Blockchain Papers

Jan Herczyński

No abstract is available for this record.

Maria Rippa

Introduction. The state of financial provision of social protection at the expense of budgetary funds is an important issue for each state. Purpose. The purpose of the article is to scientifically substantiate the theoretical foundations of social protection of the population and the sources of its financial support. Results. Expenditures on social protection of the population occupy a significant place in the state expenditures of Ukraine. Through the system of social protection during 2010–2016, about 23% of GDP was allocated. A tendency towards a decrease in their share (in 2016 – 18,2%) was revealed. Budget financing takes the lead in the system of sources of financial support. Due to the budget system, 10.8% is distributed, while in the structure of total expenditures of the Consolidated Budget expenditures on social protection and social security make up 59,6%. A comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of volumes and structure of budget financing during 2007–2017 was conducted. A tendency towards annual growth of expenditures on social protection has been established, and it has been found that their growth rates during the investigated period significantly exceeded GDP growth rates. A significant level of centralization is established. Such a situation requires the optimization of budgetary expenditures on social security and social security and the modernization of sources of their financial support. Conclusions. The main vectors for improving the budget financing of social protection and social security in Ukraine are: – decentralization of budget financing of social protection and social security; – provision of social transfers based on the verification of the property and financial status of the recipients; – the targeted nature of social assistance; – monetization of subsidies; – optimization of the state policy in the labor market with a view to its rapid adaptation to structural changes taking place in the economy; since socially-market economy is aimed not only at social protection, but also the creation of such an organizational and economic mechanism that would contribute to reducing the part of the population that needs state paternalistic care (social assistance).

Alvaro Gonzalez Rivas, Mariya Tsyganova, Eliza Mik

Many expect Smart Contracts (SC’s) to disrupt the way contracts are done implying that SC have the potential to affect all commercial relationships. SC’s are automatization tools; therefore, proponents claim that SC’s can reduce transaction costs through disintermediation and risk reduction. This is an over-simplification of the role of relationships, contract law, and risk. We believe there is a gap in the understanding of the capabilities of SC’s. With that in mind we seek to define an amorphous term and clarify the capabilities of SC’s, intending to facilitate future SC research. We’ve examined the legal, technical, and IS views from an academic and practitioner’s perspective. We conclude that SC’s have taken many forms, becoming a suitcase word for any sort of code stored on a blockchain, including the embodiment of contractual terms; and that the immutable nature of SC’s is a barrier to their adoption in uncertain and multi-contextual environments.

А. В. Смирнов, Nikolay Teslya

No abstract is available for this record.

Aditya Pradana, Goh Ong, Yogan Jaya, Ali A. Mohammed

In Malaysia, a new regulation of traffic offences demerit points has been over a debate. Therefore, a blockchain model is formulated to solve this issue. It serves a purpose to be a Proof of Work (PoW) of a blockchain system. This model contains application layer and blockchain layer with smart contract inside. The smart contracts act as a conditional filter which follows the regulation rules. It contains three contracts starting from the declaration of each offence’s demerit points and fines until the penalties when a certain amount of demerit points is collected, including revocation of driver license. The contracts will be automatically executed when such conditions are fulfilled. A transaction schema is also designed to match the schema of a traffic offence system. This model is deployed in online environment with two servers synced to each other to prove the decentralized characteristic of blockchain. It is developed using NodeJS while preserving JSON format for transaction between server and client. A user interface is also provided as a simulation media where a traffic officer can input offences and send it to blockchain server while public users or the driver itself can check the status of the driver license recorded on the blockchain. Government officer can monitor the records through a dashboard analytics provided which contains graphs and charts based on the records. This interface is used as media to do evaluation which produces satisfying results. The evaluation shows that the smart contracts are executed properly as compared to real regulations.

Jakub J. Szczerbowski

Smart contracts are computer programs executed on virtual machines, which are used to regulate relationships between the subjects of law. They allow parties to foresee, with a high degree of certainty, how will the contractual relationship develop and by the use of blockchain technology they provide a high degree of certainty. It has been conjured that smart contracts will offer significantly lower transaction costs in relation to traditional contracts. The paper analyzes this proposition and finds that not only are the gains doubtful, but also that in some cases transaction costs may be significantly higher.

