Blockchain Papers

Simone Fabiano

No abstract is available for this record.

Fitrotun Niswah, Goinpeace Tumbel, Ms Aslinda

The logical consequence of the concept of regional autonomy is the presence of fiscal decentralization. The independence of rural communities in the formulation of programs for the administration of governance and development at the village level becomes the space of urgency of village financial management, because substantially, through the enormous financial support Central Government, Provincial Government and Regency / City Government, the village is required to be able to organize governance and development implementation properly and correctly. Furthermore, increasing public demand for good governance has encouraged the central government and regional governments to implement public accountability. Krina describes accountability as a principle that guarantees that every administration activity can be accounted openly by the perpetrator to those affected by the implementation of the policy. Based on the problem, the paper builds on literature reviews covering various dimensions of Open Government and its applicability to village finance to build the empirical evidence and the frameworks.
\nKeywords—Transparency, Village Finance system, Open 
\nGovernment Partnership

Antonio Legerén-Molina

espanolLos contratos inteligentes o smart contracts, son una realidad que se viene aplicando desde hace tiempo, aunque han ganado relevancia con motivo del descubrimiento de la cadena de bloques. Tanto los smart contracts que se ejecutan de acuerdo con dicha tecnologia como los que tienen lugar fuera de ella responden esencialmente a un mismo esquema: son secuencias de codigo que expresan o implementan acuerdos existentes que pueden producir efectos juridicos cuya peculiaridad esencial es que se ejecutan de manera autonoma. Este articulo se dedica al estudio de los retos juridicos que suscitan los smart contracts con relevancia juridica ejecutados fuera de una cadena de bloques; en concreto, a si son o no contratos, a su proceso de formacion, a la incidencia que tiene en ellos el error, a su prueba en el proceso judicial, asi como a algunos aspectos relativos al pago. A fin de comprender de manera completa los contratos inteligentes, tambien se analiza su significado, su origen historico, su funcionamiento, sus ventajas y las dificultades que presentan. EnglishSmart contracts are a reality that has been applied for decades, although they have gained relevance due to the discovery of the blockchain. Both the smart contracts that are executed according to said technology and those which take place outside of it, respond essentially to the same scheme: they are code sequences which express or implement existing agreements that can produce legal effects whose essential feature is that they are self-executable autonomously. This paper is dedicated to the study of the legal challenges that arise from smart contracts executed outside the blockchain; in particular, to whether or not they are contracts, to their making process, to the incidence that the error has on them, to their proof in the judicial procedure, as well as to some aspects related to payment. In order to get a full understanding of smart contracts, their meaning, their historical origin, their operation, their advantages and their difficulties will be also analyzed.

Matthew Wesley

The information age has dawned upon us through the comprehensive and boundless adoption of the internet; E-banking and smart-phones thus, causing a reliance on online transaction sys-tems reducing the need to handle tangible cash notes. The current monetary system is arguably on the cusp of an evolutionary moment through the adoption of virtualised currencies, this phe-nomenon potentially possesses the next metamorphic step in contemporary global economic money. Cryptocurrency is a radical new innovation, and has become a widely debated topic over the past few years despite this, the topic of the diffusion of innovation and the procedures which the phenomenon needs to overcome have had relatively small amounts of academic attention in comparison to other fields of research. Therefore, this study aims to identify how cryptocurrency is diffusing through the diffusion of innovation model with the intention of identifying the current location of diffusion; this in turn will create a more universalised understanding of the phenomenon in regards to other radical innovations. Due to the nature of the study, the conducted research utilised a qualitative method. Additional-ly, the focus on collecting data which will positively reflect an academic study with the purpose of uncovering information in alignment with the research questions of the study at hand lead to an ‘interpretivist’ methodology. Hence, 10 interviews were conducted of which the interviewees came from a range of different countries allowing the researcher to identify information rich da-ta. This approach allowed for two pathways of research to occur. Firstly, the non/potential in-vestors of which had basic cryptocurrency knowledge and secondly, current users/investors of which had an overall understanding of the cryptocurrency phenomenon. Furthermore, the pri-mary data alongside the utilisation of secondary survey questions and the literature allowed for a wider understanding of the phenomenon. The results of the study unveiled a range of trends and developments in the diffusion process. Accordingly, these findings advance the understanding of the micro, macro and psychological factors which are present in the diffusion of the cryptocurrency innovation. Thereby, the re-search draws attention to how a range of barriers synergistically working together requires a synergistic strategic approach from governments and individuals to surpass the current diffu-sion position and progress further, in turn increasing the chances of mainstream adoption.

