Follow blockchain research across journals, conferences, and preprint repositories.
29,250 results · page 1201 of 1,219
Marie Larsson Linton, Ernie G. S. Teo, Elisabeth Bommes, Cheng–Ying Chen · 5 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Junpeng Wang, Xue Yubo, Minghao Liu
As the world's first completely decentralized digital payment system, the emergence of bitcoin represents a revolutionary phenomenon in financial markets. This paper mainly studies the fluctuations of bitcoin price and discusses weather digital currencies represented by bitcoin have the potential to invest. Cointegration analysis and VEC (Vector Error Correction) Model have been performed to demonstrate the relationship between bitcoin price and some variables including stock price index, oil price and daily trading volume of bitcoin. The empirical research indicates that there is long-term equilibrium and short-term dynamic relationship among the four factors. The short run analysis reveals that oil price and bitcoin trading volume have little influence on bitcoin price while stock price index has relatively larger impact on it. In the long run, stock price index and oil price have a negative effect on bitcoin price. On the contrary, the value of bitcoin is positively affected by daily trading volume.
Karen Elliott, Fabio Massacci, Chan-Nam Ngo, Julian Williams
No abstract is available for this record.
Philipp Paech
Abstract Since the emergence of the virtual currency Bitcoin in 2009, a new, Internet‐based way of recording entitlements and enforcing rights has increasingly captured the interest of businesses and governments. The technology is commonly called ‘blockchain’ and is often associated with a closely related phenomenon, the ‘smart contract’. The market is now exploring ways of using these concepts for financial assets, such as securities, fiat money and derivative contracts. This article develops a conceptual framework for the governance of blockchain‐based networks in financial markets. It constructs a vision of how financial regulation and private law should set the boundaries of this new technology in order to protect market participants and societies at large, while at the same time allowing the necessary room for innovation.
Brett Scott
The decentralized digital currency Bitcoin - and its underlying "blockchain" technology - has created much excitement in the technology community, but its potential for building truly empowering social and solidarity-based finance has yet to be tested. This paper provides a primer on the basics of Bitcoin and discusses the existent narratives about the technology´s potential to facilitate remittances, financial inclusion, cooperative structures and even micro-insurance systems. It also flags up potential points of concern and conflict; such as the tech-from-above "solutionism" and conservative libertarian political dynamics of some of the technology start-up community that surrounds Bitcoin. As a way of contrast the paper considers "blockchain 2.0" technologies with more overtly communitarian ideals and their potential for creating "cooperation at scale". It concludes with suggestions for future research.
Neil Gandal, Hanna Hałaburda
We analyze how network effects affect competition in the nascent cryptocurrency market. We do so by examining early dynamics of exchange rates among different cryptocurrencies. While Bitcoin eventually dominates this market, our data suggest no evidence of a winner-take-all effect early in the market. Indeed, for a relatively long period, a few other cryptocurrencies competing with Bitcoin (the early industry leader) appreciated much more quickly than Bitcoin. The data in this period are consistent with the use of cryptocurrencies as financial assets (popularized by Bitcoin), and not consistent with winner-take-all dynamics. Toward the end of our sample, however, things change dramatically. Bitcoin appreciates against the USD, while other currencies depreciate against the USD. The data in this period are consistent with strong network effects and winner-take-all dynamics. This trend continues as at the time of writing.
Saifedean Ammous
No abstract is available for this record.
Joerg Osterrieder, Julian Lorenz, Martin Strika
Cryptocurrencies became popular with the emergence of Bitcoin and have shown an unprecedented growth over the last few years. As of November 2016, more than 720 cryptocurrencies exist, with Bitcoin still being the most popular one. We provide both a statistical analysis as well as an extreme value analysis of the returns of the most important cryptocurrencies. A particular focus is on the tail risk characteristics and we will provide an in-depth univariate and multivariate extreme value analysis. The tail dependence of cryptocurrencies is investigated (using both empirical and Gaussian copulas). For investors—especially institutional ones—as well as regulators, an understanding of the risk and tail characteristics are of utmost importance. For cryptocurrencies to become a mainstream investable asset class, studying these properties is necessary. Our findings show that cryptocurrencies exhibit strong non-normal characteristics, large tail dependencies, depending on the particular cryptocurrencies and heavy tails. Statistical similarities can be observed for cryptocurrencies that share the same underlying technology. This has implications for risk management, financial engineering (such as derivatives on cryptocurrencies)—both from an investor’s as well as from a regulator’s point of view. To our knowledge, this is the first detailed study looking at the extreme value behaviour of cryptocurrencies, their correlations and tail dependencies as well as their statistical properties.
