Mirza Jabbar Aziz Baig, M. Tariq Iqbal, Mohsin Jamil, Jahangir Khan
A low-cost, open-source peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading system for a remote community is presented in this paper. As a result of its geographic location, this community has never been able to access electricity and other modern amenities. This study aims to design and implement a P2P energy trading system for this remote community that allows residents to take advantage of distributed energy resources. A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (Pi4B) hosts the main server of the trading system that includes the user interface and a local Ethereum blockchain server. The Ethereum blockchain is used to deploy smart contracts. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) servers run on ESP32 microcontrollers. Sensors and actuators connected to the ESP32 are field instrumentation devices that facilitate acquiring, monitoring, and transferring energy data in real-time. To perform trading activities, React.JS open-source library was used to develop the blockchain-enabled user interface. An immutable blockchain network keeps track of all transactions. The proposed system runs on a local Wi-Fi network with restricted authorization for system security. Other security measures such as login credentials, private key, firewall, and secret recovery phrases are also considered for information security and data integrity. A Hypertext Transfer Protocol is implemented for communication between the servers and the client. This explains the overall system design, implementation, testing, and results.
With the development of blockchain applications, the requirements for file storage in blockchain are increasing rapidly. Many protocols, including Filecoin, Arweave, and Sia, have been proposed to provide scalable decentralized file storage for blockchain applications. However, the reliability is not well promised by existing protocols. Inspired by the idea of insurance, we innovatively propose a decentralized file storage protocol in blockchain, named as FileInsurer, to achieve both scalability and reliability. While ensuring scalability by distributed storage, FileInsurer guarantees reliability by enhancing robustness and fully compensating for the file loss. Specifically, under mild conditions, we prove that no more than 0.1\% value of all files should be compensated even if half of the storage collapses. Therefore, only a relatively small deposit needs to be pledged by storage providers to cover the potential file loss. Because of lower burdens of deposit, storage providers have more incentives to participate in the storage network. FileInsurer can run in the top layer of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and thus it can be directly applied in Web 3.0, Non-Fungible Tokens, and Metaverse.
Adel Albshri, Ali Alzubaidi, Bakri Awaji, Ellis Solaiman
Recently, distributed ledger technologies like blockchain have been proliferating and have attracted interest from the academic community, government, and industry. A wide range of blockchain solutions has been introduced, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger technologies in the literature. However, tools for evaluating these solutions and their applications are still lacking, limiting the exploration of their potentiality and associated challenges/limitations. That is, experimenting with real blockchain networks usually requires a solid budget; and thus, sophisticated blockchain simulators can facilitate designing and evaluating solutions before the actual implementation stage. The quality of such simulators depends on several factors such as usability, reliability, provided capabilities, and supported features. This paper aims to provide a systemic mapping review of blockchain simulators focusing on these quality factors. This paper also sheds light on the configuration parameters (inputs) and produced metrics (outputs) supported by each simulator. Furthermore, it investigates which metrics supported by each simulator are scientifically validated/evaluated. Moreover, code quality comparison is carried out to assess the source code of the covered simulators. The results reveal that no simulator fully covers the wide operational range of features and capabilities of existing blockchain technologies. However, several promising efforts exist in the domain of blockchain simulation with interesting and useful features. Finally, we discuss the subject of blockchain simulation and provide our insight into the matter.
Cheick Tidiane Bâ, Andrea Michienzi, Barbara Guidi, Matteo Zignani · 6 authors
Nowadays, Online Social Media (OSM) are among the most popular web services. Traditional OSM are known to be affected by serious issues including misinformation, fake news, censorship, and privacy violations, to the point that a pressing demand for new paradigms is raised by users all over the world. Among such paradigms, the concepts around the Web 3.0 are fueling a new revolution of online sociality, pushing towards the adoption of innovative and groundbreaking technologies. In particular, the decentralization of social services through the blockchain technology is representing the most valid alternative to current OSM, enabling the development of rewarding strategies for value redistribution, and fake news detection. However, the so-called Blockchain Online Social Media (BOSMs) are far from being mature, with different platforms that continually try to redefine their services in order to attract larger audiences, thus causing blockchain forks and massive user migrations, with the latter dominating the dynamics of the current OSM landscape, too.
