, or public
services. However, few of them could reveal the concerns of front-line
developers and the situations of blockchain in practice. In this article, we
investigate how developers use and discuss blockchain with a case study of
Stack Overflow posts. We find blockchain is a relatively new topic in Stack
Overflow but it is rising to popularity. We detect 13 types of questions that
developers post in Stack Overflow and identify 45 blockchain relevant entities
(e.g., frameworks, libraries, or tools) for building blockchain applications.
These findings may help blockchain project communities to know where to improve
and help novices to know where to start.