Alin Tomescu, Srinivas Devadas
© 2017 IEEE. We present Catena, an efficiently-verifiable Bitcoinwitnessing scheme. Catena enables any number of thin clients, such as mobile phones, to efficiently agree on a log of application-specific statements managed by an adversarial server. Catenaimplements a log as an OP-RETURN transaction chain andprevents forks in the log by leveraging Bitcoin's security againstdouble spends. Specifically, if a log server wants to equivocate ithas to double spend a Bitcoin transaction output. Thus, Catenalogs are as hard to fork as the Bitcoin blockchain: an adversarywithout a large fraction of the network's computational powercannot fork Bitcoin and thus cannot fork a Catena log either. However, different from previous Bitcoin-based work, Catenadecreases the bandwidth requirements of log auditors from 90GB to only tens of megabytes. More precisely, our clients onlyneed to download all Bitcoin block headers (currently less than35 MB) and a small, 600-byte proof for each statement in a block. We implement Catena in Java using the bitcoinj library and use itto extend CONIKS, a recent key transparency scheme, to witnessits public-key directory in the Bitcoin blockchain where it can beefficiently verified by auditors. We show that Catena can securemany systems today, such as public-key directories, Tor directoryservers and software transparency schemes.
Svein Ølnes
The new technology Bitcoin has got a lot of attention since it was presented in late 2008 and implemented early 2009. However, the main attention has been to the currency and not so much the underlying blockchain technology. This paper argues that we need to look beyond the currency and investigate the potential use of the blockchain technology to enable smarter governments by utilizing the secure, distributed, open, and inexpensive database technology. The technology is discussed in the perspective of an information infrastructure to investigate its full potential. After a literature review of Bitcoin publications, with a special emphasis on eGovernment literature, the paper presents a relevant use case highlighting the innovation potential of the new technology. The literature review shows that Bitcoin is absent from the e-Government literature. The use case presented shows that Bitcoin could be a promising technology for validating many types of persistent documents in public sector.
Gina Pieters, Sofia Vivanco
We document systematic differences in bitcoin prices across 11 different markets representing 26% of global bitcoin trade volume. These differences must -due to the identical nature of all bitcoin -result from characteristics of markets themselves. We examine differences across the markets and find that those which do not require customer identification for establishing an account are more likely to deviate from representative market prices than those which do. This implies that standard financial regulations, specifically know-your-customer regulations, can have a non-negligible impact on the bitcoin market.
Rosario Gennaro, Steven Goldfeder, Arvind Narayanan
No abstract is available for this record.
Elie Bouri, Georges Azzi
No abstract is available for this record.
Andrew Urquhart
No abstract is available for this record.
Ferdinando M. Ametrano, Emilio Barucci, Daniele Marazzina, Stefano Zanero
No abstract is available for this record.
Ferdinando M. Ametrano
No abstract is available for this record.
Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Andrew Shact
At the World Economic Forum more than 800 executive and technology experts were asked when they thought a particular “tipping point” would be reached – when would we see a government collect tax with blockchain? The agreed date was 2023 (on average). A full 73% of the respondents however, expected the tipping point to have been reached by 2025. This paper argues that the EU VAT will be an early adopter, if not the earliest adopter of blockchain. There are a number of reasons why. Blockchain will bring substantial efficiencies to VAT collection. It will reduce costs, and build critical inter-governmental trust relationships. Most importantly, blockchain will immediately end revenue losses well in excess of €50 to €60 billion per year in missing trader intra-community fraud (MTIC). Blockchain will also be essential for making the EU Commission’s April 2016 Action Plan on VAT work. Blockchain should be a critical part of the detailed legislative proposal (expected in 2017). This plan will bring in a “definitive VAT system” dealing with intra-EU cross-border trade, which will be based on taxation in the country of destination. This paper predicts that the EU will bring in the “definitive system” on the back of blockchain technology. Blockchain is a revolutionary improvement on any centralized data system. Tax administrations are inherently based upon centralized repositories of taxpayer data. They are prime candidates for the kinds of efficiency improvements that come through blockchain. This is particularly the case for transaction taxes, and even more so for a VAT fraud prevention application, like the Digital Invoice Customs Exchange (DICE), which relies on a real-time exchange of encrypted data.
