A technical article in 2008 and the follow-up open-source software in 2009 released by Satoshi Nakamoto have modified the concept of currency and seem to continue affecting our economic and financial thinking. In less than 8 years, bitcoin, a digital currency, is not only accepted as a mean of payment but also traded in numerous ?bitcoin exchanges?, which have accumulated a market capitalization of around 10.7 billion U.S. dollar. The phenomenon raised the interest of scholars across wide disciplines including finance, economics, law, and computer science. Research articles regarding bitcoin has gradually formed a growing body of literature, which reflects the state of the art of bitcoin research. However, there is no systematic survey of this literature up to now. The purpose of this study is to fill the gap by systematically surveying the bitcoin literature in the hope to uncover the main discussion topics and made suggestions for future research. We collect a total of 253 articles directly related to bitcoin from the Scopus database. In addition to providing basic descriptive statistics of this dataset, we apply co-word analysis to separate the literature into groups. This is done by establishing a network in which articles are nodes and co-usage of the key terms links these articles. The network is then separated into groups based on nodes? similarity in their connectivity. The result is a division of the articles into three groups each contain distinct discussion topics. The first group is a pool of technological articles which elaborates on improving various aspects of bitcoin technology. The second group focuses on bitcoin?s impacts to existing financial system and real economy. The discussions in the third group call for a legal framework to regulate bitcoin and other digital currency. In the end, we model the bitcoin research in a PEST (political, economic, social, and technological) analysis structure and suggest that the influence of bitcoin and the associated technology on society as a whole is a big gap waiting to be filled in future research.
Bitcoin has long been touted as a currency and a payment system that relies on cryptography and mathematics rather than trust. But is Bitcoin really trustless? And if so, would that be a good thing? This article undertakes a critical deconstruction of Bitcoin and the blockchain, their themes of democracy and transparency, and the idea that they are trustless. The article then proposes a new conceptualization of the role of trust in business and contracting: the bridging model, which allows for a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between enforcement and trust in contract formation. The bridging model is first applied to traditional banking, to illustrate and analyze the enforcement mechanisms underpinning the U.S. dollar as currency and the banking system as a whole, and to demonstrate that the enforcement mechanisms (government backing and regulation) are not as robust as generally believed. The bridging model is later applied to Bitcoin, to show not only that the system requires more trust than is generally understood, but also that both currency and payment systems benefit from the involvement of trusted intermediaries in response to problems and crises.
In this article, we review the recent developments in the digital currency landscape. We survey the economic drivers that led to the creation of digital currencies and show that they are a natural step in the evolution of means of payment. We overview two major classes of digital currencies, cryptocurrencies and platform-based digital currencies and discuss how the design of such currencies affects the incentives of their users and ultimately their popularity. Finally, we discuss competition in the digital currency market.
At Bitcoin’s peak in November 2013, there were 93,000 global transactions made in a single day. These users purchased everyday items such as personal services, food, and real estate. This alone suggests that Bitcoin is not primarily used as a long-term investment tool, but rather is used as a currency and a vehicle for global transactions. Congress and the IRS should regulate it accordingly. Representative Stockman’s Virtual Currency Reform Act offered an attempt to negate the IRS decision and officially classify Bitcoin and other virtual currencies as currency instead of property. A tax reclassification would alleviate typical users’ many inconveniences caused by burdensome accounting and tax reporting. A reclassification would also allow and encourage the use of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies because imposing a sales tax on transactions similar to everyday currencies is a small change that most users would not find prohibitive or restrictive. While it is evident that there needs to be some form of IRS taxation of virtual currencies, attempting to classify Bitcoin according to existing tax principles is challenging and ineffective.\nAlthough this is new technology and subsequently uncharted territory for many doctrines of law, the technology should be embraced and encouraged to prosper. For example, typical sales tax on transactions made on the internet are currently an unsolved dilemma. It gets even trickier trying to throw virtual currencies into the mix. Between complex tax law, jurisdictional issues, and the constant globalization of our economy, challenging legal questions will arise. Classifying certain Bitcoin transactions for a sales tax instead of a capital gains and losses tax is the first step in the right direction toward answering these difficult questions and encouraging the use of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies to further global trade in the future.
Contemporary financial technology (“fintech”) efforts to enhance the clearance and settlement of transactions may reopen of long-settled questions about accounting, its role in the development of capitalism, its theological undertones, and its practical efficacy. This essay considers distributed ledger technology, the database systems underlying Bitcoin and similar digital currency experiments. Distributed ledgers do more than record transactions. They can also verify them without apparent human intercession, and they can execute more complicated tasks that take on the appearance of and have some of the same practical effects as contracts. If double-entry bookkeeping animated the modern constitution of subjects and objects of property, what do distributed ledgers herald?
