Blockchain applications are considered as “trustless” machines, because they reduce business’s needs of trust in others. The “trustless” nature draws researchers’ attention on investigating the implications of blockchain in a business environment. From a view of business ethics, this paper aims at evaluating the impacts of blockchain applications on trust and business. After expounding the relations between trust in blockchain and trust in business partners, I evaluate the impacts based on a framework of competence trust, contractual trust, and goodwill trust. My conclusion is that full acceptance of trust in blockchain over trust in others is not good and will cause several risks that cannot be neglected. The main contribution of this paper is investigating and summarizing ethical and commercial risks of blockchain applications including disintermediation fallacy, centralization of trust, ambiguous contract, noncognitive trust in untrustworthy partners, and more actions guided by moral minimum.
Christian Sri Kusuma Aditya, M. Akash, pothuru eswar akash, M. Amitkumar · 8 authors
The complexity of providing secure access, protecting critical data and end-user privacy in cloud data centre is leading to a demand for a new approach in network and data security. Recently, blockchain technology is being used in claims management to provide a decentralized and secure solution. The issue of security is crucial in the Virtual machine authorization in the cloud data centers. In the traditional approach of VM authorization, SSH key and IP address is given to the user to log into virtual machines. This opens much vulnerability as it might get spoofed or sniffed from the network, leading to accesses of private data to intruder. In this work, we propose a method which intends to aid in the security of the VM authorization using claims-based authorization system in conjunction with Blockchain based decentralized storage. Furthermore, the proposed system automates the process of launching a VM in OpenStack orchestration software.
Radical changes in the technological environment have been forcing service providers to consider whether, if so, how to automate any aspects of their services with robots and other emerging technologies. Some service providers have been adopting robotic service assistants, and even creating organizations partially or fully automated by robots. However, some service providers have not been able to fully take advantage of RSAs’ benefits in a way that enhances customer service experiences. We review those challenges of RSAs and discuss the potential application of blockchain technology in governing a robotic service organization, the concept we propose in this study. Drawing on transaction cost theory and resource-based theory, we discuss theoretical implications of the impact of blockchain technology on the governance of a robotic service organization. Our study represents one of the first theoretical research to evaluate the impact of blockchain technology in a robotic service economy.
Mark Stefan, Paul Zehetbauer, Stephan Cejka, Franz Zeilinger · 5 authors
Energy communities will be an essential element of the future energy system. Especially renewable energy communities are gaining high attention in many European countries and their implementation, characteristics and use cases are elaborated in many research and development activities all around the world. Within the Austrian research project Blockchain Grid, a blockchain-based renewable energy community is implemented and field-tested in Heimschuh, Styria. It supports different technical applications like self-consumption optimisation and peer-to-peer energy trading for customers and a novel approach for grid capacity management supporting distribution system operators. These use cases have been implemented and validated in simulative studies showing promising potential for total energy costs for energy community members.
Full paper: https://www.ilaindia.net/jila/index.php/jila/article/view/408 This study describes a systematic investigation of blockchain technology and its applications across various domains with main focus on libraries. The conceptand working of blockchain technology are discussed with respect to multiple domains to emphasize how the peculiar attribute of this technology can revolutionize ‘library practices’. Opportunities and Risks of blockchain are alsodiscussed to guide the users of blockchain technology. Based on this study, the authors tried to make library professionals aware of this emerging technology and assist them in taking some initiatives for its appropriate application in libraries.
In the past, it was difficult to check, identify, and trace product quality. Quality violation regularly takes place when consumers know product quality is overstated. In this paper, we examine the motivation for and implication of a supply chain that adopts blockchain technology to improve product quality in supply chains. We build up a stylish model in which a two-echelon supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer. The manufacturer decides whether or not to adopt blockchain and the retailer sells products to consumers. Our results imply that the manufacturer always provides a low-quality product without blockchain but when the quality-cost ratio is sufficiently high with the affordable blockchain adoption cost, blockchain technology could encourage the manufacturer to produce high-quality products.