Elizaveta Lebedeva

No abstract is available for this record.

Andreas Hanl

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin might revolutionize the economy through enabling peer-to-peer based transactions by abolishing the need for a trusted intermediary. As for now, Bitcoin remains to be the best recognized cryptocurrency, in particular in terms of market capitalization. However, as this paper shows, there are plenty of alternatives. This paper outlines the historical roots which have led to the creation of privately emitted, cryptography based digital currencies. Additionally, this paper discusses future possible hurdles of the development of cryptocurrencies and outlines features which might influence the success of a cryptocurrency. Insights into the beginning of cryptocurrency development are gained by analysis of the publicly available DOACC dataset. The paper does so by providing an overview of the techniques and mechanisms used by cryptocurrencies. It shows that newly created cryptocurrencies tend to be very similar in some properties in the early stages but new features and more diversity developed in more recent years. Additionally, newly created cryptocurrencies tend more and more to create a fixed number of coins before the initial announcement in order to sell these in Initial Coin Offerings. Even when the amount of premining increases over years, it remains at lower levels on the aggregate.

Sofia Anyfantaki, Stelios Arvanitis, Nikolas Topaloglou

No abstract is available for this record.

Stavros Stavroyiannis

Digital currencies and cryptocurrencies have hesitantly started to penetrate the investors, and the next step will be the regulatory risk management framework. We examine the Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall properties for Bitcoin and Ethereum, using GARCH methodology and filtered historical simulation. We find the both Bitcoin and Ethereum are subject to a higher risk, therefore, to higher sufficient buffer and risk capital to cover potential losses.

Dominique Guégan, Marius Frunza

The aim of this research is to explore the econometric features of Bitcoin-USD rates. Various non-Gaussian models are fitted to daily returns in order to underline the unique characteristics of Bitcoin when compared to other more traditional currencies. Market efficiency hypothesis is tested further, and the main reasons for breaches in efficiency are discussed. The main goal of the paper is to assess the presence of bubble effects in this market with customized tests able to detect the timing of various bubbles. The results show that the Bitcoin prices had two episodes of rapid inflation in 2013 and 2017.

