The value of bitcoin depends upon self‐fulfilling beliefs that are hard to pin down. We demonstrate this for the case where bitcoin is the only form of money in the economy and then generalize the message to the case of multiple bitcoin clones and/or a competing fiat currency. Some aspects of the indeterminacy we describe would no longer hold if bitcoin were an interest‐bearing object. ( JEL D50, E42)
A trustless technology, Bitcoin tries to solve issues of social coordination and economic exchange by relying exclusively on technological means. Is technology alone able to resolve the social and political concerns affecting the Bitcoin network?
Elie Bouri, Péter Molnár, Georges Azzi, David Roubaud · 5 authors
This paper uses a dynamic conditional correlation model to examine whether Bitcoin can act as a hedge and safe haven for major world stock indices, bonds, oil, gold, the general commodity index and the US dollar index. Daily and weekly data span from July 2011 to December 2015. Overall, the empirical results indicate that Bitcoin is a poor hedge and is suitable for diversification purposes only. However, Bitcoin can only serve as a strong safe haven against weekly extreme down movements in Asian stocks. We also show that Bitcoin hedging and safe haven properties vary between horizons.
Bitcoin is a decentralised currency and payment system that seeks to eliminate the need for trusted authorities. It relies on a peer-to-peer network and cryptographic protocols to perform the functions of traditional financial intermediaries, such as verifying transactions and preserving the integrity of the system. This article examines the political economy of Bitcoin, in light of a recent dispute that divided the Bitcoin community with regard to a seemingly simple technical issue: whether or not to increase the block size of the Bitcoin blockchain. By looking at the socio-technical constructs of Bitcoin, the article distinguishes between two distinct coordination mechanisms: governance by the infrastructure (achieved via the Bitcoin protocol) and governance of the infrastructure (managed by the community of developers and other stakeholders). It then analyses the invisible politics inherent in these two mechanisms, which together display a highly technocratic power structure. On the one hand, as an attempt to be self-governing and self-sustaining, the Bitcoin network exhibits a strong market-driven approach to social trust and coordination, which has been embedded directly into the technical protocol. On the other hand, despite being an open source project, the development and maintenance of the Bitcoin code ultimately relies on a small core of highly skilled developers who play a key role in the design of the platform.
Blockchain technology provides a major advance for excipient supply chains, assisting in the delivery of unadulterated, source, process and transit verifiable excipients (or APIs and drug products), but does not alleviate the necessity for quality audits. The adoption of blockchain technology should make the process faster and make the transactional record more robust and reliable, however other rate-limiting steps of the excipient supply chain including transit and testing time will remain. In terms of pure speed, blockchain is suited to financial transactions where no physical goods change hands (such as financial instruments and derivatives, stocks, insurance, land-registry, taxation, medical records etc.) but this does not mean that it should be ignored in respect of the advantages it could offer in improving the excipient supply chain.
The blockchain technology as a foundation for distributed ledgers offers an innovative platform for a new decentralized and transparent transaction mechanism in industries and businesses. The inherited characteristics of this technology enhance trust through transparency and traceability within any transaction of data, goods, and financial resources. Despite initial doubts about this technology, recently governments and large corporations have investigated to adopt and improve this technology in various domains of applications, from finance, social and legal industries to design, manufacturing and supply chain networks. In this article, the authors review the current status of this technology and some of its applications. The potential benefit of such technology in manufacturing supply chain is then discussed in this article and a vision for the future blockchain ready manufacturing supply chain is proposed. Manufacturing of cardboard boxes are used as an example to demonstrate how such technology can be used in a global supply chain network. Finally, the requirements and challenges to adopt this technology in the future manufacturing systems are discussed.
