Follow blockchain research across journals, conferences, and preprint repositories.
501 results · page 16 of 21
Emanuele Borgonovo, Alessandra Cillo, Stefano Caselli, Donato Masciandaro
No abstract is available for this record.
Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts
No abstract is available for this record.
Sean Stein Smith
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.
Julien Prat, Benjamin Walter
No abstract is available for this record.
Md Altab Hossin, Sajjad Hosain
Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency that has attracted substantial interest in recent years from the general public, profit seekers, risk takers, academic practitioners, and, last but not least, economists. Although it is referred to as new, Bitcoin has existed since 2009 and is rooted in technology that goes back even farther. It was the first established cryptocurrency, with the first trade in 2010. Since 2015, Bitcoin has attracted even more attention because of its increase in value and volume of exchange. The Bitcoin system maintains a global, distributed cryptographic ledger of transactions, or blockchain, through a consensus algorithm running on hardware scattered around the world. This paper discusses the nature of cryptocurrency and blockchain, how it works, and the present status of Bitcoin blockchain in different countries around the world. The paper also includes a review of literature on Bitcoin engineering, Bitcoin as currency and the cryptocurrency system, related work on queuing theory, and work on competition and monopoly. The paper explores three possible outcomes with regard to the future prospects of Bitcoin. The various aspects of this technology are yet to be revealed in detail, but the authors hope that this simple, basic, and narrative paper will be helpful to those seeking basic references regarding this newest issue.
Aleksandar ÄorÄeviÄ, Dordevic, Aleksandar
During the history there have been different examples of incorporating technology into economics. Some of them include SWIFT, e-banking, mobile payments, and many more. Technology had to be commercialized and put into service of facilitating economic processes. International finances underwent the process of development too. With the globalization process national economies became more interconnected and dependent from each other. Individuals demanded a faster and more convenient way to make international payments. Internet trade is on the rise, social media rule the contemporary world, and then appears the inception of so-called crypto currencies. The most famous is Bitcoin. Where lays its place in the economic science? It looks like that Bitcoin is going towards decentralization of the monetary system known by now. The goal of this paper is to raise the awareness of the changes happening in economy and in economic science.
Jamil Civitarese
Metcalfe's Law argues the value of a network is proportional to the square of its users. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be modeled as such: if Metcalfe's Law is true, then it is possible to forecast prices using the size of the network. I test this assertion by a cointegration test between price and an adjusted number of wallets' connections. It is stated that the series do not cointegrate, rejecting the Metcalfe's Law. A first-differences model is employed to further analyse the relation between returns and variations in the number of wallets. It is stated that Metcalfe's Law consistently predicts the trend in the value of Bitcoin; nevertheless, it is not possible to reject the reverse causation of Bitcoin returns leading to new wallets.
JesĂșs FernĂĄndezâVillaverde
Abstract This article reviews what cryptocurrencies are, and it frames them within the context of historical monetary experiences and contemporary monetary economics. The article argues that, as pure fiduciary private money, cryptocurrencies are a bubble without a fundamental value and they will not provide, in general, optimal amounts of money or deliver price stability. Nevertheless, cryptocurrencies can play a role in improving the current means of payments and in disciplining central banks into providing better governmentârun fiduciary monies.
JesĂșs FernĂĄndezâVillaverde
Advocates of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin believe that having currency competition will help achieve the economic objective of price stability. This Issue Brief summarizes research that explores whether competition among privately issued fiat currencies can actually produce price stability. The research finds that in most cases, a system of private monies does not deliver price stability. And even when it does, it always is subject to self-fulfilling inflationary episodes, and it supplies a suboptimal amount of money. Although there is no economic reason to curb the use of cryptocurrencies at the moment, it is important to review key regulatory issues that policymakers need to consider now, before the use of cryptocurrencies becomes even more widespread.
