The purpose of this research is to identify how effective the determinants of the price changes in cryptocurrencies are and if they are predictable. The study addresses several independent variables that are in our consideration which may impact the prices the most. To obtain the results, panel data has been used to run fixed effects models. Then I treated them as time series data to run dynamic, distributed lags, and first-differencing regression models. Important political shocks and instabilities have been analyzed and interpreted in this paper. In the light of our findings we were able to comment on the complex relation between cryptocurrency prices and socio-political situations throughout the time range. The results address that cryptocurrency price changes are not predictable. It is hard to say what does affect the most prices. Internet search trends seem to have an impact but at the end it has been found that the correlation is not strong. From an economist's viewpoint, investing in cryptocurrencies without analyzing price changes and news might be disastrous and we can call it basically gambling. Cryptocurrencies shouldn't be seen as a gambling medium and should be taken more seriously like an investment medium. In some specific occasions investing in cryptocurrencies may lead lucrative income.
The development of information technology in the modern economy is one of the drivers of economic growth. Digital technologies are developing at an accelerating pace. Digitalization stimulates not only economic, but also social and technological progress. The impact of digital technology in different industries is not the same. The authors of the article consider such promising modern technology as Blockchain. Its advantage is that the information is protected from unauthorized modification. This transforms the system of economic relations. The level of trust increases. Opportunistic behaviour of participants in contractual relations is blocked. As a result, economic efficiency improves. These positive effects are analyzed in the case of the pharmaceutical industry. The introduction of Blockchain technologies into pharmaceuticals allows you to track all stages of production of drugs and guarantee their quality. Blockchain technology allows you to confirm the authenticity of recipes and the drugs with the help of special digital devices. The consequence of this is a reduction in the number of counterfeit drugs on the market, as well as improving the quality of medical care for the population.
Jan 1, 2018·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Gianluca Salviotti, Leonardo Maria De Rossi, Nico Abbatemarco
Blockchain is emerging as a game changing technology in many industries. Although it is increasingly capturing the business community’s attention, a comprehensive overview of commercially available applications is lacking to date. This paper aims to fill this gap. Firstly, we propose a structured approach to assess the application landscape of blockchain technologies. To build our framework, we relied on largely accepted classifications of blockchains, based on protocols, consensus mechanisms and ownership, as well as on the most cited application areas emerging from the literature. Secondly, we applied the framework on a database of 460 released blockchains. The analysis confirms a dominance of applications for cryptocurrencies, financial transactions and certification purposes, with a prevalence of permissionless platforms. We also found new application fields that go far beyond the seven initial areas addressed by the current body of knowledge, leading to some interesting takeaways for both practitioners and IS researchers.
The vehicle to everything (V2X) requires the real-time integration of all kinds of information on roads, pedestrians, the environment, and vehicles themselves. This information also needs to be shared with other vehicles. The effective integration of information and the strong privacy protection are the key restrictions on the development of the V2X. The previous privacy protection model has mainly focused on the centralized network, and there were problems with the centralized gateway and single-point decision, which were not suitable for the decentralized scenario. Therefore, this paper proposes a remote attestation security model based on a privacy-preserving blockchain. The overall model involves two core steps. First, the vehicle provides the network with an evidence of a credible identity and integrity. Secured, the vehicles in the network calculate the nodes to make their respective decisions, and the accounting nodes summarize the sub-conclusions, form the final results, and write them into data blocks. The analysis shows that it possesses the security features of decentralization, traceability, anonymity, irreplaceability, and high efficiency. The model framework, core block chain structure, and protocol process are described in detail. The experimental results based on a realistic infrastructure are presented. These experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can effectively enhance the security of the communications of intelligent vehicles in the V2X.
The accounting profession has long occupied a role and fiduciary responsibility aligned with fraud prevention and safeguarding consumer data and finances. As cryptocurrencies become more prominent and widespread, including utilization by both individual consumers and organizations, the risk of unethical actors entering the market continues to rise. This research approaches the situation from two angles. First, a review of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, including an overview of the initial coin offering (ICO) process is conducted, including regulatory updates in the space. Second, and important for both academic and practitioner end users of this research, a checklist, guide, and items to consider to assist in preventing fraud connected to cryptocurrencies will be provided.
