Blockchain Papers

Tobias Burggraf

No abstract is available for this record.

Suman Kumar Das, Diptesh Pandey, Barnali Dey, Suparna DasGupta · 5 authors

An inclusive project is classified and alienated into several tasks where as task management is one of the foremost components of project management, since the roles and tasks assigned by the manager of this component to each employee working on a project. In scrupulous there are several ways to track the status of work and this monitoring is also required to find the efficiency of an individual and at the time of the annual and mid- term appraisal and all these monitoring records can be used to give qualifications to associates and employees. In this work, the authors have proposed a system along with the solution based on the ERC20 token which is identified as blockchain platform based on Ethereum in which they can implement Project Task Management which is tamper proof and as well as can track the assigned task of an employee on real time basis.

Владимир Юрьевич Карпычев

Функциональное моделирование на основе стандарта IDEF0 – создание графических моделей любой предметной деятельности, включающих иерархическое описание процессов, операций, ресурсов (информации), инструментария, исполнителей, управления и связей между ними. В статье предложена функциональная модель создания и управления смарт-контрактами на платформе Ethereum.

Kris Joseph

The 2008 debut of Bitcoin marked the first large-scale implementation of blockchain technology, and its decentralized approach to monetary systems has since been abstracted to more generalized purposes like distributed computing. Platforms like Ethereum, which function as a global, decentralized computing and data storage system, promise to bring the cost of decentralized knowledge production in line with the efficiencies afforded by the centralized, integrated computing systems that currently dominate the knowledge economy. Blockchain technologies have been investigated for a wide range of information management purposes, but their exploration within the realm of library and information studies has largely been nascent. Though many applications within the field have been envisioned, few have been explored in depth. Among the many functions performed in the field of librarianship, the work of cataloguers—which has always been performed in a decentralized manner—represents an intriguing use case. A review of current shared-cataloguing practices reveals that catalogues have become largely-centralized, divorced from public participation, dominated by an ethos of efficiency at the cost of quality, and essentially unaltered since the shift from physical to electronic catalogue storage more than 40 years ago. The evolution of blockchain technologies, paired with an intentional approach to shared catalogues that is open for use, transparency, and public participation, is explored in a conceptual framework and design based on the Ethereum platform. A theoretical design scheme grounded in the affordances of Ethereum, shaped by the principles of open source software development, and guided by the best practices of existing social information production systems results in a proposal for Catagora: an open source, open-for-use, transparent and participatory shared-cataloguing platform that reverses the trend towards architectural and political centralization and promises novel catalogue features such as complete revision history and distributed collaboration on the content and quality of catalogue entries. Blockchain technology, alone, cannot disrupt shared cataloguing practices; such a shift involves the voluntary and eager participation of cataloguers and members of the public in order to sustain and grow the system. The Catagora design concept presented in this thesis incorporates accessibility, collaboration and reputational systems that are intended to foster open participation, but these alone cannot guarantee a thriving, shared-cataloguing alternative to existing systems. Further exploration, in the form of a live implementation, is warranted; and lessons from existing large-scale library technology projects suggest that a centrally-coordinated implementation, targeting key cataloguing partners and driven by a passionate project champion, may provide a more complete picture of the blockchain’s potential to support open, shared cataloguing for the benefit of information seekers.

A.K.M. Najmul Islam, Matti Mäntymäki, Marja Turunen

This paper investigates the focal actors and their heterogeneity in blockchain splits. Disagreements in blockchain communities often lead to splits in the blockchain and the community. For example, disagreements within the Bitcoin community on increasing the block size led to the blockchain split and creation of Bitcoin Cash. We build on actor-network theory to investigate blockchain split as a translation process, and employ case study methodology to examine Bitcoin splits. We identify several human actors, such as miners, developers, merchants, and investors, as well as non-human actors including ideologies, exchanges and computer programs involved in Bitcoin splits. Our results show that actor heterogeneity, that is, the complex constellation of diverse actors, plays a key role in blockchain splits. We further describe how the human and non-human actors’ fluid moves into micro and macro positions in the network affect the development of the split. We also discuss the role of these actors and their engagement in forming micro and macro agencies in blockchain splits. Our study adds to the understanding of actor behavior and network dynamics in decentralized information systems such as blockchain and open source software.