Vasyl Rossikhin, M. Yu. Burdin, Oleg Mykhalskyi

The aim of the article is a comparative legal study of laws and regulations that determine the legal principles for the regulation of cryptocurrency circulation in some foreign countries and in Ukraine and, on this basis, a definition of ways to improve domestic legislation in this sphere. The subject of the study is an interrogation of legal regulation issues of cryptocurrency circulation in Ukraine. Methodology. The study is based on a legal comparison of the regulation of cryptocurrency circulation in Ukraine and in foreign countries. Based on a comparative legal study of certain provisions of Ukrainian legislation, the possibilities and limits of implementation of positive foreign experience in this sphere are determined. The results of the study revealed that to implement foreign experience for the legal regulation of cryptocurrency circulation, it is necessary to postpone the final transition to a floating rate regime by reinforcing state interference. Moreover, it is necessary to strengthen currency control not only for currency transactions with cryptocurrency but also for the activities of entities that determine the state policy on cryptocurrency regulation, as well as operate respectively using instruments provided for by the regulations of the current legislation. Practical implications. The positive experience of the formation of the foreign exchange market in other countries demonstrates that the gradual transition to cryptocurrency circulation is the beginning of the natural market rate, the balance of payments and gradual liberation of the national economy from the pressure of administrative and corruption restrictions. Relevance/originality. The legal analysis of the regulation of cryptocurrency circulation in Ukraine and the definition of problems is the basis for developing the most promising directions for the development of domestic legislation in this sphere.

Peder Østbye

No abstract is available for this record.

Alexander Brauneis, Roland Mestel, Ryan Riordan, Erik Theissen

We study trading of Bitcoin against US dollar (BTCUSD) on exchanges in three continents, Bitfinex, Bitstamp and Coinbase Pro. We use a high frequency dataset that contains transactions and order book information. The BTCUSD market is highly liquid in terms of bid-ask spreads and order book depth. While spreads are even lower than in equity markets, prices are not integrated across exchanges. Persistent differences exist between the three exchanges in terms of trade prices and posted prices often violating no-arbitrage assumptions. The liquidity of the Bitcoin exchanges is predominantly determined by local factors and is essentially independent of liquidity in equity and FX markets. This suggests that despite the virtual nature of Bitcoin, local jurisdictional factors affect the flow of capital between low and high price jurisdictions.

Authors unavailable

Bitcoin, the term coined by a person or group pseudonymously called Satoshi Nakamoto, is considered the world's first decentralized digital currency. Since its release in 2009, there has been tremendous growth in market value of Bitcoin, with anonymity and distributed nature removing the need for any central authority being the driving force for its popularity. The technology is relatively new and complex for a layman to understand. However, there has been enough hype about it which has drawn the attention of researchers and nemesis alike to expose vulnerabilities in the system as well as explore the future perspectives of this new concept. This paper analyses major components of Bitcoin and related concepts of Blockchain, highlighting a few security concerns/ motivation to explore the future perspectives of this technology which is being considered analogous to the Internet revolution.

Anthony Tapiwa Mazikana

No abstract is available for this record.

Pisso Nseke

Low transaction cost, low level of entry, worldwide quickness, and anonymity of the transactions is the main advantage of cryptocurrency use, making it an attractive transaction media for African countries. At the same time, there are certain drawbacks of it in terms of strong volatility, lack of user-friendliness and its usage in crime. The conceptual paper explores the use of cryptocurrencies, and its potential in the African context. The research paper utilizes UTAUT 2 Model and adds key constructs for analyzing the adoption of new technology by Africans. These additional constructs include hedonistic motivation, habit and price cost. Key factors were considered in the case of African countries in order to analyze whether cryptocurrency is essential for economic growth in some economic countries. The application of UTAUT model in the case of Arica shows that performance, effort expectations, social influence are favorable for African countries while the influence of hedonic motivations and price is unfavorable for acceptance of cryptocurrencies in African countries.

Wang Yu-xiao, Juntao Gao

In Bitcoin financial system, a user’s privacy is supposed to be protected by means of anonymity. However, the anonymity makes illegal trades possible because nobody is able to reveal the real identities of the illegal users. In this paper, we propose a regulation scheme based on the ciphertext-policy hierarchical attribute-based encryption (CP-HABE). In the scheme, users’ identities are encrypted by using access policy and are contained in their transaction. A type of user is defined as the dependable regulation node, which is responsible for the regulation of transactions and encrypted identities. A new signature algorithm instead of the elliptic curve signature is adopted to generate wallet key pairs, this establishes a connection between wallet addresses and encrypted identities. When a transaction is doubted to involve illegal activities, the authorized regulation nodes are capable of revealing the users’ real identities and add the illegal identities to a public blacklist. Our system is based on a new CP-HABE scheme which is proved to be secure against chosen-plaintext attack in the standard model under the Bilinear Diffie–Hellman Exponent assumption. Finally, we give a performance analysis of our system. The proposed regulation system can reveal criminals’ identities undertaking illegal activities.

Urban J. Jermann

No abstract is available for this record.

Marcel Thum

No abstract is available for this record.