Many cryptocurrencies rely on Blockchain for its operation. Blockchain serves as a public ledger where all the completed transactions can be looked up. To place transactions in the Blockchain, a mining operation must be performed. However, due to a limited mining capacity, the transaction confirmation time is increasing. To mitigate this problem many ideas have been proposed, but they all come with own challenges. We propose a novel parallel mining method that can adjust the mining capacity dynamically depending on the congestion level. It does not require an increase in the block size or a reduction of the block confirmation time. The proposed scheme can increase the number of parallel blockchains when the mining congestion is experienced, which is especially effective under DDoS attack situation. We describe how and when the Blockchain is split or merged, how to solve the imbalanced mining problem, and how to adjust the difficulty levels and rewards. We then show the simulation results comparing the performance of binary blockchain and the traditional single blockchain.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Compared to gold, cash and commercial bank money, bitcoin is presented as a medium of exchange, functionally similar to electronic money. Bitcoin is known as decentralized, convertible, deflationary and unstable cryptocurrency, deprived of state control and protection. Equally important is the open and global Bitcoin computer network for online transactions, operating without the need for until recently unavoidable intermediaries and different from traditional payment systems. The field of application of virtual currencies is determined by their unusual characteristics, but also by diverse comparative legal regime. Initially as a material for criminal courts and tax authorities, virtual currencies and crypto-subjects are now defined at the EU directives level. Contractual relationships and financial obligations take new forms in crypto-environment, so the question arises: to which extent a positive law is able to absorb until recently improbable concepts. The privacy and freedom that cryptocurrencies bring has its own backwardness, and the legal order is over focused on that side of a coin. On the other hand, the risks in private law transactions involving bitcoins remain unresolved, although legal subjects need this kind of legal protection badly.
Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency that implemented decentralized digital currency method. The transaction is monitored and validated by peer-to peer system using hash programming. These transactions are verified by network nodes through the use of cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. The objective of this study is to forecast the Bitcoin exchange rate using weighted moving average method. Data selected in this study are selected hourly from 14 th December 2017 until 18 th December 2017. The forecasting method is using weighted moving average. Then, the validity of the forecasting model is validated using mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) calculation. Results indicated mean absolute percentage error is 0.72%. Therefore, the moving average method is considered as reliable forecasting method for Bitcoin exchange rate. The finding of this study will help investors to make best decision regarding suitable portfolio for their investment.
Blockchain is still a big unknown, even for some professionals. Blockchain and the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) have been made infamous by Bitcoin, a digital payment and peer-to-peer monetary transaction system that bypasses banks and third party endorsements. But DLT and the Blockchain protocol can be used for other purposes.
Blockchain can potentially be deployed in a wide range of applications due to its capability to ensure decentralization, transparency, and immutability. In this paper, we design a cryptographic membership authentication scheme (i.e., authenticating graph data) to support blockchain-based identity management systems (BIMS). Such a system is designed to bind a digital identity object to its real-world entity. Specifically, we introduce a new transitively closed undirected graph authentication (TCUGA) scheme, which only needs to use node signatures (e.g., certificates for identifying nodes). The trapdoor hash function used in our scheme allows the signer to efficiently update the certificates without the need to re-sign the nodes. In other words, our scheme is efficient even though the graph dynamically adds or deletes vertices and edges. Moreover, our proposal can efficiently provide a proof when the edge between two vertices does not exist, thus solving the existing intractability issue in transitive signature (the main tool for authenticating graph data). Finally, we prove the security of our proposed TCUGA in the standard model and evaluate its performance to show its feasibility for BIMS.
The scientific enterprise relies on a peer-review process to maintain the quality of academic discourse and to ensure researchers develop a valid and consistent cumulative body of knowledge. In recent years, it appears that the review capacity in the IS field has decreased, which indicates that the community’s hunger for publication accompanies only a modest appetite for providing the necessary support to sustain the consequent increase in peer-review load. The advent of blockchain technologies and the proliferation of cryptocurrencies presents an opportunity to develop a token-based peer-review payment system that can clear the congested review pipelines while also controlling for quality and spreading the equity that peer review generates in a fair fashion through market-regulation mechanisms. Despite the digital transformation of the publishing industry, little has been done thus far to address the chronic inefficiency of the review process. The typical review cycles, which are measured in years, suggest that something needs to change. Developing a token-based peer-review payment system may be an opportunity not only to address the apparent challenge in the peer-review process but also to assert our proclaimed role as stewards of the digital revolution.
