Blockchain Papers

Francesco Fusco, Maria Ilaria Lunesu, Filippo Eros Pani, Andrea Pinna

No abstract is available for this record.

Purva Grover, Arpan Kumar Kar, P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan

No abstract is available for this record.

Yunpeng Wang, Hui Zhao, Tao Li, Fan Zhang · 5 authors

The blockchain architecture with distributed and decentralized as the main features often face problems such as long transaction confirmation time, low system throughput, and waste of computing resources. These problems are exactly what the traditional centralized architecture can solve. At the same time, in order to improve the distributed consensus efficiency, consensus algorithms such as Proof of stake, delegated proof of stake, proof of space, proof of authority, and PBFT have emerged from Bitcoin's Pow consensus mechanism. These consensus algorithms have their own advantages and Disadvantages. Disadvantages, such as Pos, DPos can improve transaction efficiency, PBFT can improve the fairness of voting, but at the same time POS also bring benefits and voting rights to hold a lot of user tilt issues to a small number of tokens, PBFT brings about a low cost of malicious user attacks and other issues. In order to effectively take advantage of the high security, high reliability of the blockchain, and high efficiency of traditional centralized architectures, and fully utilizing existing consensus mechanisms, this paper presents an innovative hybrid blockchain approach, which mixed the blockchain architecture, Hybrid-chain, consists of the following three type nodes in the architecture: service center nodes responsible for efficient transaction confirmation, dynamic transaction verification nodes participating in transactions, and random verification nodes responsible for transaction fairness verification. On the consensus mechanism, the consensus algorithm selects the corresponding consensus mechanism according to the transaction characteristics. Experiments show that compared with the traditional blockchain architecture, hybrid chain has obvious performance advantages in transaction sending, transaction confirmation and block information storage, which can greatly reduce the transaction sending time by 96%, shorten the confirmation time by 95%, and reduce the number of 79. % Block information storage space, etc.

Matthias Helble, Zulfiqar Ali, Jera Lego

To what extent do the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank remain central today and how much influence do they still wield in shaping the global agenda? While several studies have traced the development of various intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), charting their growth and influence in international affairs, and assessing their prospects, few if any have compared IGOs across various fields. This paper aims to fill this gap by taking a closer look at three different policy fields to better understand the current architecture of global governance, the centrality of IGOs, the role of new and other actors, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of this "new" architecture. The authors find that, first, the emergence of new private players has significantly eroded the centrality of IGOs such that the course of global governance in health, trade, and development finance has changed irreversibly. Second, regional arrangements have overtaken global ones and nonstate actors have assumed more prominent roles. Third, this multiplicity of powerful players has led to some positive outcomes but also greater inefficiencies and redundancies. Fourth, developed countries have been pivotal in eroding the centrality of IGOs, but developing countries are taking on a greater role in global governance. Fifth, the new architecture can be described as one of diversification in global health governance, fragmentation in global trade, and variation in multilateral development finance. Global governance in the 21st century is thus characterized by a proliferation of actors and a decentralization of authority, an erosion of IGO centrality accompanied by a greater role for nonstate actors, developing countries, and by increased regionalism. Depending on the sector of governance, its inherent aims, and the nature of the actors involved, the new architecture may be one of variation, fragmentation, or diversification. While this new architecture is complex and might possibly lead to inefficiencies and redundancies, it allows a greater number of actors to participate, making it more representative of the current world order and making it possible to mobilize more resources to promote development.

Darío Cestau, Burton Hollifield, Dan Li, Norman Schürhoff

The effective functioning of the municipal bond market is crucial for the provision of public services, as it is the largest capital market for state and municipal issuers. Prior research has documented tax, credit, liquidity, and segmentation effects in municipal bonds. Recent regulatory initiatives to improve transparency have made granular trade data available to researchers, rendering the municipal bond market a natural laboratory for the study of financial intermediation, asset pricing in decentralized markets, and local public finance. Trade-by-trade studies have found large trading costs, contemporaneous price dispersion, and other deviations from the law of one price. More research is required to understand optimal market design and the impact of post-crisis regulation, sustainability, and financial technology.

Ai Deng

No abstract is available for this record.

Iria Giuffrida, Fredric I. Lederer, Nicolas Vermeys

first met when we, along with Ed Imwinkelried and Fran Gilligan, were colleagues on the faculty of what today is The Judge Advocate General's School and Legal Center.We

Marco Dell’Erba

No abstract is available for this record.

Thomas S. Umlauft

No abstract is available for this record.