Alistair Milne
Abstract This paper documents inconsistent terminologies and misleading analogies in current discussions of digital money and payments. It offers a more consistent framework for understanding the potential of technological innovation in providing the functions of money and payments: as media of exchange, stores of value, and units of account and the implications of cryptographic technologies underpinning cryptocurrencies for the future of money and payments. These could support efficiency gains in money and payments, but decentralization is not inherent to their application. Radical reform leading to improved economic outcomes is conceivable, but not through disruptive displacement of existing institutional arrangements.
Kee-Youn Kang, Seungduck Lee
No abstract is available for this record.
Kamwoo Lee, Sinan Ulkuatam, Peter A. Beling, William T. Scherer
In this paper, we present a novel method to predict Bitcoin price movement utilizing inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and agent-based modeling (ABM). Our approach consists of predicting the price through reproducing synthetic yet realistic behaviors of rational agents in a simulated market, instead of estimating relationships between the price and price-related factors. IRL provides a systematic way to find the behavioral rules of each agent from Blockchain data by framing the trading behavior estimation as a problem of recovering motivations from observed behavior and generating rules consistent with these motivations. Once the rules are recovered, an agent-based model creates hypothetical interactions between the recovered behavioral rules, discovering equilibrium prices as emergent features through matching the supply and demand of Bitcoin. One distinct aspect of our approach with ABM is that while conventional approaches manually design individual rules, our agents' rules are channeled from IRL. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can predict short-term market price while outlining overall market trend.
JĂłn DanıÌelsson
No abstract is available for this record.
Feng Dong, Zhiwei Xu, Yu Zhang
There has been a burgeoning Fintech literature in the past years, especially on cryptocurrencies. However, there is lack of research handling cryptocurrencies in a mainstream macroeconomic model. To bridge the gap, we develop a model for Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency as risky and costly bubbles in an infinite-horizon production economy. This model is consistent with the following facts: i) the surging Bitcoin market presents enormous volatility, ii) its price dynamics are significantly sensitive to both market sentiment and policy stances. Entrepreneurial firms choose to hold Bitcoins as liquid assets to buffer idiosyncratic investment distortions. The intrinsically worthless Bitcoins can emerge as rational bubbles when the market sentiment is optimistic enough. On the one hand, bubbly Bitcoins provide market liquidity to facilitate investment in the real sector, while on the other hand, they deteriorate the investment efficiency and crowd out aggregate production. Our quantitative exercise produces various cyclical features of Bitcoin bubbles and find that the collapse of Bitcoin bubbles can improve social welfare by decreasing distortion-driven real investment.
George Bissias, Brian Neil Levine, David Thibodeau
Abrupt changes in the miner hash rate applied to a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain can adversely affect user experience and security. Because different PoW blockchains often share hashing algorithms, miners face a complex choice in deciding how to allocate their hash power among chains. We present an economic model that leverages Modern Portfolio Theory to predict a miner's allocation over time using price data and inferred risk tolerance. The model matches actual allocations with mean absolute error within 20% for four out of the top five miners active on both Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchains. A model of aggregate allocation across those four miners shows excellent agreement in magnitude with the actual aggregate as well a correlation coefficient of 0.649. The accuracy of the aggregate allocation model is also sufficient to explain major historical changes in inter-block time (IBT) for BCH. Because estimates of miner risk are not time-dependent and our model is otherwise price-driven, we are able to use it to anticipate the effect of a major price shock on hash allocation and IBT in the BCH blockchain. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we show that, despite mitigation by the new difficulty adjustment algorithm, a price drop of 50% could increase the IBT by 50% for at least a day, with a peak delay of 100%.
Hossein Nabilou, AndrĂ© PrĂŒm
Abstract Cryptocurrencies are expected to have a significant impact on banking, finance, and monetary systems. Due to the uncertainty as to the possible future trajectories of the evolving cryptocurrency ecosystem, governments have taken a relatively hands-off approach to regulating such currencies. This approach may be justified within the theoretical information-economics framework of this paper, which draws parallels between the information economics of money and quasi-money creation within the current central banking, commercial banking, and shadow banking systems with that of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In particular, drawing lessons from the literature on the role of information in creating âsafe assetsâ, in this paper the authors find that by building on symmetric (common) knowledge as to the inner workings of the Bitcoin Blockchainâthough in a different wayâbitcoin possesses a degree of endogenous information insensitivity typical of safe assets. This endogenous information insensitivity could support bitcoinâs promise of maturing into a viable store of value and a niche medium of exchange. This finding should not be overlooked in the policy discussions for potential future regulatory interventions in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Emiliano Pagnotta
No abstract is available for this record.