Argimiro Arratia, Albert X. López-Barrantes

In early 2018 prices peaked at USD 20,000 and, almost two years later, we still continue debating if cryptocurrencies can actually become a currency for the everyday life or not. From the economic point of view, and playing in the field of behavioral finance, this paper analyses the relation between prices and the search interest on Bitcoin since 2014. We questioned the forecasting ability of Google Trends for the behavior of price by performing linear and nonlinear dependency tests, and exploring performance of ARIMA and Neural Network models enhanced with this social sentiment indicator. Our analyses and models are founded upon a set of statistical properties common to financial returns that we establish for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin.

Carlos Conesa

In October 2008 a mysterious article was published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto: “Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system”. Bitcoin’s entry into operation some months later in early 2009 barely caused a ripple. Since then, the scheme has accumulated more than half a million blocks in its blockchain and they include more than 300 million transactions. In view of the media impact of Bitcoin, it is worth explaining in some detail how Bitcoin works and what its limitations are. This article reviews the aims and basic functioning of Bitcoin, analyses its strengths and weaknesses, and discusses its usefulness as an exchange mechanism.

Dirk G. Baur, Josua Oll

No abstract is available for this record.

Theodore Panagiotidis, Thanasis Stengos, Orestis Vravosinos

We examine the significance of fourty-one potential covariates of bitcoin returns for the period 2010–2018 (2872 daily observations). The recently introduced principal component-guided sparse regression is employed. We reveal that economic policy uncertainty and stock market volatility are among the most important variables for bitcoin. We also trace strong evidence of bubbly bitcoin behavior in the 2017–2018 period.

Bruno Bogaz Zarpel�ão, Rodrigo Sanches Miani, Muttukrishnan Rajarajan

No abstract is available for this record.

Ming Jin, Xiaojiao Chen, Sian-Jheng Lin

With the popularity of Bitcoin, there is a greater demand for the scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain, which is susceptible to the efficiency of block propagation. In the Bitcoin blockchain, efficient block propagation approach can reduce the computing power and the risk of forks. Meanwhile, larger blocks help to improve the throughput of transactions. Thus, the block propagation is a major issue of the scalability of the Bitcoin network. This paper introduces a method to reduce the required bandwidth of block propagation with erasure coding. To begin with, the network nodes are classified into several clusters. When a node wants to propagate a block, the node does not need to propagate the whole information of the block. Instead, the node can only transmit the transaction IDs and the coded information to each cluster. The simulation shows that the proposed method can significantly ease the network traffic among these clusters.

Jun Deng, Huifeng Pan, Shuyu Zhang, Bin Zou

No abstract is available for this record.

Roberto Frota Décourt, Usman W. Chohan, Maria Letizia Perugini

No abstract is available for this record.

Afzalur Rahman, Ayub Khan Dawood

There are diverse variables that impact the future usage of bitcoin, from issues related to security to concerns pertaining to garnering acceptance from the market and customers. In this article, few predictive statements have been analysed regarding the future of bitcoin, such as (1) the growth of share of digital purchases, (2) customer acceptance for blockchain innovation in electronic settlements, payment and banking system, (3) the emergence of bitcoin and also various other cryptocurrencies as niche cash, and (4) the implications of bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency as a specific niche cash in nations with specifically weak currency, and (5) the possibilities of regulative dangers of bitcoin usage in these nations.

Matthias Lehmann

Blockchain, or “distributed ledger” technology, has been devised as an alternative to the law of finance. While it has become clear by now that regulation in the public interest is necessary, for example to avoid money laundering, drug dealing or tax evasion, the particularly thorny issues of private law have been less discussed. These include, for instance, the right to reverse an erroneous transfer, the ownership of stolen coins and the effects of succession or bankruptcy of a bitcoin holder. All of these questions require answers from a legal perspective because the technology ignores them. Particular difficulties arise when one tries to apply a property analysis to the blockchain. Surprisingly, it is far from clear how virtual currencies and other crypto assets are transferred and acquired. The traditional requirements posed by private law, such as an agreement between the parties and the transfer of possession, are incompatible with the technology. Moreover, the idea of a "void" or "null" transfer is hard to reconcile with the immutability that characterizes the blockchain. Before any such questions can be answered, it is necessary to determine the law governing blockchain transfers and assets. This is the point where conflict of laws, or “private international law”, comes into play. Conflicts lawyers are used to submitting legal relations to the law of the country with the most significant connection. But seemingly insurmountable problems occur because decentralized ledgers with no physical connecting factors do not lend themselves to this type of “localization” exercise. The issue of this paper therefore is: How can blockchain be squared with traditional categories of private law, including private international law? The proposal made herein avoids the recourse to a newly fashioned "lex digitalis" or "lex cryptographica". Rather, it is suggested that the problems can be solved by using existing national laws, supplemented by an international text. At the same time, the results produced by DLT should also be accepted as legally protected and corrected only where necessary under the applicable national rules. In this way, a symbiosis between private law and innovative technology can be created.