Motivated by the great success and adoption of Bitcoin, a number of cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are becoming increasingly popular. Although existing blockchain-based cryptocurrency schemes can ensure reasonable security for transactions, they do not consider any notion of fairness. Fair exchange allows two players to exchange digital items, such as digital signatures, over insecure networks fairly, so that either each player gets the other's item, or neither player does. Given that blockchain participants typically do not trust each other, enabling fairness in existing cryptocurrencies is an essential but insufficiently explored problem. In this paper, we explore the solution space for enabling the fair exchange of a cryptocurrency payment for a receipt. We identify the timeliness of an exchange as an important property especially when one of the parties involved in the exchange is resource-constrained. We introduce the notion of strong timeliness for a fair exchange protocol and propose two fair payment-for-receipt protocol instantiations that leverage functionality of the blockchain to achieve strong timeliness. We implement both and compare their security and efficiency.
Motivated by the great success and adoption of Bitcoin, a number of cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are becoming increasingly popular. Although existing blockchain-based cryptocurrency schemes can ensure reasonable security for transactions, they do not consider any notion of fairness. Fair exchange allows two players to exchange digital "items", such as digital signatures, over insecure networks fairly, so that either each player gets the other's item, or neither player does. Given that blockchain participants typically do not trust each other, enabling fairness in existing cryptocurrencies is an essential but insufficiently explored problem. In this paper, we explore the solution space for enabling the fair exchange of a cryptocurrency payment for a receipt. We identify the timeliness of an exchange as an important property especially when one of the parties involved in the exchange is resource-constrained. We introduce the notion of strong timeliness for a fair exchange protocol and propose two fair payment-for-receipt protocol instantiations that leverage functionality of the blockchain to achieve strong timeliness. We implement both and compare their security and efficiency.
BACKGROUND: Proliferation and expansion of security risks necessitates new measures to ensure authenticity and validation of GMOs. Watermarking and other cryptographic methods are available which conceal and recover the original signature, but in the process reveal the authentication information. In many scenarios watermarking and standard cryptographic methods are necessary but not sufficient and new, more advanced, cryptographic protocols are necessary. RESULTS: Herein, we present a new crypto protocol, that is applicable in broader settings, and embeds the authentication string indistinguishably from a random element in the signature space and the string is verified or denied without disclosing the actual signature. Results show that in a nucleotide string of 1000, the algorithm gives a correlation of 0.98 or higher between the distribution of the codon and that of E. coli, making the signature virtually invisible. CONCLUSIONS: This algorithm may be used to securely authenticate and validate GMOs without disclosing the actual signature. While this protocol uses watermarking, its novelty is in use of more complex cryptographic techniques based on zero knowledge proofs to encode information.
Open access
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Financial technologies embody and shape notions of social, as well as financial, worth. New digital ‘alt-finance’ systems, including the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin and similar ‘cryptocurrencies,’ are no exception: technology, rhetoric, imagined users and non-users, and a long history of sociotechnical, political, and cultural relations are all elements in a dynamic assemblage with wide-ranging consequences. This paper examines the rise and fall of one alt-finance system: MazaCoin, a Bitcoin variant intended to benefit the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The story of MazaCoin is one of an attempt to unite two apparently divergent sociotechnical assemblages: (1) a libertarian, elite technology of cryptocurrency, and (2) a richly traditional indigenous community with a deep desire for cultural survivance, bound up in a precarious economy left behind in the wake of more than a century of genocide.
James Smith, Jeni Tennison, Peter S. Wells, Jamie Fawcett · 7 authors
Blockchains, or ‘distributed ledgers’, are part of a new area of technology that is generating a lot of interest. They have the potential to become an important component of our global data infrastructure.