Juri Mattila, Timo Seppälä

Over the last decade, blockchain technology has facilitated a method by which a network of equipotent and equally privileged peers can jointly maintain and edit databases in an entirely decentralized manner, without any kind of an intermediary exhibiting unilateral control. As a consequence it has enabled the creation of a new type of multi-sided platform architecture with distributed governance. As the different platform provision functions are opened to free market competition rather than monopolized by a single entity, the monopoly-like pricing structure typical of platforms is overhauled. Instead, blockchain-enabled distributed platforms appear to share value more evenly between the all the different market sides connected to the platform. Our analysis reveals that blockchain technology adds new considerations to how multi-sided platform architectures should be perceived and analyzed.

Samvit Jain, Edward W. Felten, Steven Goldfeder

Online and offline storage of digital currency present conflicting risks for a Bitcoin exchange. While bitcoins stored on online devices are continually vulnerable to malware and other network-based attacks, offline reserves are endangered on access, as transferring bitcoins requires the exposure of otherwise encrypted and secured private keys. In particular, fluctuations in customer demand for deposited bitcoin require exchanges to periodically refill online storage systems with bitcoins held offline. This raises the natural question of what upper limit on online reserves minimizes losses due to theft over time. In this article, we investigate this optimization problem, developing a model that predicts the optimal ceiling on online reserves, given average rates of deposits, withdrawals, and theft. We evaluate our theory with an event-driven simulation of the setup, and find that our equation yields a numerical value for the threshold that differs by less than 2% from experimental results. We conclude by considering open questions regarding more complex storage architectures.

Volodymyr Babich, Gilles Hilary

No abstract is available for this record.

Luis Ibáñez, John Domingue, Pascal Molli

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the WWW 2018 3rd International Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers (LD-DL). We envision the workshop as a forum for researchers and practitioners from Distributed Ledgers and Linked Data to come together to discuss common challenges; propose solutions to shortcomings of existing architectures; and identify synergies for joint initiatives. The ultimate goal is the creation of a Web of Interoperable Ledgers. We received 6 submissions from all around the world. We evaluated them regarding relevance, quality, and novelty, selecting 3 short papers and 1 long paper (66% acceptance rate) --ScienceMiles - Digital currency for researchers--Can Blockchains and Linked Data Advance Taxation? --A distributed database with explicit semantics and chained RDF graphs--When trust saves energy: A Reference Framework for Proof of Trust (PoT) Blockchains. We hope that you will find the tutorial program interesting, providing you with a valuable opportunity to learn and share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.

Michał R. Hoffman

Permissioned distributed ledgers (permissioned blockchains) supporting smart contracts that automatically adjust accounts and coordinate records among multiple parties, present a valid platform opportunity for establishing a fully digital tax regime. We propose a permissioned blockchain-based system aimed at eliminating some of the losses that tax authorities globally are currently struggling with. These multi-billion flaws manifest themselves as the tax gap, or the inability to collect the full amount that is owed by a given entity to a particular authority. Illegitimate or inefficient tax operations could be prevented with a global suite of smart contracts deployed on top of a consortium distributed ledger with on-chain governance. We also introduce the vision for a VAT Invoice 2.0 modelled as a Linked Data document. A tax reference generated by a smart contract would allow anyone with the right permissions to immediately investigate the entire commercial chain for any taxable item on an ontology-based tax document.

Huayun Tang, Yingying Jiao, Butian Huang, Changting Lin · 6 authors

Blockchain technologies have the potential to establish novel financial service infrastructures and reshape numerous fields. A blockchain is essentially a distributed ledger maintained by a set of peers (i.e., trading nodes) that do not fully trust each other. A key challenge that blockchain faces is to precisely classify the blockchain peers into categories with respect to their behavior patterns, which will not only enable deeper insights into the blockchain network but also facilitate more effective maintenance of the various peers (in private chains). In this paper, we introduce and formulate the problem of behavior pattern classification in blockchain networks and propose a novel deep-learning-based method, termedPeerClassifier, to address the problem. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formally define the problem of peer behavior classification in blockchain networks. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate thatPeerClassifieris significantly more effective than the existing conventional methods.

Valentine Vishnevsky, Viktoriia Chekina

The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the accelerated development of cyber-physical technologies lead to essential changes in national tax systems and international taxation. The main areas in which taxation meets cyber-physical technologies are digitalization, robotization, M2M and blockchain technologies. Each of these areas has its own opportunities and problems. Three main approaches towards possible solutions for these new problems are identified. The first is to try to apply taxation to new cyber-physical technologies and products of their application. This approach includes the OECD's Action 1 Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting. It also includes the spread of traditional taxes on new objects -personal data, cryptocurrencies, imputed income of robots. The second is to replace digital transactions and shortfalls in revenues by traditional objects of taxation in the form of tangible assets and people and / or increase tax pressure (including by improving tax administration with use of Big Data) and the degree of progressiveness of taxes already levied on such objects. The third approach is to set a course on building a new tax space with smart taxes based on real-time principles, smart contracts and Big Data. This implies a transition to automatic taxation using blockchain technologies, which focus on the functions of applying distributed ledgers of business transactions in realtime. At present, the general trends are such that the first and second are prevalent, which is manifested in an increase in the relative importance of property, sales and employment taxes. Concerning the third approach, any movement in this direction is still facing a number of technical and other problems and is thus being discussed mainly at the conceptual level