Retail energy markets are increasingly consumer-oriented, thanks to a growing number of energy plans offered by a plethora of energy suppliers, retailers and intermediaries. To maximize the benefits of competitive retail energy markets, group purchasing is an emerging paradigm that aggregates consumers' purchasing power by coordinating switch decisions to specific energy providers for discounted energy plans. Traditionally, group purchasing is mediated by a trusted third-party, which suffers from the lack of privacy and transparency. In this paper, we introduce a novel paradigm of decentralized privacy-preserving group purchasing, empowered by privacy-preserving blockchain and secure multi-party computation, to enable users to form a coalition for coordinated switch decisions in a decentralized manner, without a trusted third-party. The coordinated switch decisions are determined by a competitive online algorithm, based on users' private consumption data and current energy plan tariffs. Remarkably, no private user consumption data will be revealed to others in the online decision-making process, which is carried out in a transparently verifiable manner to eliminate frauds from dishonest users and supports fair mutual compensations by sharing the switching costs to incentivize group purchasing. We implemented our decentralized group purchasing solution as a smart contract on Solidity-supported blockchain platform (e.g., Ethereum), and provide extensive empirical evaluation.
Web3 is the most hyped concept from 2020 to date, greatly motivating the prosperity of the Internet of Value and Metaverse. However, no solid evidence stipulates the exact definition, criterion, or standard in the sense of such a buzzword. To fill the gap, we aim to clarify the term in this work. We narrow down the connotation of Web3 by separating it from high-level controversy argues and, instead, focusing on its protocol, architecture, and evaluation from the perspective of blockchain fields. Specifically, we have identified all potential architectural design types and evaluated each of them by employing the scenario-based architecture evaluation method. The evaluation shows that existing applications are neither secure nor adoptable as claimed. Meanwhile, we also discuss opportunities and challenges surrounding the Web3 space and answer several prevailing questions from communities. A primary result is that Web3 still relies on traditional internet infrastructure, not as independent as advocated. This report, as of June 2022, provides the first strict research on Web3 in the view of blockchain. We hope that this work would provide a guide for the development of future Web3 services.
Blockchain is a developing technology that can provide users with such advantages as decentralization, data security, and transparency of transactions. Blockchain has many applications, one of them is the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry. DeFi is a huge aggregator of various financial blockchain protocols. At the moment, the total value locked in these protocols reaches USD 82 billion. Every day more and more new users come to DeFi with their investments. The concept of decentralized finance involves the creation of a single ecosystem of many blockchains that interact with each other. The problem of combining and interacting blockchains becomes crucial to enable DeFi. In this paper, we look at the essence of the DeFi industry, the possibilities of overcoming the problem of cross-blockchain interaction, present our approach to solving this problem with the Wish Swap platform, which, in particular, provides improved fault-tolerance for cross-chain interaction by using multiple backend nodes and multisignatures. We analyze the results of the proposed solution and demonstrate how a prototype pre-sale application can be created based on the proposed concept.
Recently, multi-agent systems (MASs) have received attention due to the consideration of distributed optimization and control in blockchain (BC) based energy trading applications. However, due to the dynamic behavior of uncertain and random variables, the coordination and control of MAS are still challenging to attain resilience and dynamicity. Traditional trust systems, which rely on access control and cryptography, cannot deal with dynamic behavior of agents. Furthermore, they are inefficient in addressing the computational overhead of cryptographic primitives. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a BC-based trusted suite (TS) for MAS to handle privacy and anonymity issues during energy trading in a smart grid (SG). In this work, three objectives are simultaneously achieved: trust, cooperation, and confidentiality. Firstly, the proposed trust system is employed to perform trust credibility of agents based on trust deformation, coherence, and stability. The credibility evaluation is used to determine the dynamic behavior of agents and to detect dishonest agents in the system. Secondly, a tri-tit-for-tat (TTFT) repeated game approach is used to improve the cooperation among agents. The proposed strategy is more forgiving than the existing Di-TFT (DTFT) and TFT techniques. It motivates scammers and deceptive agents to regain their trust by cooperating in three consecutive rounds of a game. Furthermore a proof-of-cooperation (PoC) consensus mechanism is introduced to facilitate agent cooperation in block creation and validation. Thirdly, the publicly verifiable secret sharing (PVSS) technique is introduced to preserve the privacy of the agents. Unlike VSS, PVSS provides the immunity against different types of security threats. Where, the dealer agent maintained the trust, while the verification of the dealer and combiner is maintained within agent-to-agent cooperation. Simulation results show that the devised BTS model is superior to the existing benchmark model such as fuzzy logic trust (FLT) in terms of detecting the cheating and deceptive behavior of agents in the system. Besides, the devised TTFT allows cheating agents to effectively regain the trust if they cooperate thrice in a row as compared to the existing DTFT and TFT strategies. Furthermore, This study analyzes two trust-related attacks: bad-mouthing and on-off. Analysis shows that the proposed system is protected from trust related attacks.