Zeki Doğan, Selçuk Buyrukoğlu, Hüseyin Kutbay

Son günlerde ekonomi gündeminde oldukça fazla yer kaplayan Bitcoin faaliyetleri, bazı ülke- ler tarafından yasal olarak kabul edilmekte iken, Türkiye’de ise Bitcoin için tam olarak yasal bir zemin oluşturulamamıştır. Bitcoin’nin en önem- li özelliği ise, vergi cennetleri gibi kapalı bir kutu olması sebebiyle yapılan işlem miktarının belir- lenememesidir. Özellikle son günlerde Bitcoin’in oldukça değer kazanması ve Bitcoin’le yapılan iş- lemlerin kayıt altına alınamaması dolayısıyla mali kontrollerden kaçılabilmesi yatırımcılar açısından Bitcoin’i daha da değerli kılmıştır. Ayrıca Bitco- in’lerin belirli bir sayı ile sınırlı oluşu bu sanal para- yı (kripto parayı) enflasyonun etkilerinden de uzak tutmakta ve gelişmekte olan ülkelerin yerel para birimlerinin Bitcoin karşısında daha az istikrarlı ve finansal krizlere karşı dayanaksız oluşu Bitcoin’i oldukça cazip bir alternatif haline getirmiştir. Bir- çok ekonomist tarafından güven vermeyen bir yatırım ya da ödeme aracı olarak tanımlanan Bit- coin, sadece 2017 yılı içerisinde yüzde 1.700 değer kazanması sebebiyle bu söylemlerin aksine işlem hacmini gün geçtikçe katlamayı başarmıştır. Bun- dan dolayı birçok dünya ülkesi Bitcoin’i yasal bir işlem olarak kabul etme yolunu tercih etmiştir. Böylece yapılan işlemlerin kayıt altına alınabilecek olması Bitcoin ile yapılan işlemler üzerinden de vergi alınabileceği hususunu gündeme getirmiştir. Bu çalışmada, Bitcoin’in tanımına ve gelişimine, özellikleri ve işleyişine, avantaj ve dezavantajla- rına, Türkiye özelinde Bitcoin işlemlerinin vergiye tabi tutulması durumunda hangi gelir unsuru ola- rak kabul edileceği, ne şekilde vergilendirileceği ve muhasebeleştirileceğine ilişkin önerilere yer verilecektir.

Mohammad Jafarinejad, Hamid Sakaki

No abstract is available for this record.

Efe Akinci, Jing Li

This paper studies Granger Causality relations between Bitcoin and 5 stock market indexes which are Japan, Russia, South Korea, Sweden and the United States. The time-period examined is from 2013 to 2017 and all the tests are conducted based on daily data. We analyze this in three different periods, last 5 years (2013-2017), in 2017 and last 3 months of 2017. To estimate the relationship, we use unit root test and Augmented Dickey-Fuller, Lagrange Multiplier, Johansen Cointegration Test and finally Granger Causality Test. After the tests, countries have a same integrated order that exhibits a long-run relationship. In causality, except for Russia, each country has affected the Bitcoin prices and being affected in a different period, especially in the last 3 months of 2017, the impact and popularity of Bitcoin affect too much the stock market in the short-run. As a result, the causation between Bitcoin and stock market indexes shows impact statistically significant in the 2017 year. The importance of cryptocurrency and popularity not as much as hype like late 2017 in 2018, but we think that cryptocurrencies are one of the major currencies that affect economical world very deeply.

Sajda Qureshi, Jason Xiong

The rapid rise of cryptocurrency adoption appears to effect the ability of people to improve their lives. In this paper, the most ubiquitous cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is used to investigate effects on financial inclusion and human development. The findings in this paper show a strong positive correlation between bitcoin transactions and human development, between bitcoin transactions and financial inclusion and between financial inclusion and human development. The Bitcoin effect is identified as having a cyclical relationship on financial inclusion and human development. While the Bitcoin effect has a very positive effect on the global economy, this paper uses these results to investigate what business models are enabled through the Bitcoin effect. Cluster analysis is carried out to identify business models that are relevant to the country categories they represent. Three business models are identified from the Bitcoin effect that relate to the country categories they represent. These are miners, innovators and wallets. This paper’s contribution is in discovering and describing the key characteristics of the Bitcoin effect and the business models it generates globally.

