Abstract The philosophy of blockchain technology is concerned, among other things, with blockchain ontology, how it might be characterised, how it is being created, implemented, and adopted, how it operates in the world, and how it evolves over time. This paper concentrates on whether Bitcoin/blockchain can be considered a complex system and, if so, whether it is a chaotic one. Beyond mere academic curiosity, a positive response would raise concerns about the likelihood of Bitcoin/blockchain entering a 2010‐Flash‐Crash‐type of chaotic regime, with catastrophic consequences for financial systems based on it. The paper starts by highlighting the relevant details of the Bitcoin/blockchain ecosystem formed by the blockchain itself, bitcoin end users (payers and payees), capital gains seekers, miners, full nodes maintainers, and developers, and their interactions. Then the Information Theory of Complex Systems is briefly discussed for later use. Finally, the blockchain is investigated with the help of Crutchfield's Statistical Complexity measure. The low non‐null statistical complexity value obtained suggests that the blockchain may be considered algorithmically complicated but hardly a complex system and unlikely to enter a chaotic regime.
Bitcoin is traded on exchanges which use an open limit order book. This paper investigates the microstructure of various bitcoin markets with respect to liquidity and private information processing. The markets are found to be fairly liquid, providing liquidity at a stable rate throughout the 24 hours trading period. The spread itself as well as the proportion attributed to adverse selection costs are high suggesting that private information is an important aspect in the bid-ask spread.
Daniel Augot, Hervé Chabanne, Thomas Chenevier, William R. George · 5 authors
We present an identity management scheme built into the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing for identities that are as indelible as the blockchain itself. Moreover, we take advantage of Bitcoin's decentralized nature to facilitate a shared control between users and identity providers, allowing users to directly manage their own identities, fluidly coordinating identities from different providers, even as identity providers can revoke identities and impose controls.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Monies are typically categorized as commodity or fiat, depending on whether the item in question is intrinsically worthless. In the case of bitcoin, it is not so clear. I consider the superficial subjective value argument often put forward by non-monetary economists and a more sophisticated payments technology argument. After dismissing both, I argue that there are two reasonable views on the value of bitcoin. One might claim bitcoin lacks intrinsic worth, in which case its value depends on foresight and coordination. Alternatively, one might claim that bitcoin has intrinsic worth, even if no one else accepts it, because some users have peculiar preferences. In either case, the existence of bitcoin calls into question the practical relevance of the regression theorem.
Questo studio si propone di analizzare il complesso delle novità introdotte al sistema dei pagamenti e al trasferimento di diritti da Distributed Ledger e Blockchain, in una prospettiva che tenga conto delle applicazioni di mercato di queste innovazioni tecnologiche e della tutela giuridica degli interessi economici e delle posizioni soggettive che ne derivano. In particolar modo, l’opera vuole stimolare la discussione volta alla definizione di un quadro normativo socialmente adeguato che sostenga l’efficienza di questi strumenti in un’ottica di scambio economico globalizzato.
Massimo Bartoletti, Stefano Lande, Livio Pompianu, Andrea Bracciali
Modern cryptocurrencies exploit decentralised blockchains to record a public and unalterable history of transactions. Besides transactions, further information is stored for different, and often undisclosed, purposes, making the blockchains a rich and increasingly growing source of valuable information, in part of difficult interpretation. Many data analytics have been developed, mostly based on specifically designed and ad-hoc engineered approaches. We propose a general-purpose framework, seamlessly supporting data analytics on both Bitcoin and Ethereum --- currently the two most prominent cryptocurrencies. Such a framework allows us to integrate relevant blockchain data with data from other sources, and to organise them in a database, either SQL or NoSQL. Our framework is released as an open-source Scala library. We illustrate the distinguishing features of our approach on a set of significant use cases, which allow us to empirically compare ours to other competing proposals, and evaluate the impact of the database choice on scalability.
Blockchain technology as a whole is experiencing a dramatic rise in adoption, in no small part due to the developer-friendly Ethereum network. While the number of smart-contract powered distributed applications (Dapps) continues to rise, they face many of the same challenges all new technologies face as they are introduced to a market. By modeling the consumer adoption of blockchain technology and analyzing scholarly literature on supply-side factors affecting the diffusion of technology, we seek to prove the growth of a Dapp can be accelerated using abstraction, whole product planning, and complementaries.
Building on the groundswell of scholarly, practitioner, cultural, and investor interest in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), the aim of this paper is to delineate the structure of a multidisciplinary research agenda on DAOs, as encapsulated in the edited volume Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Innovation and Vulnerability in the Digital Economy, highlighting therein the main areas of research promise and avenues of further enquiry. As such, the paper attempts to serve as a form of shorthand-guidebook for researchers interested in the domain of DAOs.
Modern economies are held together by innumerable contracts. However, current contracts are neither machine-readable nor easily human-readable. The Ricardian Contract paradigm of parameters, prose and code posits a hybrid model of automation and conventional legal text. This paper connects recent work on design criteria for 'Smart Contract Templates' with prose objects and prototype inheritance demonstrated at CommonAccord. Templates authored and shared as prose objects can become the basis for automation, codification, commentary, big data analysis and graphic presentations.
Over past decade cloud services have enabled individuals and organizations to perform different types of tasks such as online storage, email services, on-demand movies and TV shows. The cloud services has also enabled on-demand deployment of applications, at cheap cost with elastic and scalable, fault tolerant system. These cloud services are offered by cloud providers who use authentication, authorization and accounting framework based on client-server model. Though this model has been used over decades, study shows it is vulnerable to different hacks and it is also inconvenient to use for the end users. In addition, the cloud provider has total control over user data which they are able to monitor, trace, leak and even modify at their will. Thus, the user data ownership, digital identity and use of cloud services has raised privacy and security concern for the users. In this thesis, Blockchain and its applications are studied and alternative model for authentication, authorization and accounting is proposed based on Ethereum Blockchain. Furthermore, a prototype is developed which enables users to consume cloud services by authenticating, authorizing and accounting with a single identity without sharing any private user data. Experiments are run with the prototype to verify that it works as expected. Measurements are done to assess the feasibility and scalability of the solution. In the final part of the thesis, pros and cons of the proposed solution are discussed and perspectives for further research are sketched.