Abstract Large penetration of various types of distributed energy resources and new requirements in electricity markets, have facilitated creation of sophisticated distributed energy resource aggregation systems for providing grid services. Aggregators such as Virtual Power Plants enable participation of small‐ and medium‐scale distributed energy resources in electricity markets, interacting with grid operators to collectively provide ancillary power and energy services. These interactions between grid operator, Virtual Power Plants operator and distributed energy resources are complex both in terms of contractual agreements and provision of services. On all layers, accurate tracking of distributed energy resource usage and execution of contracts is required for establishing trust between transacting participants. Digitalisation and automation of processes such as control of distributed energy resources, verification and payouts for services will add value for solving complexity of dealing with multiple parties in a Virtual Power Plants aggregation model. The authors present a blockchain‐integrated Virtual Power Plants system that enables full automation of distributed energy resource controls through smart contracts, digital trust between participants and immediate payouts for services. Effectiveness of the developed blockchain mechanism is demonstrated on a pilot Virtual Power Plants system comprising distributed energy storage systems, renewables, EV charging stations and loads with a total size of 1.8 MWs. Additionally, we propose a new mechanism for managing renewable energy curtailments through blockchain.
Robert Antwi, James Dzisi Gadze, Eric Tutu Tchao, Axel Sikora · 10 authors
The increase of the Internet of Things (IoT) calls for secure solutions for industrial applications. The security of IoT can be potentially improved by blockchain. However, blockchain technology suffers scalability issues which hinders integration with IoT. Solutions to blockchain’s scalability issues, such as minimizing the computational complexity of consensus algorithms or blockchain storage requirements, have received attention. However, to realize the full potential of blockchain in IoT, the inefficiencies of its inter-peer communication must also be addressed. For example, blockchain uses a flooding technique to share blocks, resulting in duplicates and inefficient bandwidth usage. Moreover, blockchain peers use a random neighbor selection (RNS) technique to decide on other peers with whom to exchange blockchain data. As a result, the peer-to-peer (P2P) topology formation limits the effective achievable throughput. This paper provides a survey on the state-of-the-art network structures and communication mechanisms used in blockchain and establishes the need for network-based optimization. Additionally, it discusses the blockchain architecture and its layers categorizes existing literature into the layers and provides a survey on the state-of-the-art optimization frameworks, analyzing their effectiveness and ability to scale. Finally, this paper presents recommendations for future work.
In blockchain, ensuring integrity of data when updating distributed ledgers is a challenging and very fundamental process. Most of blockchain networks use Merkle tree to verify the authenticity of data received from other peers on the network. However, creating Merkle tree for each block in the network and composing Merkle branch for every transaction verification request are time-consuming process requiring heavy computations. Moreover, sending these data through the network generates a lot of traffic. Therefore, we proposed an updated mechanism that uses incremental hash chain with probabilistic filter to verify block data, provide a proof of data integrity and efficiently update blockchain light nodes. In this article, we prove that our model provides better performance and less required computations than Merkle tree while maintaining the same security level.
Abstract Blockchain technology has been recognised as a promising technology for supporting Peer‐to‐Peer (P2P) energy trading—an emerging paradigm in which energy trading is performed directly between end energy customers. The state‐of‐the‐art blockchain designs for P2P energy trading can only support less compute‐intensive energy trading tasks and/or rely on the set up of a long challenge time to ensure correctness of transactions, which restricts the systems' scalability and applicability in the diverse P2P energy trading applications. This paper proposes a new dual‐blockchain system for P2P energy trading. The system consists of a primary blockchain and a secondary blockchain. The primary blockchain is mainly responsible for storing the data of P2P energy trading transactions while the compute‐intensive tasks (e.g. pricing and transaction verification) are executed in the secondary blockchain. An Improved Optimistic Rollup (IOR) mechanism is proposed to facilitate the co‐operation of the dual blockchains. Through a specific ‘executor‐validator’ mechanism and a group of specific smart contracts with different functions, the IOR mechanism can effectively accommodate the dual blockchains to execute the P2P energy trading transactions in a computational efficient manner while ensuring the correctness and security of the transactions. A prototype of the proposed system is implemented on Fisco Bcos and Alibaba Cloud and comprehensive simulations are conducted to validate the proposed system.