Fault-tolerant consensus has been studied extensively in the literature, because it is one of the most important distributed primitives and has wide applications in practice. This paper surveys important results on fault-tolerant consensus in message-passing networks, and the focus is on results from the past decade. Particularly, we categorize the results into two groups: new problem formulations and practical applications. In the first part, we discuss new ways to define the consensus problem, which includes larger input domains, link fault models, different network models . . . etc, and briefly discuss the important techniques. In the second part, we focus on Crash Fault-Tolerant (CFT) systems that use Paxos or Raft, and Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) systems. We also discuss Bitcoin, which can be related to solving Byzantine consensus in anonymous systems, and compare Bitcoin with BFT systems and Byzantine consensus.
Blockchain or, more generally, distributed ledger technology allows to create a decentralized digital ledger of transactions and to share it among a network of computers. In this paper, we argue that the implementation of this technology in financial markets offers investors new options for managing the degree of transparency of their holdings and their trading intentions. We first identify two intrinsic features of a distributed ledger that impact the availability of these new options, namely the mapping between identifiers and end-investors and the degree of transparency of the ledger, and we then examine how the implementation design of these critical features affects investor trading behavior, trading costs, and investor welfare, in a theoretical model of intermediated and peer-to-peer trading. The most transparent setting yields the highest investor welfare, despite the risk of front-running. In the absence of full transparency, welfare is weakly higher if investors are allowed to split their holdings among many identifiers.
This paper reports the outcome of a series of interviews and focus group meetings with professionals working in post-trade processing and the provision of mutual distributed ledger services. The objective was to elicit and document views on three research hypotheses about the potential impact of mutual distributed ledger technology (‘blockchain’) on post-trade processing global securities markets. \n\nThese hypotheses are (a) on the appropriate access to mutual distributed ledger; (b) on whether change would be piecemeal or ‘big bang’; and (c) on the extent to which applying mutual distributed ledger in securities settlement would require major changes in business processes. Our research finds that while the use of blockchain to validate operational data in mutual distributed ledgers can yield substantial reductions in both cost and risk, the concept of data sharing itself is far from new. Current interest in mutual distributed ledgers has established significant momentum, but there is a danger of building unrealistic expectations of the extent to which the technology on its own will address the underlying need for co-ordination of business processes both within and between firms. Achieving all the potential benefits from mutual distributed ledgers will require board level buy-in to a substantial commitment of time and resource, and active regulatory support for process reform, with relatively little short term payoff.
In this article, we explore the formidable yet untapped capabilities of Blockchain technology and Bitcoin in order to alleviate poverty. We focus on the Republic of Moldova, which has been plagued by endemic corruption and persistently high poverty levels since her independence in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The transformative power of Blockchain technology and Bitcoin are then evidenced through a dual analysis of tourism 2.0 (with a real-world case study) and e-governance, which can contribute to increased inward capital investment flows, and help fight off corruption practices. Finally, we conclude that these new technologies constitute a significant step in the right direction, in order to break away from twenty-five years of disappointing socio-economic development performance.
We study the macroeconomic consequences of issuing central bank digital currency (CBDC) — a universally accessible and interest-bearing central bank liability, implemented via distributed ledgers, that competes with bank deposits as medium of exchange. In a DSGE model calibrated to match the pre-crisis United States, we find that CBDC issuance of 30% of GDP, against government bonds, could permanently raise GDP by as much as 3%, due to reductions in real interest rates, distortionary taxes, and monetary transaction costs. Countercyclical CBDC price or quantity rules, as a second monetary policy instrument, could substantially improve the central bank’s ability to stabilise the business cycle.
Scott Ruoti, Ben Kaiser, Arkady Yerukhimovich, Jeremy Clark · 5 authors
This paper explains the functioning of “blockchain technology” and critically assesses its potential role in improving services in banking, contracts, and database systems. Comparing blockchain to the current best practice technology in these fields reveals several barriers to successful commercial implementation: Blockchain technology involves costly redundancies and irreversibility, faces serious scaling problems and significant barriers to complying with regulations, and is a security liability unless secured with its own freely trading currency. A survey of the state of the blockchain industry shows that in eight years since blockchain technology was invented, it has had no commercial applications other than digital cash. The paper concludes that a blockchain is a peculiar engineering design whose only advantage is in removing third party intermediation to allow for the creation of digital cash, and is unlikely to offer economic advantages for any commercial problem other than the one it was specifically engineered to solve.