George S. Geis

A healthy system of shareholder voting is crucial for any regime of corporate law. The proper allocation of governance power is subject to debate, of course, but the fitness of the underlying mechanism used to stuff the ballot boxes should concern everyone. Proponents of shareholder power, for instance, cannot argue for greater control if the legitimacy of the resulting tallies is suspect. And those who advocate for board deference do so on the bedrock of authority that reliable shareholder elections supposedly confer.\nUnfortunately, our trust in the corporate franchise was forged during an era that predates modern complexities in the way that stock ownership is now tracked and traded. We do not trace shares, and any clear-eyed look at the conferral of voting rights via back-end stock clearing practices is unsettling. Evidence of the various entanglements crops up from time to time—in the form of questionable voting outcomes or disputes about standing for shareholder lawsuits—but the underlying problems are systemic, not episodic. Our stock clearing system is a kludge.\nThis is an important moment for corporate law, however, because new technology is approaching a state where clearing and settlement systems may soon support traceable shares. The rise of distributed ledgers and blockchain technology is poised to allow for specific share identification and precise records of share provenance. This may sound like an uninteresting technical sideshow, but as this Article will argue, the impact of traceable shares on corporate law will be profound. It will change the structure of shareholder lawsuits, alter the allocation of corporate governance rights, and require lawmakers to rethink fundamental principles of shareholder responsibility for corporate misdeeds.

René Oostewechel, Yves-Laurent Régis, Jan Brouwers, J.W.P.M. Vogels · 6 authors

This report provides the technical results of a dry run transporting mangoes and avocados from Haiti to the US, Canada and The Netherlands. For both fruits, temperature has been registered from the moment of harvest till arrival at all destinations. Also logistical data related to the planning and preparation of the test, time needed for each step, and quality of fruits has been analysed. After the introduction chapter, technical data are provided for both mango and avocado in the next two chapters, with a concluding last chapter afterwards that provides overall analysis, lessons learned and recommendations. Use of the QR codes has allowed a transparent and digital process where all chain partners have open access to all information. The report presents a block chain test at limited level and actual implementation and scaling of block chain procedures might still need refinement like the longer ripening and/or storage before retail distribution.

Eva Micheler, Anna Whaley

No abstract is available for this record.

Alastair Berg, Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

No abstract is available for this record.

Manuj Subhankar Sahoo, Pallav Kumar Baruah

After the introduction of Bitcoin, blockchain has made its way through numerous applications and been adopted by various communities. A number of implementations exist today providing a platform to carry on business with ease. However, it is observed the scalability of blockchain still remains an issue. Also, none of the framework can claim the ability to handle Big Data and support to perform analytics, which is an important and integral facet of current world of business. We propose HBasechainDB, a scalable blockchain-based tamper-proofed Big Data store for distributed computing. HBasechainDB adds the blockchain characteristics of immutability and decentralization to the HBase database in the Hadoop ecosystem. Linear scaling is achieved by pushing computation to the data nodes. HBasechainDB comes with inherent property of efficient big data processing as it is built on Hadoop ecosystem. HBasechainDB also makes adaptation of blockchain very easy for those organizations whose business logic are already existing on Hadoop ecosystem. HBasechainDB can be used as a tamper-proof, decentralized, distributed Big Data store.

Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Jiangang Shu, Kan Yang · 5 authors

As a very attractive computing paradigm, cloud computing makes it possible for resource-constrained users to enjoy cost-effective and flexible resources of diversity. Considering the untrustworthiness of cloud servers and the data privacy of users, it is necessary to encrypt the data before outsourcing it to the cloud. However, the form of encrypted storage also poses a series of problems, such as: How can users search over the outsourced data? How to realize user-side verifiability of search results to resist malicious cloud servers? How to enable server-side verifiability of outsourced data to check malicious data owners? How to achieve payment fairness between the user and the cloud without introducing any third party? Towards addressing these challenging issues, in this paper, we introduce TKSE, a trustworthy keyword search scheme over encrypted data without any third party, trusted or not. In TKSE, the encrypted data index based on digital signature allows a user to search over the outsourced encrypted data and check whether the search result returned by the cloud fulfills the pre-specified search requirements. In particular, for the first time, TKSE realizes server-side verifiability which protects honest cloud servers from being framed by malicious data owners in the data storage phase. Furthermore, blockchain technologies and hash functions are used to enable payment fairness of search fees without introducing any third party even if the user or the cloud is malicious. Our security analysis and performance evaluation indicate that TKSE is secure and efficient and it is suitable for cloud computing.