Sachin Modgil, Vandana Sonwaney

This paper Decision making at the top level is very complex. One important responsibility of the policy makers and the governance system is to plan the safety and security to its citizen and consumers for the firms. This research address of the main concern of counterfeiting goods in today’s time. This research identify the potential and needs of the distributed ledger technologies like blockchain and their application potential to combat the problem of counterfeiting in Indian economy. The research uses SWARA (Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis)-WASPAS (Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment) methodology after expert opinion gathered to understand the problem better and it results into the prioritization of application of blockchain in different industries. SWARA is applied to evaluate the weights of the criteria and WASPAS to evaluate and prioritize the alternatives.

Emanuel Palm

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, Bitcoin emerged as a radical new alternative to the fiat currencies of the traditional banking sector. Through the use of a novel kind of probabilistic consensus algorithm, Bitcoin proved it possible to guarantee the integrity of a digital currency by relying on network majority votes instead of trusted institutions. By showing that it was technically feasible to, at least to some extent, replace the entire banking sector with computers, many significant actors started asking what else this new technology could help automate. A subsequent, seemingly inevitable, wave of efforts produced a multitude of new distributed ledger systems, architectures and applications, all somehow attempting to leverage distributed consensus algorithms to replace trusted intermediaries, facilitating value ownership, transfer and regulation. In this thesis, we scrutinize distributed ledger technologies in terms of how they could help facilitate the digitization of contractual cooperation, especially in the context of the supply chain and manufacturing industries. Concretely, we consider them from three distinct technical perspectives, (1) performance, (2) interoperability and (3) integration. Voting systems, with or without probabilistic mechanisms, require significant time and resources to operate, for which reason it becomes relevant to investigate how the costs of running those systems can be mitigated. In particular, we consider how a blockchain, a form of distributed ledger, can be pruned to in order to reduce disk space requirements. Furthermore, no technical system part of a larger business is an island, but will have to be able to interoperate with other systems to maximize the opportunity for automation. For this reason, we also consider how transparent message translation between systems could be facilitated, as well as presenting a formalism for expressing the syntactic structure of message payloads. Finally, we propose a concrete architecture, the Exchange Network, that models contractual interactions as negotiations about token exchanges rather than as function invocations and state machine transitions, which we argue lowers the barrier to compatibility with conventional legal and business practices. Even if no more trusted institutions could be replaced by any forthcoming distributed ledger technologies, we believe contractual interactions becoming more digital would lead to an increased opportunity for using computers to monitor, assist or even directly participate in the negotiation, management and tracking of business agreements, which we see as more than enough to warrant the cost of further developing of the technology. Such computer involvement may not just save time and reduce costs, but could also enable new kinds of computer-driven economies. In the long run, this may enable new levels of resource optimization, and not just within large organizations, but also smaller companies, or even the homes of families and individuals.

Benedict Faber, Georg Cappelen Michelet, Niklas Weidmann, Raghava Rao Mukkamala · 5 authors

Recent scandals on the abuse of personal information from social media platforms and numerous user identity data breaches raise concerns about technical, commercial, and ethical aspects of privacy and security of user data. European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the largest changes in data privacy regulation and entails several key regulatory measures for both data controllers and data processors to empower and protect EU citizens’ privacy. In this research work, we propose a conceptual design and high-level architecture for a Blockchain-based Personal Data and Identity Management System (BPDIMS), a human-centric and GDPR-compliant personal data and identity management system based on the blockchain technology. We describe how BPDIMS’s architecture utilizes blockchain technology to provide a high-level of security, trust and transparency. We discuss how BPDIM’s human-centric approach with GDPR compliance shifts the control over personal data to the end users and empowers them better.