The digital finance revolution, which is often termed the “FinTech Revolution”, is currently changing the financial services industry through innovative solutions, often developed by startup and Big Tech companies. The financial sector is one of the key pillars of all economic transactions in general and sustainability specifically. As is so often the case: money is power. Innovative examples range from digital supply chain finance enabled agricultural and fashion value chains bridging Western and African as well as Asian countries, digital currency fueled smart meters for schools in Africa, digital investment marketplaces for forest tokens to crowdfunding enabled entrepreneurship in Asia and South America. Digital innovation in financial services is changing the way how financial resources can be accessed, distributed, and managed. This paper analyzes approaches from the emerging field of FinTech, InsurTech and blockchain at the intersection of sustainability. By reading through almost one-hundred and fifty papers from academia and practice as well as analyzing hundreds of start-ups in this field, the major building blocks were derived and a future research and innovation agenda was developed. The Appendix which is mentioned in this paper is downloadable online: www.sustainable-digital-finance.org. The results indicate that the topic is of great emerging interest. The areas of the focus are energy management, financial services, governments/NGOs, and transportation as well as some other relevant sectors that hold great potential and in which the combination of business and sustainability benefits is more obvious than ever enabled through innovative technology. The analysis reveals that future research and innovation areas might be fruitful in (1) novel ways for an integrated measuring of business and sustainability benefits, (2) novel sustainable cross-industry ecosystems and business models relying on new FinTech, InsurTech and blockchain enabled products and services, (3) new forms of organizational designs such as autonomous distributed organizations and processes built on new governance mechanisms and (4) novel FinTech, InsurTech, and blockchain applications for Sustainable Digital Finance Ecosystems.
Michael Milovich, Jennifer Nicholson, Darren B. Nicholson
Within the ever-changing technology and business landscape, it is imperative that students develop skills in identifying and leveraging emerging technologies to create business value in innovative and novel ways. Drawing on the Net-enabled Business Innovation Cycle framework, applied learning techniques, and current events, we developed an assignment to explore one such emerging technology – blockchain – to enhance students’ ability to apply what they have learned to solve business problems. Our findings showed that students overwhelmingly found the activity and experience beneficial in three important ways: (1) understanding an emerging technology, (2) applying the technology to contemporary business issues, and (3) leveraging what they learned to create plausible solutions to business challenges and opportunities.
To overcome the fast-changing block withholding attacks among multiple mining pools composed of miners in the blockchain system, this paper proposes a mining pool computing power allocation (MPPA) algorithm, which significantly improves the revenues of mining pools with block withholding attacks. MPPA first establishes the revenue optimization model of mining pools, which includes current adequate total computing power, the revenues of honest mining, and the revenues of block withholding attacks. Then MPPA calculates the revenue gain generated by block withholding attacks on other mining pools. To adjust the fixed computing power in each iteration, we have the mining pool computing power allocation algorithm with a fixed change of computing power (MPPA_F). To adjust the optimal recovery and attack computing power, we have the mining pool computing power allocation algorithm with an optimal change of computing power (MPPA_O). The simulation results demonstrate that MPPA_F and MPPA_O can find the optimized solutions of power computing allocation for each mining pool and outperform the state-of-arts such as WSFS, ALLC, and ALLD.
Blockchain technology is most likely to change the next decade of business.It enables transfer of digital property from one Internet user to another in a secure way without any intermediaries.The consequences of this breakthrough technology have a vast potential in all areas of business.Information Technology (IT) provides ready to use, end-to-end solutions and allow small businesses to focus on their core business.Recent innovations in IT have positively impacted businesses.With the emergence of blockchain technology, the convergence of telecom and computing is finally reaching maturity in a unified platform for doing business in the 21 st century.In this paper, we study the various ways in which blockchain technology can help small businesses and propose a framework that helps in choosing the appropriate blockchain application in the context of business process reengineering.
Blockchain is a block chain technology that makes it possible to send and store information in a distributed way, creating a decentralized data register. The article presents the applications of blockchain technology in the field of power engineering, among others for use in the area of settlements on the electricity market. The work shows the possibilities of using and using block chains to describe the purchase and sale, generation and management of electricity. The work describes aspects of technology that allow partial or complete decentralization of the process. The article also shows how such transactions could be carried out automatically and without supervision - giving certainty of pre-established rules, rules and assumptions.
Ira Sood, Henri Pirkkalainen, Anthony F. Camilleri
Higher education is in dire need of reform in order keep up with the rapidly advancing technology and student needs surrounding it. Unbundling of higher education has been discussed as one of the potential directions of reform. Prior research has suggested that blockchain technology has the potential to play an essential role in facilitating such change in higher education. However, the ways in which blockchain can facilitate unbundling remains missing in literature. We specifically address this gap. This study reports on a qualitative study with 17 respondents in the field of higher education as well as blockchain technology. Our findings indicate three specific areas of unbundling that can be facilitated with blockchain technology, namely new governance model, modular student experience and enhanced faculty roles. We explain how four key characteristics of blockchain (i.e., decentralization, immutability, pseudonymity and self-sovereignty) facilitate those three areas of unbundling in specific. The findings of this study can aid both the universities and the blockchain community in understanding how the concept of blockchain can be embedded effectively in the unbundling of higher education.