Liping Tao, Yang Lu, Ding Xu, Yuqi Fan · 5 authors
Blockchain is a viable solution to provide data integrity for the enormous volume of 5G IoT social data, while we need to break through the throughput bottleneck of blockchain. Sharding is a promising technology to solve the problem of low throughput in blockchains. However, cross-shard communication hinders the effective improvement of blockchain throughput. Therefore, it is critical to reasonably allocate transactions to different shards to improve blockchain throughput. Existing research on blockchain sharding mainly focuses on shards formation, configuration, and consensus, while ignoring the negative impact of cross-shard communication on blockchain throughput. Aiming to maximize the throughput of transaction processing, we study how to allocate blockchain transactions to shards in this paper. We propose an Associated Transaction assignment algorithm based on Closest Fit (ATCF). ATCF classifies associated transactions into transaction groups which are then assigned to different shards in the non-ascending order of transaction group sizes periodically. Within each epoch, ATCF tries to select a shard that can handle all the transactions for each transaction group. If there are multiple such shards, ATCF selects the shard with the remaining processing capacity closest to the number of transactions in the transaction group. When no such shard exists, ATCF chooses the shard with the largest remaining processing capacity for the transaction group. The transaction groups that cannot be completely processed within the current epoch will be allocated in the subsequent epochs. We prove that ATCF is a 2-approximation algorithm for the associated transaction assignment problem. Simulation results show that ATCF can effectively improve the blockchain throughput and reduce the number of cross-shard transactions.
He Xue, Dajiang Chen, Ning Zhang, Hong‐Ning Dai · 5 authors
As an important technology to ensure data security, consistency, traceability, etc., blockchain has been increasingly used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The integration of blockchain and edge computing can further improve the resource utilization in terms of network, computing, storage, and security. This paper aims to present a survey on the integration of blockchain and edge computing. In particular, we first give an overview of blockchain and edge computing. We then present a general architecture of an integration of blockchain and edge computing system. We next study how to utilize blockchain to benefit edge computing, as well as how to use edge computing to benefit blockchain. We also discuss the issues brought by the integration of blockchain and edge computing system and solutions from perspectives of resource management, joint optimization, data management, computation offloading and security mechanism. Finally, we analyze and summarize the existing challenges posed by the integration of blockchain and edge computing system and the potential solutions in the future.
The use of blockchain in regulatory ecosystems is a promising approach to address challenges of compliance among mutually untrusted entities. In this work, we consider applications of blockchain technologies in telecom regulations. In particular, we address growing concerns around Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC aka. spam) sent through text messages (SMS) and phone calls in India. Despite several regulatory measures taken to curb the menace of spam it continues to be a nuisance to subscribers while posing challenges to telecom operators and regulators alike. In this paper, we present a consortium blockchain based architecture to address the problem of UCC in India. Our solution improves subscriber experiences, improves the efficiency of regulatory processes while also positively impacting all stakeholders in the telecom ecosystem. Unlike previous approaches to the problem of UCC, which are all ex-post, our approach to adherence to the regulations is ex-ante. The proposal described in this paper is a primary contributor to the revision of regulations concerning UCC and spam by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The new regulations published in July 2018 were first of a kind in the world and amended the 2010 Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation (TCCCPR), through mandating the use of a blockchain/distributed ledgers in addressing the UCC problem. In this paper, we provide a holistic account of of the projects' evolution from (1) its design and strategy, to (2) regulatory and policy action, (3) country wide implementation and deployment, and (4) evaluation and impact of the work.