C. Kouzinopoulos, Γεώργιος Σπαθούλας, Konstantinos M. Giannoutakis, Konstantinos Votis · 9 authors

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that became popular as the foundational block of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Over the past few years it has seen a rapid growth, both in terms of research and commercial usage. Due to its decentralized nature and its inherent use of cryptography, Blockchain provides an elegant solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem and is thus a good candidate for use in areas that require a decentralized consensus among untrusted peers, eliminating the need for a central authority. Internet of Things is a technology paradigm where a multitude of small devices, including sensors, actuators and RFID tags, are interconnected via a common communications medium to enable a whole new range of tasks and applications. However, existing IoT installations are often vulnerable and prone to security and privacy concerns. This paper studies the use of Blockchain to strengthen the security of IoT networks through a resilient, decentralized mechanism for the connected home that enhances the network self-defense by safeguarding critical security-related data. This mechanism is developed as part of the Safe-Guarding Home IoT Environments with Personalised Real-time Risk Control (GHOST) project.

Simon Albrecht, Stefan Reichert, J. Schmid, Jens Strüker · 6 authors

This case study analyzes the impact of theory-based factors on the implementation of different blockchain technologies in use cases from the energy sector. We construct an integrated research model based on the Diffusion of Innovations theory, institutional economics and the Technology-Organization-Environment framework. Using qualitative data from in-depth interviews, we link constructs to theory and assess their impact on each use case. Doing so we can depict the dynamic relations between different blockchain technologies and the energy sector. The study provides insights for decision makers in electric utilities, and government administrations.

Tomer Golomb, Yisroel Mirsky, Yuval Elovici

Due to their rapid growth and deployment, Internet of things (IoT) devices have become a central aspect of our daily lives. However, they tend to have many vulnerabilities which can be exploited by an attacker. Unsupervised techniques, such as anomaly detection, can help us secure the IoT devices. However, an anomaly detection model must be trained for a long time in order to capture all benign behaviors. This approach is vulnerable to adversarial attacks since all observations are assumed to be benign while training the anomaly detection model.

Benjamin Fabian, Tatiana Ermakova, Jonas Krah, Ephan Lando · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Alistair Milne

Abstract This paper documents inconsistent terminologies and misleading analogies in current discussions of digital money and payments. It offers a more consistent framework for understanding the potential of technological innovation in providing the functions of money and payments: as media of exchange, stores of value, and units of account and the implications of cryptographic technologies underpinning cryptocurrencies for the future of money and payments. These could support efficiency gains in money and payments, but decentralization is not inherent to their application. Radical reform leading to improved economic outcomes is conceivable, but not through disruptive displacement of existing institutional arrangements.

Saide Zhu, Wei Li, Hong Li, Chunqiang Hu · 5 authors

The past three years have seen the rapid increase of Bitcoin difficulty, which has led to a substantial variance in solo mining. As a result, miners tend to join a large open pool to get a more stable reward. Nowadays, mining pools take up over 98% of Bitcoins total computation power. In a sense, this is a manifestation of Bitcoin that tends to be centralized. Thus, researchers have shown an increased interest in pool mining payoff and security. The purpose of this paper is to review and summarize recent research in Bitcoin pool mining system. We first introduce several common reward distribution schemes, and analyze their advantages and disadvantages with some improvement mechanisms; In the second section, to address pool security problems, we examined the practical utility of some existing and potential attack strategies. To study those malicious attack in details, several defense methods are collected. Finally, we make an outlook on Bitcoin future.

Dominik Stroukal

Bitcoin as a payment system indisputably offers an advantage over the government currencies in transaction time and costs. On the other hand the moneyness of Bitcoin itself is questioned. This paper analyzes Bitcoin from the Austrian perspective and compares the qualities of Bitcoin with qualities of good money in order to find out whether Bitcoin could serve as money. The examined properties are portability, storability, divisibility, recognizability, homogeneity and scarcity. Moreover it examines the consistency of Bitcoin emergence as a medium of exchange with Mises' regression theorem and identifies the non-monetary value of Bitcoin. The result of this theoretical analysis shows that Bitcoin's properties can facilitate the functions of money.

Guillaume Haeringer, Hanna Hałaburda

Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency invented in 2008 is both puzzling and inspiring. High volatility of its price is challenges financial analysts as well as scholars. We look at the incentive mechanisms that make Bitcoin work, and we discuss current and potential uses of Bitcoin and technologies inspired by it.