In recent years the distributed ledger technology (‘DLT’) has been presented as potentially disruptive for financial market applications. Since no reference implementation of such technology has emerged yet, it is not even clear how different it would be from the blockchain technology underlying bitcoin. Blockchain is a sub-optimal data structure if not associated to a virtual currency, i.e. to a native digital asset used to provide the economic incentive to reach distributed consensus on a transaction history. Since the interest for virtual currencies in the financial markets has remained marginal so far, most of the interest for DLT seems to boil down to the cryptographic enhancements of coupling secure messaging with shared databases. Such an evolutionary approach might be relevant, but hardly disruptive; instead, it is the availability for the first time ever in digital realm of a scarce asset, transferable but not replicable, to be groundbreaking. Bitcoin could prove to be digital gold as relevant as physical gold has been in the human history and the development of finance: it has already realized a permissionless transaction network and could play a crucial role in the history of money.
Bitcoin, a fascinating phenomenon of crypto-technology, has emerged in financial markets as a potential alternative to standard fiat currencies. It represents unique sociotechnical \necosystem working outside of any traditional markets, and its economy is still not well understood. Dynamics of Bitcoin price proves to be quite a controversial subject, but there is a strong indication that social factors mainly influence its economy. \n \nTechnical flaws and lack of any central authority issuing and controlling this digital currency make it vulnerable to abuse. It has been associated with controversy due to frequent incidents, namely hacks, theft, scam, and illicit use, which affected its ecosystem ever since it gained popularity. \n \nThis thesis adds to the discussion about social aspects of Bitcoin economy by analysing the changes in its price volatility in the context of incidents occurring in its \necosystem. As empirically proven, those negative events have no impact on the fluctuations of Bitcoin price.
Im Dezember 2015 identifizierte Sir Mark Walport, wissenschaftlicher Berater der Regierung des Vereinigten Königreichs, in seinem Bericht Distributed Ledger Technologie über die Blockchain hinaus massive Vorteile einer Nutzung dezentraler Transaktionssysteme in verschiedenen Geschäftsbereichen der britischen Regierung. Mark Walport sieht vor allem das Potential, die Beziehung zwischen Regierung und Bürger neu zu definieren, wenn es um den Austausch von Daten, um Transparenz und um Aufbau von Vertrauen geht. Ebenso können Betrug, Korruption und Administrationskosten eingedämmt werden. Im Bericht werden u.a. folgende Anwendungsfälle für Blockchain‐Technologien besprochen: Zusammengefasst empfiehlt der Bericht der britischen Regierung, das Thema schnellstmöglich zu adressieren, die Erforschung dezentraler Datenbanken massiv zu fördern und nicht zuletzt ein regulatorisches Rahmenwerk für dezentrale Transaktionssysteme zu entwickeln.
Like how VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) disrupted cross‐border telephony, Bitcoin will bring huge savings and improved service in cross‐border payments and will therefore create the MoIP (Money over Internet Protocol) (Pantera Capital). Anhand einiger typischer Gradmesser der Netzwerkökonomie soll in der Folge aufgezeigt werden, welche massive Entwicklung das von Satoshi Nakamoto vorgeschlagene neue kryptografische Transaktionssystem innerhalb einer Zeitspanne von gut sechs Jahren genommen hat.
…the more it is adopted by a mass of users, the more it is secured (Counterparty). Inwieweit, ob und welche Kryptowährung schlussendlich langfristig weltweit akzeptiert wird, ist Thema zahlreicher und vielfältiger Diskussionen. Innerhalb der verschiedenen Kryptowährungen hat das Bitcoin‐System eindeutig einen massiven Vorsprung. Vorstellbar ist jedoch auch analog des Konzepts des freien Wettbewerbs unter den Währungen vom österreichischen Ökonomen Friedrich August von Hayek ein Nebeneinander verschiedenster Kryptowährungen. Jeder dieser Kryptowährungen könnte ein Wert durch eine Gruppe von Menschen, die sich dafür entscheiden, dieser Währung zu vertrauen, beigemessen werden. Diese Gruppe kann durch gemeinsame demografische, geografische oder ethische Interessen definiert werden. Damit Kryptowährungen jedoch von der breiten Öffentlichkeit genutzt werden, bedarf es noch Vor allem aber braucht es Akzeptanz und Nutzung der Kryptowährungen in der breiten Öffentlichkeit und hier liefert die Gratis‐Bitcoin‐Ökosphäre, bestehend aus Hunderten Faucet‐Webseiten, einen großen Beitrag.
Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to reimagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era (Marc Andreessen, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz). Die Vorteile der Nutzung des Bitcoin‐Transaktionssystems als Ersatz für die momentan genutzten elektronischen Zahlungsverkehrssysteme sind offensichtlich, und doch gibt es immer noch viel Diskussion über Sinnhaftigkeit und Nutzbarkeit des Systems. Die Gründe dafür sind vielfältig und sollen das Thema der nächsten Ausführungen sein. Bei der Diskussion der Limitationen des Bitcoin‐Systems ist die relative Neuheit des Systems zu berücksichtigen, sodass es sich bei vielen der im Folgenden im Detail diskutierten Limitationen handelt es sich um Anfangsschwierigkeiten, an deren Lösung intensiv gearbeitet wird.
Die Möglichkeit der Programmierbarkeit des Bitcoins ist fast ein nachträglicher Einfall, auch wenn Sidechain‐Vorschläge diese Programmierbarkeit ein wenig leichter machen wollen und es bereits Altcoins mit verschiedenen spezifischen Anwendungen gibt. Im Gegensatz dazu wurde das Kryptowährungstechnologieprojekt Ethereum von Vitalik Buterin, seinem Erfinder, von Tag 1 als Software‐Entwicklungsplattform für dezentrale Applikationen konzipiert, und ihre Blockchain wurde speziell entwickelt, um die Ausführung dieser dezentralen Apps (auch Dapps genannt) zu unterstützen. Vitalik Buterin, 1994 in Russland geboren, war vor der Gründung von Ethereum auch involviert in die Entwicklungsprojekte Colored Coins und Mastercoins. Er gewann 2014 den "World Technology Award" und ein Stipendium des Risikokapitalgebers Peter Thiel. In dem Diskussionspapier zu Ethereum skizzierte Buterin vor allem die Grenzen einer Programmierbarkeit der Bitcoin‐Blockchain und schlug die Erstellung einer neuen komplett programmierbaren Blockchain mit einer turing‐vollständigen Programmiersprache vor. Anders als andere Blockchain‐Projekte soll die Ethereum Software nicht nur für einen Zweck nutzbar sein – sondern soll die Basis für die Erarbeitung aller möglichen Arten von Lösungen sein und dabei die Umsetzung intelligenter Verträge (Smart Contracts) ebenso erfassen als auch die Ethereum‐spezifische Idee von dezentralen autonomen Organisationen (DAOs).
There has recently been a flood of interest in potential new applications of blockchains, as well as proposals for more generic designs called public ledgers. Most of the novel proposals have been in the financial sector. However, the public ledger is an abstraction that solves several of the fundamental problems in the design of secure distributed systems: global time in the form of a strict linear order of past events, globally consistent and immutable view of the history, and enforcement of some application-specific safety properties. This paper investigates the applications of public ledgers to access control and, more specifically, to group management in distributed systems where entities are represented by their public keys and authorization is encoded into signed certificates. It is particularly difficult to handle negative information, such as revocation of certificates or group membership, in the distributed setting. The linear order of events and global consistency simplify these problems, but the enforcement of internal constraints in the ledger implementation often presents problems. We show that different types of revocation require slightly different properties from the ledger. We compare the requirements with Bitcoin, the best known blockchain, and describe an efficient ledger design for membership revocation that combines ideas from blockchains and from web-PKI monitoring. While we use certificate-based group-membership management as the case study, the same ideas can be applied more widely to rights revocation in distributed systems.