Abstract Agriculture 4.0 is the era of integrating intelligent technologies in agriculture. Problems such as low informatization, food safety, high management cost and imbalance between supply and demand in agriculture have greatly hindered the development of agriculture. The various properties of blockchain technology can make up for the lack of agricultural mechanism, and the fusion of the two is a hot issue in the application of blockchain. Blockchain technology has already had some application cases in the field of agriculture. Based on the research status of Chinese and foreign scholars in this field, this paper firstly introduces the basic overview of blockchain. Then, with agricultural supply chain and agricultural product traceability as the core, it describes the application of blockchain technology in the agricultural field, and further explores solutions to different application problems. Finally, combined with the practical application of “agriculture + blockchain”, relevant Suggestions are proposed to provide reference for cross-disciplinary research.
Recent years have witnessed a boom in blockchain systems written in Rust to utilize its efficiency and safety. Unfortunately, deadlock bugs have become one of the ubiquitous banes to these systems due to the heavy use of locks for parallelism and the misunderstanding of the lock mechanism in Rust. This paper analyzed the common lock-related pitfalls in blockchain systems written in Rust and proposed Stuck-me-not, the first MIR-based static deadlock detector, for the most common deadlock type: double-lock. We have discovered 29 previously unknown double-lock bugs in 11 popular blockchain-related projects. We believe our work can greatly improve the concurrency security of the current blockchain ecosystem.
Blockchain serves as an immutable ledger which allows transactions to take place in a decentralized manner. The proposed solution incorporates the use of Blockchain for Supply Chain Management of Relief Materials after a Disaster. The proposed solution also provides many additional features when compared to the current system like being tamper-proof, providing anonymity and accountability to the users. Our solution incorporates a box-in-box approach whilst keeping tabs via tamper-proof barcodes. Barcodes will be frequently scanned at designated locations. Users also have the facility to track the donated items online through a dedicated website. For blockchain infrastructure, we have used Hyperledger Fabric.
The articles in this special section focuses on blockchain for scalable Internet of Things (IoT) management, access, and accountability. The articles highlight new blockchain architectures and techniques that can be leveraged to enable scalable management, access and accountability of massive numbers of IoT devices to effectively support various IoT applications.
Blockchain technology has been used in many fields such as data management, cloud computing and Internet of Things with the features of decentralization, transparency and immutability. In order to study the performance of a blockchain system with a light-load traffic, we establish a discrete-time non-exhaustive vacation queue with batch service and gated service. In this model, we regard transaction initiation, mining processing and block verification as arrival, vacation and service period, respectively. By using an embedded Markov chain method and a regeneration cycle approach, we derive the average response time of transactions. Experiment results with analysis and simulation show that the average response time of transactions is impacted by the arrival rate of transactions. Finally, we study the Nash equilibrium behavior and the socially optimal behavior of transactions, and present a pricing policy for transactions to maximize the social profit.
In this paper, the prototype of Thai voting sys-tem using blockchain technology (B-VoT) has been successfully designed and developed. Hyperledger Fabric was chosen to be a major blockchain infrastructure. The web-application was developed to allow voters to vote. In addition, real-time voting results will be shown on the same website after election period has passed. We connected the web-application and blockchain database together in order to store the votes as a blockchain transaction. With our Blockchain Internet Election, the voters can easily elect on the website and their votes is automatically stored in the blockchain database as a single blockchain transaction. This voting prototype can assure the data integrity because no one can modify any information or voting results. Therefore, our system could have a huge impact on the voting reliability as well as rebuild public trustworthiness in Thailand election.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Xiuqin Shang, Xi Chen, Lulu Niu, Gang Xiong · 9 authors
This paper proposes the social manufacturing based on Blockchain, which realizes precise and efficient customization through smart contract and distributed accounting. It is a new manufacturing mode of service-oriented, distributed and collaborative customization. This paper proposes the definition of SM based on Blockchain. In the process of using to Blockchain, it can form a strong trust relationship, so that multiple nodes / roles in SM can save the complete copy of the whole database, rather than a centralized permission / role. Secondly, the Blockchain-based SM system is developed for customized manufacturing. Finally, its application case and the optimization results are given. In SM, it is the key that how to transform customized manufacturing actions into socialized actions of manufacturing resources through internet communities and interconnect Socialized Manufacturing Resources (SMRs) in upstream and downstream. In this paper, the smart contract relationship is established based on Blockchain between SMRs to build credit mechanism in SM, Which can ensure the effective circulation and association of SMRs.