Wiebe Ruttenberg, Andrea Pinna
Over the last decade, information technology has contributed significantly to the evolution of financial markets, without, however, revolutionising the way in which financial institutions interact with one another. This may be about to change, as some market players are now predicting that new database technologies, such as blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), could be the source of an imminent revolution. This paper analyses the main features of DLTs that could influence their potential adoption by financial institutions and discusses how the use of these technologies could affect the European post-trade market for securities. The original protocol underlying DLTs has its roots in the anarchic world of virtual currencies, which operate outside the conventional financial system. The public debate on DLTs has also been very much focused on the revolutionary potential of the technology. This paper concludes that, irrespective of the technology used and the market players involved, certain processes that feature in the post-trade market for securities will still need to be performed by institutions. DLTs could, however, stimulate a reorganisation of financial markets, which could in turn: (i) reduce reconciliation costs, (ii) streamline the post-trade value chain, and (iii) allow more efficient use to be made of collateral and regulatory capital. It should, nevertheless, be remembered that research into DLTs and their uses is at an early stage. The scope for financial institutions to adopt DLTs and their potential impact on mainstream financial markets are still unclear. This paper discusses three potential models of how market players could adopt DLTs for performing core post-trade functions. The DLT could be adopted either: (i) in clusters, (ii) collectively, or (iii) peer to peer. The evaluation of the three adoption models assumes that they are all equally compatible with the regulatory framework. It shows that, assuming this to be the case, they would each have different advantages and costs. JEL Classification: G21, G23, L15, O33
Sinclair Davidson, Primavera De Filippi, Jason Potts
Distributed ledger technology, invented for cryptocurrencies, is increasingly understood as a new general-purpose technology for a broad range of economic activities that rely on consensus of a database of transactions or records. However, blockchains are more than just a disruptive new ICT. Rather, they are a new institutional technology of governance that competes with other economic institutions of capitalism, namely firms, markets, networks, and even governments. We present this view of blockchains through a case study of Backfeed, an Ethereum-based platform for creating new types of commons-based collaborative economies.
Roman Beck, Jacob Stenum Czepluch, Nikolaj Lollike, Simon Malone
No abstract is available for this record.
Giuseppe Ateniese, Bernardo Magri, Daniele Venturi, Ewerton R. Andrade
We put forward a new framework that makes it possible to re-write or compress the content of any number of blocks in decentralized services exploiting the blockchain technology. As we argue, there are several reasons to prefer an editable blockchain, spanning from the necessity to remove inappropriate content and the possibility to support applications requiring re-writable storage, to "the right to be forgotten." Our approach generically leverages so-called chameleon hash functions (Krawczyk and Rabin, NDSS '00), which allow determining hash collisions efficiently, given a secret trapdoor information. We detail how to integrate a chameleon hash function in virtually any blockchain-based technology, for both cases where the power of redacting the blockchain content is in the hands of a single trusted entity and where such a capability is distributed among several distrustful parties (as is the case with Bitcoin). We also report on a proof-of-concept implementation of a redactable blockchain, building on top of Nakamoto's Bitcoin core. The prototype only requires minimal changes to the way current client software interprets the information stored in the blockchain and to the current blockchain, block, or transaction structures. Moreover, our experiments show that the overhead imposed by a redactable blockchain is small compared to the case of an immutable one.
Sinclair Davidson, Primavera De Filippi, Jason Potts
No abstract is available for this record.
Mike Sharples, John Domingue
The ‘blockchain’ is the core mechanism for the Bitcoin digital payment system. It embraces a set of inter-related technologies: the blockchain itself as a distributed record of digital events, the distributed consensus method to agree whether a new block is legitimate, automated smart contracts, and the data structure associated with each block. We propose a permanent distributed record of intellectual effort and associated reputational reward, based on the blockchain that instantiates and democratises educational reputation beyond the academic community. We are undertaking initial trials of a private blockchain or storing educational records, drawing also on our previous research into reputation management for educational systems.
Christian Catalini, Joshua S. Gans
We build on economic theory to discuss how blockchain technology can shape innovation and competition in digital platforms. We identify two key costs affected by the technology: the cost of verification and the cost of networking. The cost of verification relates to the ability to cheaply verify state, including information about past transactions and their attributes, and current ownership in a native digital asset. The cost of networking, instead, relates to the ability to bootstrap and operate a marketplace without assigning control to a centralized intermediary. This is achieved by combining the ability to cheaply verify state with economic incentives targeted at rewarding state transitions that are particularly valuable from a network perspective, such as the contribution of the resources needed to operate, scale, and secure a decentralized network. The resulting digital marketplaces allow participants to make joint investments in shared infrastructure and digital public utilities without assigning market power to a platform operator, and are characterized by increased competition, lower barriers to entry, and a lower privacy risk. Because of their decentralized nature, they also introduce new types of inefficiencies and governance challenges.