With the introduction of smart contacts, Ethereum has become one of the most popular blockchain networks. In the wake of its popularity, an increasing number of Ethereum-based software have been developed. However, the carbon emissions resulting from these software has been pointed out as a global issue. It is necessary to reduce the energy consumed by these software to reduce carbon emissions. Recently, most studies have focused on smart contracts and proposed energy-efficient methods for the development of carbon friendly Ethereum networks. However, in addition to smart contracts, the energy used by client software in Ethereum networks should also be reviewed. This is because the client software performs all functions occurring in the Ethereum network, including smart contracts. Therefore, energy bugs that waste energy in Ethereum client software should be investigated and solved. The first task to enable this is to build an energy bug benchmark of Ethereum client software. This study introduces ECench, an energy bug benchmark of Ethereum client software. ECench includes 507 energy buggy commits from 7 series of client software that are officially operated in the Ethereum network. We carefully collected and manually reviewed them for cleaner commits. A key strength of our benchmark is that it provides eight energy wastage categories, which can serve as a cornerstone for researchers to identify energy waste codes. ECench can provide a valuable starting point for studies on energy reduction and carbon reduction in Ethereum.
How to achieve secure content distribution and accountability in information-centric networking (ICN) is a crucial problem. Subscribers need to verify whether the data came from a reliable source, rather than from a spoofing adversary. Public key cryptography was introduced to achieve a method of authentication that binds the data packet to its owner. In existing prototypes, PKIs, identity-based signatures (IBSs) and recommendation networks are the common schemes used to ensure the authenticity and availability of public keys. However, CA-based PKIs and KGC-based IBSs have been proven to be weak when it comes to resisting security attacks, with recommendation networks being too complex to deploy. In this respect, we designed a novel distributed authentication model as a secure scheme to support public key cryptography. Our model establishes a decentralized public key infrastructure by combining the smart contracts of blockchain and optimized zero-knowledge proof-verifiable presentations by utilizing the DID project, which realizes the management of public key certificates through blockchain and ensures the authenticity and availability of public keys in decentralized infrastructure. Our scheme fundamentally solves the issues of security and feasibility in existing schemes and provides a more scalable solution with respect to authenticating data sources. An experiment demonstrated that our proposal is 20% faster than the original zero knowledge proof scheme in registration.
Open access
Caching and Content Delivery
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Self-sovereign identity (SSI) has gained a large amount of interest. It enables physical entities to retain ownership and control of their digital identities, which naturally forms a conceptual decentralized architecture. With the support of the distributed ledger technology (DLT), it is possible to implement this conceptual decentralized architecture in practice and further bring technical advantages such as privacy protection, security enhancement, high availability. However, developing such a relatively new identity model has high costs and risks with uncertainty. To facilitate the use of the DLT-based SSI in practice, we formulate Self-Sovereign Identity as a Service (SSIaaS), a concept that enables a system, especially a system cluster, to readily adopt SSI as its identity model for identification, authentication, and authorization. We propose a practical architecture by elaborating the service concept, SSI, and DLT to implement SSIaaS platforms and SSI services. Besides, we present an architecture for constructing and customizing SSI services with a set of architectural patterns and provide corresponding evaluations. Furthermore, we demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed architecture in practice with Selfid, an SSIaaS platform based on our proposed architecture.
Lam Duc Nguyen, Arne Bröring, Massimo Pizzol, Petar Popovski
In recent years, industrial manufacturing has undergone massive technological changes that embrace digitalization and automation towards the vision of intelligent manufacturing plants. With the aim of maximizing efficiency and profitability in production, an important goal is to enable flexible manufacturing, both, for the customer (desiring more individualized products) and for the manufacturer (to adjust to market demands). Manufacturing-as-a-service can support this through manufacturing plants that are used by different tenants who utilize the machines in the plant, which are offered by different providers. To enable such pay-per-use business models, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a viable option to establish decentralized trust and traceability. Thus, in this paper, we study potential DLT technologies for efficient and intelligent integration of DLT-based solutions in manufacturing environments. We propose a general framework to adapt DLT in manufacturing, and then we introduce the use case of shared manufacturing, which we utilize to study the communication and computation efficiency of selected DLTs in resource-constrained wireless IoT networks.
Weizhao Tang, Lucianna Kiffer, Giulia Fanti, Ari Juels
Most permissionless blockchain networks run on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which offer flexibility and decentralization at the expense of performance (e.g., network latency). Historically, this tradeoff has not been a bottleneck for most blockchains. However, an emerging host of blockchain-based applications (e.g., decentralized finance) are increasingly sensitive to latency; users who can reduce their network latency relative to other users can accrue (sometimes significant) financial gains. In this work, we initiate the study of strategic latency reduction in blockchain P2P networks. We first define two classes of latency that are of interest in blockchain applications. We then show empirically that a strategic agent who controls only their local peering decisions can manipulate both types of latency, achieving 60\% of the global latency gains provided by the centralized, paid service bloXroute, or, in targeted scenarios, comparable gains. Finally, we show that our results are not due to the poor design of existing P2P networks. Under a simple network model, we theoretically prove that an adversary can always manipulate the P2P network's latency to their advantage, provided the network experiences sufficient peer churn and transaction activity.