Stephen Williamson
Do Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies play a useful social role, or do they represent a social waste? Bitcoin is a decentralized recordkeeping system, with updating of the record of transactions in the blockchain.
Aleksander Berentsen, Fabian SchÀr
We characterize various currencies according to their control structure, focusing on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and government-issued fiat money. We then argue that there is a large unmet demand for a liquid asset that allows households and firms to save outside of the private financial sector. Central banks could offer such an asset by simply allowing households and firms to open accounts with them. Finally, we conclude that a central bank will not issue cryptocurrencies in the sense of a truly decentralized and permissionless asset that allows users to remain anonymous.
June Ma, Joshua S. Gans, Rabee Tourky
We analyze the Bitcoin protocol for electronic peer-to-peer payments and the operations that support the "blockchain" that underpins it. It is shown that that protocol maps formally into a dynamic game that is an extension of standard models of R&D racing. The model provides a technical foundation for any economic analysis of 'proof of work' protocols. Using the model, we demonstrate that free entry is solely responsible for determining resource usage by the system for a given reward to mining. The endogenous level of computational difficulty built into the Bitcoin protocol does not mitigate this usage and serves only to determine the time taken to process transactions. Regulating market structure will mitigate resource use highlighting the importance of identifying the benefits of competition for the operation of the blockchain.
Sven Thies, PĂ©ter MolnĂĄr
No abstract is available for this record.
Kose John, Maureen OâHara, Fahad Saleh
At their essence, blockchains are digital sequences of numbers coded into computer software that permit the secure exchange, recording, and broadcasting of transactions between individual users operating anywhere in the world with Internet access. Like most technological changes, the development of blockchains drew on and combined several existing technologies. Blockchains incorporate digital encryption technologies that mask, to varying degrees, the specific content exchanged as well as the identities of individual users. Algorithms, pre-coded series of step-by-step instructions, are also mobilised in solving complex mathematical equations and arriving at a consensus on the validity of transactions within networks of users. Time-stamping technologies then periodically bundle verified transactions into datasets, or âblocksâ. Linked together sequentially, these âblocksâ form âchainsâ that make up larger âblockchainâ databases of transactions that broadcast a permanent record of transactions whilst maintaining the anonymity of users and specific content exchanged. Blockchains are intended to be maintained by all users in manners meant to be immutable, unless users arrive at a clear consensus to undertake changes.
Emiliano Pagnotta, Andrea Buraschi
We address the valuation of bitcoins and other blockchain tokens in a new type of production economy: a decentralized financial network (DN). An identifying property of these assets is that contributors to the DN trust (miners) receive units of the same asset used by consumers of DN services. Therefore, the overall production (hashrate) and the bitcoin price are jointly determined. We characterize the demand for bitcoins and the supply of hashrate and show that the equilibrium price is obtained by solving a fixed-point problem and study its determinants. Price-hashrate âspiralsâ amplify demand and supply shocks.
Bruno Biais, Christophe BisiÚre, Matthieu Bouvard, Catherine Casamatta · 5 authors
ABSTRACT We offer a general equilibrium analysis of cryptocurrency pricing. The fundamental value of the cryptocurrency is its stream of net transactional benefits, which depend on its future prices. This implies that, in addition to fundamentals, equilibrium prices reflect sunspots. This in turn implies multiple equilibria and extrinsic volatility, that is, cryptocurrency prices fluctuate even when fundamentals are constant. To match our model to the data, we construct indices measuring the net transactional benefits of Bitcoin. In our calibration, part of the variations in Bitcoin returns reflects changes in net transactional benefits, but a larger share reflects extrinsic volatility.