This thesis describes a longitudinal study of Bitcoin,\nthe perhaps most popular blockchain based system today.\nPublic blockchains have emerged as a plausible messaging substrate\nfor applications that require highly reliable communication.\nHowever, sending messages over existing blockchains can be cumbersome\nand costly as miners require payment to establish consensus on the\nsequence of messages, since the electricity consumption\nneeded to run miners is not negligible.\nThe blockchain protocol requires an always\ngrowing size of the information stored in it so its scalability is\nthe biggest problem. For that reason we decided to\ncollect and store data locally in our own data structure,\nnecessary for the analysis,\nallowing us to save up to 10 times the amount of disk space.\nToday, systems using the blockchain protocol are emerging,\nand cryptocurrencies are a glaring example\nof its implementation. Bitcoin\nrepresents the largest cryptocurrency on market,\nand it has to face a massive scale due to its popularity,\nhaving in 2012 about fifty thousands\ntransaction per day and reaching now,\nin 2017, more than three hundred fifty\nthousands of transactions\napproved every day.\n\nThis massive scale in the system leads to a saturation\nof the messaging substrate, hence performance issues.\nIn this thesis we will focus also on the Bitcoin network\nperformance, in particular, transaction throughput and\nlatency.\nFrom 2009 to 2017 a lot of analyses on\nthe blockchain have been performed,\nenhancing the considerable change in\nthe block size limit,\nfrom 256 bytes to 1MB,\nas an attempt to overcome scalability problems.\nDifferent papers were published, discussing\nwhether changing or not the block size limit.\nIn addition, the Bitcoin price increased\nfrom ~0.7$ to more than 7.000$,\nmaking the system even more desirable for\nminers, but causing several complications\nin the fee and reward mechanism.\nWe evaluate and discuss possible ways to improve this fee\nmechanism in order to guarantee more revenue for miners along\nwith an user fee optimization.\n\nWe finally present our own system for\nlongitudinal analysis on the Bitcoin blockchain,\nBAS. It generates a dataset\nwhich contains a significant portion of\nthe whole blockchain, updated on September 2017.\nWe discuss our results and compare them with\nother evaluations from past years, considering\nthree main key points: scalability,\nperformance and fees/costs.\nWe discuss how scalability affects performance,\nand how the costs and fees are dependent\nfrom them both.\nWe want also to take into consideration\nthe environmental impact of Bitcoin\nand how it affects the coming\nof new cryptocurrencies.\nWe evaluate and\npropose, using machine learning techniques,\ntwo different cost prediction models that aim to\npredict bandwidth for upcoming transactions\naccording the fee they are willing to pay, and\nthe expected revenue for miners according to\nthe time spent mining.\nThese models can\nbe used by application to throttle network traffic to optimize\nmessage delivery. We also discuss\nwhether the block size limit should be increased for a higher\nthroughput or not.
Blockchain is a relatively new technology created for Bitcoin’s network to store transaction records happening in it. The system is redundant and distributed, making it difficult for corrupt transactions. Without doubt the greatest use case of this technology is cryptocurrencies, however is wrong to restrict this tool only to the financial area. Many use cases are also being developed for business areas like digital identity and technological areas like IoT and many other areas. Due to the complexity, privacy and bureaucracy of certain processes in many areas a new technology rise called Smart Contracts, computational code programmable to meet certain conditions. These digital contracts act like traditional contracts, with the difference of its automaticity, where the need for a notary and certified people to validate signatures can be erased. So, the point of this thesis is to understand the concept of Blockchain and Smart Contracts and how they can be integrated together in other business and technological areas to improve and increase the efficiency of the organizational processes. After that, to create a demonstration case that show all the potential behind these technologies in a business area.