<p> Power systems are undergoing rapid transitions to incorporate renewable sources of generation and to combat climate change. Next stage of transitions will lead to a shift from large-scale, centralized systems to networks of smallsized, distributed electricity systems which require distributed or decentralized ledgers for database management for efficient transactions. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) are a form of decentralized ledgers where the transactions (energy, information and money) among various entities are maintained. One such DLT is blockchain technology which offers several advantages. Data recorded in blockchains are difficult to tamper with; have privacy protection; facilitate fast, accurate and real-time settlement of financial transactions. Contemporary research has started focusing on their possible applications in energy systems. State-of-the-art suggests that while business and market aspects have been extensively discussed, the electrical constraints and implementation methodologies have not been adequately addressed. Furthermore, all the reviewed projects have implemented only peer-to-peer transactions that are not scalable. To incorporate the new entities like prosumers, intermicrogrid transactions and interactions with the legacy power grid, new structural and operational frameworks are necessary. The proposed research explores the possibility of developing blockchain enabled smart microgrids (BSMG) with the above frameworks. It aims to build a conceptual framework of BSMG, including the transaction protocols and process flows. It proposes inclusion of network constraints in a three-levelled transaction setup which is executed over a four-layered architecture. Another practical challenge is that BSMGs may be set up on different blockchain platforms. Hence, this paper also proposes implementing Inter-Blockchain Protocol for the first time to include interoperability and communication between different platforms. Finally the performance metrics that will be used to validate the BSMGs are outlined. </p>
Befekadu G. Gebraselase, Bjarne E. Helvik, Yuming Jiang
Bitcoin is the first and the most extensive decentralized electronic cryptocurrency system that uses blockchain technology. It uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to operate without a central authority and propagate system information such as transactions or blockchain updates. The communication between participating nodes is highly relying on the underlying network infrastructure to facilitate a platform. Understanding the impact of peer formation strategies, peer list, and delay is vital in understanding node to node communication and the system performance. Therefore, we performed an extensive study on the transaction characteristics of Bitcoin through a testbed. The analysis shows that peer selection strategies affect the transaction propagation and confirmation times. In particular, better performance, in terms of smaller transaction confirmation time and lower number of temporary forks, may be achieved by adjusting the default nearby-based peer selection strategy.
Matthias Grundmann, Max Baumstark, Hannes Hartenstein
A recent spam wave of IP addresses in the Bitcoin P2P network allowed us to estimate the degree distribution of reachable peers. The resulting distribution indicates that about half of the reachable peers run with Bitcoin Core’s default setting of a maximum of 125 concurrent connections and nearly all connection slots are taken. We validate this result empirically. We use our observations of the spam wave to group IP addresses that belong to the same peer. By doing this grouping, we improve on previous measurements of the number of reachable peers and show that simply counting IP addresses overestimates the number of reachable peers by 15 %. We revalidate previous work by using our observations to estimate the number of unreachable peers.
The bitcoin payment innovation has gained wider interest around the world, but its adoption among the general population has been a challenge. Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer technology works with no central authority or banks, and the transaction management and issuing of bitcoin is carried out collectively by the network. One major debate on bitcoin development and diffusion is the critical matter of nongovernment intervention through adequate policy and regulatory framework and thus hinders people’s active participation (acceptance) in the bitcoin market. Consequently, this study is purposed to examine the role government policy and regulations (moderating impact) can have in driving the acceptance of bitcoin payment from the Chinese perspective. The UTAUT was used as the theoretical basis from which a model was developed for testing. The structural equation model (SEM) through the use of SmartPLS was employed to undertake the analysis. The results have demonstrated that government regulation moderates (significant) the influence of both performance expectancy and infrastructure support on the behavioral acceptance of bitcoin payment. However, government regulation contrary to expectations was not significant in moderating the influence of effort expectancy (EE) and security on the acceptance of bitcoin payments. Additionally, the study discovered that performance expectancy, security, EE, and infrastructure support were significant in encouraging bitcoin behavioral adoption. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings on the development and diffusion of bitcoin technology systems are dissected meticulously.