Önder Gürcan, Alejandro Ranchal Pedrosa, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni

Bitcoin-like blockchains do not envisage any specific mechanism to avoid unfairness for the users. Hence, unfair situations, like impossibility of cancellation of transactions explicitly or having unconfirmed transactions, reduce the satisfaction of users dramatically, and, as a result, they may leave the system entirely. Such a consequence would impact significantly the security and the sustainability of the blockchain. Based on this observation, in this paper, we focus on explicit cancellation of transactions to improve the fairness for users. We propose a novel scheme with which it is possible to cancel a transaction, whether it is confirmed in a block or not, under certain conditions. We show that the proposed scheme is superior to the existing workarounds and is implementable for Bitcoin-like blockchains. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Éric Ghysels, Giang Nguyen

We examine price discovery and liquidity provision in the secondary market for bitcoin—an asset with a high level of speculative trading. Based on BTC-e’s full limit order book over the 2013–2014 period, we find that order informativeness increases with order aggressiveness within the first 10 tiers, but that this pattern reverses in outer tiers. In a high volatility environment, aggressive orders seem to be more attractive to informed agents, but market liquidity migrates outward in response to the information asymmetry. We also find support to the Markovian learning assumption often made in theoretical models of limit order markets.

Kartik Hegadekatti

No abstract is available for this record.

Jonathan Taylor Heinecke

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are currently dominating the field of distributed systems research and development. The Ethereum blockchain is emerging as a popular DLT platform for developing software and applications. Several challenges in Ethereum software development are the complex nature of working with DLTs, the lack of tools for developing on this DLT, and poor documentation of concepts for DLT developers. In this thesis, we provide building blocks that reduce the complexity of DLT operations and lower the barrier to entry into DLT development. We do this by providing a Node.js library, Ethereum-Easy, that simplifies operations on Ethereum. We implement this library into a sample application called Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) and built a continuous delivery, continuous integration pipeline for deploying Ethereum code (Jenk-Thereum). This thesis aims to make development on DLTs easier, quicker, and less expensive.

Liudmila Zavolokina, Pascal Mehrwald, Isabell M. Welpe, Helmut Krcmar

No abstract is available for this record.

Viktor Atterlönn

No abstract is available for this record.

Hans-Georg Fill, Felix Haerer

Blockchains permit to store information in a tamper-resistant and irrevocable manner by reverting to distributed computing and cryptographic technologies. The primary purpose is to keep track of the ownership of tangible and intangible assets. In the paper at hand we apply these concepts and technologies to the domain of knowledge management. Based on the explication of knowledge in the form of enterprise models this permits the application of so-called knowledge proofs for a. enabling the transparent monitoring of knowledge evolution, b. tracking the provenance, ownership, and relationships of knowledge in an organization, c. establishing delegation schemes for knowledge management, and d. ensuring the existence of patterns in models via zero-knowledge proofs. To validate the technical feasibility of the approach a first technical implementation is described and applied to a fictitious use case.

Jan Mendling, Gero Decker, Richard Hull, Hajo A. Reijers · 5 authors

This paper summarizes a panel discussion at the 15th International Conference on Business Process Management. The panel discussed to what extent the emergence of recent technologies including machine learning, robotic process automation, and blockchain will reduce the human factor in business process management. The panel discussion took place on 14 September, 2017, at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. Jan Mendling served as a chair; Gero Decker, Richard Hull, Hajo Reijers, and Ingo Weber participated as panelists. The discussions emphasized the impact of emerging technologies at the task level and the coordination level. The major challenges that the panel identified relate to employment, technology acceptance, ethics, customer experience, job design, social integration, and regulation.

Gaby G. Dagher, Praneeth Babu Marella, Matea Milojkovic, Jordan Mohler

Voting is a fundamental part of democratic systems; it gives individuals in a community the faculty to voice their opinion. In recent years, voter turnout has diminished while concerns regarding integrity, security, and accessibility of current voting systems have escalated. E-voting was introduced to address those concerns; however, it is not cost-effective and still requires full supervision by a central authority. The blockchain is an emerging, decentralized, and distributed technology that promises to enhance different aspects of many industries. Expanding e-voting into blockchain technology could be the solution to alleviate the present concerns in e-voting. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based voting system, named BroncoVote, that preserves voter privacy and increases accessibility, while keeping the voting system transparent, secure, and cost-effective. BroncoVote implements a university-scaled voting framework that utilizes Ethereum’s blockchain and smart contracts to achieve voter administration and auditable voting records. In addition, BroncoVote utilizes a few cryptographic techniques, including homomorphic encryption, to promote voter privacy. Our implementation was deployed on Ethereum’s Testnet to demonstrate usability, scalability, and efficiency.