Philip Saunders

No abstract is available for this record.

Oleh Stanislavovych Savenko

The work out the developed method of interaction of components of distributed multi-level system of detection of malicious software on the basis of decentralized and self-organized architecture in local networks. Its feature is the synthesis of its requirements of distribution, decentralization, multilevel and self-organization. This allows you to use it autonomously. The basis of the distributed distributed system is its structural components, which are represented by autonomous software modules that can be in different states. The transition between module states is based on a defined set of transitions. Interaction and communication between autonomous software modules is based on their presence in certain states during operation and is determined by the rules of the developed method. Distributed system is a responsive system that will monitor selected events. Each program module places a resident mechanism, the motive mechanisms for the transition between states, the transitions between which are given by subsets of transitions, the data for which will be formed using the technologies of artificial intelligence. In addition, the feature of the components of the system is the same organization, which allows the exchange of knowledge in the middle of the system, which, unlike the known systems, allows us to use the knowledge gained by separate parts of our system in other parts. The developed system allows to fill it with subsystems of detection of various types of malicious software in local area networks. The method of interaction of components of a distributed multilevel detection system of malicious software provides a procedure for communication between parts of the system and the exchange of knowledge between them. It will be used to organize the interaction of system components and maintain its integrity. In order to solve the problem of the direct detection of malicious software in local area networks, methods will be applied that will be applied to the lower level of the system, which will include the architectural features of the distributed system and the technology of detecting the malicious software-based software. However, the developed method of interaction includes the ability to determine the state of a distributed multi-level system, depending on the states of individual modules, and on its basis, in accordance with it will be decided on the further operation of the system as a whole and its configuration. The method regulates the actions of the part of the system that relates to the bundling software of the distributed system. The conducted experiments on the use of the developed distributed system showed the possibility of attracting to the detection of the malicious software of computing power of 78 # 24 (2018) other hosts of the local network. The obtained results of experiments show an increase in the reliability of the detection of malicious software.

Rafail Ostrovsky, Giuseppe Persiano, Daniele Venturi, Ivan Visconti

No abstract is available for this record.

Concha Artola, María Gil Izquierdo, Javier J. Pérez, Alberto Urtasun · 6 authors

In highly decentralized countries the subnational dimension of economic developments acquires particular relevance, given the existence of potential spillover effects across jurisdictions or the existence of asymmetric impacts of national-wide macroeconomic shocks. At the same time, though, the analysis of sub-national macroeconomic and public finance short-term developments tend to be restricted in many countries due to data limitations. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the available data for monitoring macroeconomic and public finance developments at the regional level in Spain, and to present some examples of its practical use in real time. After a thoroughly review of the publicly available information, we identify two key informational gaps in this area of conjunctural analysis, namely: (i) the lack of homogeneous and official quarterly measures of aggregate regional economic activity (in particular, real GDP), and (ii) the limited sample size of time series pertaining to government budgetary developments at the regional level.

Grany Mmatsatsi Senyolo, Edilegnaw Wale, G. F. Ortmann

The aim of this study has been to analyse the value chain of African leafy vegetables in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. This was done by identifying the prominent value chain actors, institutions governing the chain, the infrastructural endowments, key factors and challenges affecting the success or failure of the value chains for African leafy vegetables. Relationships among the value chain actors were weak, with transactions based mostly on spot markets. While smallholder farmers attain high gross margins, their intention to take part in the mainstream markets are prevented by lack of technical advice on production, lack of packaging and processing services, poor infrastructure, deficiency of contractual agreements between actors, and lack of access to finance. Although producers currently attain relatively higher gross margins, more benefits might be realized if government services (such as training, seed production and distribution) could either be decentralized or privatized. Future policy interventions should focus on promoting value addition along the African leafy vegetable chain, provision of cold storage facilities by municipalities closer to smallholder farmers in the rural areas and this will stabilize farm gate prices to encourage continuation of production.