Jan 1, 2016·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Maximilian Friedlmaier, Andranik Tumasjan, Isabell M. Welpe
The blockchain (i.e., a decentralized and encrypted digital ledger) has the potential to disrupt many traditional business models. This study investigates the emerging blockchain business-application landscape by analyzing its industry, venture capital funding, and regional distribution. By matching four venture databases on blockchain-based startups we create a unique database to analyze the technology from a diffusion of innovation theoretical perspective. First, our results show that blockchain startups are present across all industry segments and are most prominently represented in the Finance & Insurance and Information & Communication industries. A fine-grained analysis of financial services yields increasing novel applications in existing service offerings. Second, we find that mainly Finance & Insurance and Information & Communication industries are funded by venture capital, but that blockchain startups are present across all industries. Third, our regional distribution analysis of the emerging ventures identifies two leading geographical blockchain clusters (i.e., the US and UK).
Abstract A multidimensional financial system could provide benefits for individuals, companies, and states. Instead of top-down control, which is destined to eventually fail in a hyperconnected world, a bottom-up creation of value can unleash creative potential and drive innovations. Multiple currency dimensions can represent different externalities and thus enable the design of incentives and feedback mechanisms that foster the ability of complex dynamical systems to self-organize and lead to a more resilient society and sustainable economy. Modern information and communication technologies play a crucial role in this process, as Web 2.0 and online social networks promote cooperation and collaboration on unprecedented scales. Within this contribution, we discuss how one dimension of a multidimensional currency system could represent socio-digital capital (Social Bitcoins) that can be generated in a bottom-up way by individuals who perform search and navigation tasks in a future version of the digital world. The incentive to mine Social Bitcoins could sustain digital diversity, which mitigates the risk of totalitarian control by powerful monopolies of information and can create new business opportunities needed in times where a large fraction of current jobs is estimated to disappear due to computerization.
Dappfort is a blockchain-focused Web3 development company that helps businesses harness the power of decentralized technologies to build secure, scalable, and future-ready digital solutions. Headquartered in Madurai, India, with additional presence in London, Dappfort works across a broad range of industries — including finance, healthcare, gaming, retail, and supply chain — delivering tailored blockchain and Web3 applications to startups, enterprises, and global organizations. The company’s core services include the design and development of decentralized applications (DApps), crypto exchanges (centralized and decentralized), crypto wallets, NFT marketplaces, DeFi platforms, token creation, smart contract development, and enterprise Web3 integration. Dappfort also expands into related areas such as Web3 e-commerce, AI-powered blockchain solutions, and metaverse experiences, supporting clients from strategy and consulting through deployment and ongoing support. With expertise in major blockchain networks like Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, and others, Dappfort positions itself as a full-stack partner for businesses aiming to enter or grow in the decentralized digital economy. While the company promotes a strong innovation- and security-oriented approach, external reviews on third-party platforms show mixed feedback from users about project delivery and quality.
Blockchain represents a technology for establishing a shared, immutable version of the truth between a network of participants that do not trust one another, and therefore has the potential to disrupt any financial or other industries that rely on third-parties to establish trust. Recent trends in computing including: prevalence of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS); easy access to High Performance Computing (HPC i.e. 'The Cloud'); and increasingly advanced analytics capabilities such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) allow for rapidly prototyping applications for analysis of trends in the emergence of Blockchain technology. A scaleable proof-of-concept pipeline that lays the groundwork for analysis of multiple streams of semi-structured data posted on social media is demonstrated. Preliminary analysis and performance metrics are presented and discussed. Future work is described that will scale the system to cloud-based, real-time, analysis of multiple data streams, with Information Extraction (IE) (ex. sentiment analysis) and Machine Learning capability.
An interesting research problem in our age of Big Data is that of determining provenance. Granular evaluation of provenance of physical goods--e.g. tracking ingredients of a pharmaceutical or demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods--has often not been possible with today's items that are produced and transported in complex, inter-organizational, often internationally-spanning supply chains. Recent adoption of Internet of Things and Blockchain technologies give promise at better supply chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain as many favoured use cases of blockchain are for provenance tracking. We are also interested in applying ontologies as there has been some work done on knowledge provenance, traceability, and food provenance using ontologies. In this paper, we make a case for why ontologies can contribute to blockchain design. To support this case, we analyze a traceability ontology and translate some of its representations to smart contracts that execute a provenance trace and enforce traceability constraints on the Ethereum blockchain platform.