Rongyue Zheng, Jianlin Jiang, Xiaohan Hao, Wei Ren · 6 authors

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is envisioned as an indispensable opportunity in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries as a revolutionary technology and process. Smart construction relies on BIM for manipulating information flow, data flow, and management flow. Currently, BIM model has been explored mainly for information construction and utilization, but rare works pay efforts to information security, e.g., critical model audit and sensitive model exposure. Moreover, few BIM systems are proposed to chase after upcoming computing paradigms, such as mobile cloud computing, big data, blockchain, and Internet of Things. In this paper, we make the first attempt to propose a novel BIM system model called bcBIM to tackle information security in mobile cloud architectures. More specifically, bcBIM is proposed to facilitate BIM data audit for historical modifications by blockchain in mobile cloud with big data sharing. The proposed bcBIM model can guide the architecture design for further BIM information management system, especially for integrating BIM cloud as a service for further big data sharing. We propose a method of BIM data organization based on blockchains and discuss it based on private and public blockchain. It guarantees to trace, authenticate, and prevent tampering with BIM historical data. At the same time, it can generate a unified format to support future open sharing, data audit, and data provenance.

Zura Kakushadze, Willie Yu

We give an algorithm and source code for a cryptoasset statistical arbitrage alpha based on a mean-reversion effect driven by the leading momentum factor in cryptoasset returns discussed in https://ssrn.com/abstract=3245641. Using empirical data, we identify the cross-section of cryptoassets for which this altcoin-Bitcoin arbitrage alpha is significant and discuss it in the context of liquidity considerations as well as its implications for cryptoasset trading.

Soumya Basu, David Easley, Maureen O’Hara, Emin Gün Sirer

Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies prioritize transactions based on their fees, creating a unique kind of fee market. Empirically, this market has failed to yield stable equilibria with predictable prices for desired levels of service. We argue that this is due to the absence of a dominant strategy equilibrium in the current fee mechanism. We propose an alternative fee setting mechanism that is inspired by generalized second price auctions. The design of such a mechanism is challenging because miners can use any criteria for including transactions and can manipulate the results of the auction after seeing the proposed fees. Nonetheless, we show that our proposed protocol is free from manipulation as the number of users increases. We further show that, for a large number of users and miners, the gain from manipulation is small for all parties. This results in users proposing fees that represent their true utility and lower variance of revenue for miners. Historical analysis shows that Bitcoin users could have saved $272,528,000 USD in transaction fees while miners could have reduced the variance of fee income by an average factor of 7.4 times.

Nikolai Zaitsev

Report presents analysis of empirical distribution of future returns of bitcoin (BTC) from BTUSD inverse option prices. Logistic pdf is chosen as underlying distribution to fit option prices. The result is satisfactory and suggests that these prices can be described with just three or even one parameter. Fitted Logistic pdf matches forward price movements upto a scaling factor. Nevertheless, this observation stands alone and does not allow stochastic description of underlying prices with logistic pdf in similar fashion as it is done within Black-Scholes modelling framework. Put-call parity relationship is derived connecting prices of vanilla inverse options and futures.

Mansoor Ahmed, Ilia Shumailov, Ross Anderson

The first six months of 2018 saw cryptocurrency thefts of $761 million, and the technology is also the latest and greatest tool for money laundering. This increase in crime has caused both researchers and law enforcement to look for ways to trace criminal proceeds. Although tracing algorithms have improved recently, they still yield an enormous amount of data of which very few datapoints are relevant or interesting to investigators, let alone ordinary bitcoin owners interested in provenance. In this work we describe efforts to visualize relevant data on a blockchain. To accomplish this we come up with a graphical model to represent the stolen coins and then implement this using a variety of visualization techniques.

Mahdi H. Miraz, David C. Donald

Since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2008, many other cryptocurrencies have been introduced and gained popularity. Lack of interoperability and scalability amongst these cryptocurrencies was - and still is - acting as a significant impediment to the general adoption of cryptocurrencies and coloured tokens. Atomic Swaps – a smart exchange protocol for cryptocurrencies - is designed to facilitate a wallet-to-wallet transfer enabling direct trades amongst different cryptocurrencies. Since swaps between cryptocurrencies are still relatively unknown, this article will investigate the operation and market development thus far and query the advantages they offer and the future challenges they face. The paper contains detailed literature and technology reviews, followed by the main analysis and findings.