There has recently been a flood of interest in potential new applications of\nblockchains, as well as proposals for more generic designs called public\nledgers. Most of the novel proposals have been in the financial sector.\nHowever, the public ledger is an abstraction that solves several of the\nfundamental problems in the design of secure distributed systems: global time\nin the form of a strict linear order of past events, globally consistent and\nimmutable view of the history, and enforcement of some application-specific\nsafety properties. This paper investigates the applications of public ledgers\nto access control and, more specifically, to group management in distributed\nsystems where entities are represented by their public keys and authorization\nis encoded into signed certificates. It is particularly difficult to handle\nnegative information, such as revocation of certificates or group membership,\nin the distributed setting. The linear order of events and global consistency\nsimplify these problems, but the enforcement of internal constraints in the\nledger implementation often presents problems. We show that different types of\nrevocation require slightly different properties from the ledger. We compare\nthe requirements with Bitcoin, the best known blockchain, and describe an\nefficient ledger design for membership revocation that combines ideas from\nblockchains and from web-PKI monitoring. While we use certificate-based\ngroup-membership management as the case study, the same ideas can be applied\nmore widely to rights revocation in distributed systems.\n
We present a novel institutional perspective on the distributed consensus and ledger technology known as blockchain. We discuss the concept of Distributed Autonomous Institutions that are able to facilitate global interactions, contracts, and value transfers, all of which are achieved without the need for the human-based third party trust. We argue that due to its properties and design blockchain technology represents a disruptive change in the modelling paradigms of socio-technical systems. Distributed trust and consensus mechanisms offered by blockchain technology represent a novel, qualitatively different, phenomenon. We present the general design principles, stakeholders, the dynamics between those stakeholders, the incentive models, and the consensus protocols currently used in blockchains, before highlighting the potential of blockchain technology to develop distributed autonomous institutions. We conclude with a discussion of challenges associated with the adoption of blockchain technology.
DT X is building a next generation model from the grassroots of infrastructure Telecommunications 4.0 to IOT, Industry 4.0, Education 4.0 and financial services (Banking 4.0) leveraging Distributed Ledger technology. (Going beyond code and blockchain.)
The aim is to empower and beyond traditional and rational projects by targeting the sore points globally, opposed to the tradition proposals and whitepapers of a target market of 2 billion people who currently don’t have access to banking across the world.
DT X is based over four years of trials and errors of sub projects to evaluate the conditions and possible prospects, which in each and every time fall back to National Infrastructure and resources which varies from country to country: Telecommunications, Energy, Financial Services (Fintech & Regulation), Available Funding, Economic Stimulation, Education and Blockchain adoption & use cases.
Instead of promoting specific problems and identifying alternative underlying issues DT X is targeting the core root of the issue then apply by layers solutions to solve specific requirements.
Western world application will be focused on a similar model of Africa but more evolved around Telecommunication infrastructure merged with Distributed Ledger Technology over its own Network on a national scale thus securing all information and providing Industry 4.0 the infrastructure to grow and create economic growth whilst supporting Fintech, Education and Public or Private services.
The Internet of Things IoT is experiencing exponential growth in research and industry, but it still suffers from privacy and security vulnerabilities. Conventional security and privacy approaches tend to be inapplicable for IoT, mainly due to its decentralized topology and the resource-constraints of the majority of its devices. BlockChain BC that underpin the crypto-currency Bitcoin have been recently used to provide security and privacy in peer-to-peer networks with similar topologies to IoT. However, BCs are computationally expensive and involve high bandwidth overhead and delays, which are not suitable for IoT devices. This position paper proposes a new secure, private, and lightweight architecture for IoT, based on BC technology that eliminates the overhead of BC while maintaining most of its security and privacy benefits. The described method is investigated on a smart home application as a representative case study for broader IoT applications. The proposed architecture is hierarchical, and consists of smart homes, an overlay network and cloud storages coordinating data transactions with BC to provide privacy and security. Our design uses different types of BCs depending on where in the network hierarchy a transaction occurs, and uses distributed trust methods to ensure a decentralized topology. Qualitative evaluation of the architecture under common threat models highlights its effectiveness in providing security and privacy for IoT applications.