Blockchain Papers

Marcella Atzori

No abstract is available for this record.

Angela Walch

The terminology around blockchain technology is notoriously confusing, with disputes over whether a blockchain is the same as a distributed ledger, or whether an appcoin is the same as a protocol token. In this article, I examine the difficulties the rapidly shifting, contested vocabulary poses for regulators seeking to understand, govern, and potentially use blockchain technology, and offer suggestions for how to fight through the haze of unclear language. In Part I, I provide examples of the fluctuating, contested language in the blockchain technology space, and describe the forces at play in shaping the language. In Part II, I lay out the problems the language raises for regulators, including challenges in identifying the facts about the technology, distinguishing among the many variations of the technology, and communicating clearly about the technology, as well as increasing the chances of regulatory capture, inconsistent regulation across jurisdictions and subject domains, and “perverse innovation.” In Part III, I closely analyze the use of the term “immutable” in blockchain discourse, to illuminate the confusion a single term can cause for regulators (and the public at large). I argue that the widespread use of the term “immutable” as a defining feature of blockchain technology is misleading, given that (i) real world events have demonstrated that the unchangeable nature of a blockchain record is always limited by the decisions of its human governors to change it, and (ii) the source of a blockchain record’s “immutability” is disputed, meaning that it is unclear whether any particular variation of the technology may be fairly described as creating an “immutable” record. This is problematic as regulators have already begun to craft legislation describing the records created by blockchain technology as immutable, and are making decisions to use the technology in large part because of its “immutability.” In Part IV, I suggest ways regulators can become better educated about blockchain technology, as is essential for them to responsibly govern or use the technology. I also recommend that regulators take a highly critical approach that (i) seeks to separate hype from reality; (ii) is sensitive to how incentives may shape the way blockchain technology is portrayed by industry and those sponsored by industry, and how misleading terminology appears in publications of the highest prestige levels; (iii) includes diverse perspectives from proponents and critics of the technology, multiple disciplines, and from across the gender, race, geographic, and economic development spectrums; (iv) takes nothing, including descriptions of the technology itself, at face value, but deeply interrogates and scrutinizes the technology and its stated capabilities; and (v) asks regulators to think for themselves about the technology and its benefits rather than succumbing to herd behavior. I am hopeful that these recommendations, coupled with awareness that blockchain vocabulary is treacherous, can help regulators to discover the facts about blockchain technology and respond to them appropriately.

Friedrich Holotiuk, Francesco Pisani, Jürgen Moormann

Because of its potentially disruptive influence on business models (BMs), blockchain technology has sparked a lively debate among researchers. Our Delphi study sets out to explore the impact of blockchain in payments, which represents a major cornerstone of banking and the cradle of this technology. The results, grouped around four areas of thoughts, indicate that blockchain allows the offering of new services and renders some of the current ones obsolete. This consequently impacts the financial structure of firms in the payments industry and further generates great potential for new BMs while making some existing ones obsolete. Eventually, new players, which are better able to leverage the po-tential of blockchain, will give a strong impulse to this development. Our findings contribute to the literature by providing new insights about the impact of innova-tive technologies on BMs and have further practical implications by presenting a better understanding of future BMs in payments.

Bastian Fredriksson

The thesis investigates how a blockchain can be used to build a decentralised public key infrastructure for the web, by proposing a custom federation blockchain relying on honest majority. Our main contribution is the design of a Proof of Stake protocol based on a stake tree, which builds upon an idea called follow-the-satoshi used in previous papers. Digital identities are stored in an authenticated self-balancing tree maintained by blockchain nodes. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations, based on the size of the domain name system, show that the block size must be set to at least 5.2 MB, while each blockchain node with a one-month transaction history would need to store about 243 GB. Thin clients would have to synchronise about 13.6 MB of block headers per year, and download an additional 3.7 KB of proof data for every leaf certificate which is to be checked.

Lene Østergaard Jepsen

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Helen Eenmaa, María José Schmidt-Kessen

No abstract is available for this record.

Jim Kyung-Soo Liew, Levar Hewlett

No abstract is available for this record.

Usman W. Chohan

The focus of economists in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has been on its monetary aspects, particularly its deflationary nature, its fungibility, and its disruption of modern monetary mechanisms. This discussion paper draws the focus away from monetary discourses towards fiscal ones, drawing on the case study of Bulgaria and the confiscation of Bitcoins of a magnitude as to pay off a substantial component of its fiscal burden. The paper thereby raises questions about the role that cryptocurrencies may play, tangentially if not directly, in fiscal policy considerations.

Sailendra Prasanna Mishra

No abstract is available for this record.

Yash Madhwal, Peter Panfilov

To serve target customers better than their competitors, supply chain management (SCM) teams today look into new technologies such as Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain. These new technologies allow managers to develop and provide complex supply chain services and products faster with improved reliabilities. With these technologies, SCM teams can build complex models of a supply chain or systems of supply chains using a data-driven approach. With the growth of aviation domain across the world, there has been increasing demand in aircraft for airlines and other customers. In this domain, SCM teams deal with complex networked supply chains for aircraft's spare part purchase and delivery for aircraft's maintenance and repair. Aircraft's spare parts are shipped to single assembly hubs, located globally. All parts come with certain life expectancy, specific requirements and maintenance attributes. With thousands of spare parts, hundreds of parameters, and number of manufactures distributed globally, SCM team need to deal with very large amount of data. In this paper, we use an industrial scenario of aviation industry SCM to demonstrate the necessity of having decentralized system based on distributed data-driven application technologies such as Blockchain, not only to assist in maintaining inventory of the aircraft's parts but also to monitor the performance, usage, etc. This will help to achieve a transparent network of supply chain for aircraft's parts and reduce the risk of availability of aircraft's parts in black market. These new data-driven technologies when embedded into SCM scenarios will help the SCM managers to analyse the supply, demands, source of availability of spare parts and provide methods to procure them from the right sources.

Percy Venegas

No abstract is available for this record.

Anton Kajtazi, Andrea Moro

This research explores the effects of adding bitcoin to an optimal portfolio (naïve, long-only, unconstrained and semi-constrained) by relying on mean-CVaR in the Chinese market. Then backtesting to compare the performance of portfolios with and without bitcoin for each scenario is perfomed. Results show significant but weak correlations between various asset classes and bitcoin, implying a more mature financial profile of bitcoin in China compared to that in the west. Backtesting results show that the effect of adding bitcoin to optimal portfolios is not consistent over the entire out-of-sample period. The naïve and the long-only strategy improved the risk-reward ratio up until the late 2013 price-crash with no significant advantages thereafter. Shorting strategies on the other hand, with or without leverage, fail to produce more efficient portfolios when bitcoin is added, and this is consistent over the entire out-of-sample period. The results also show that semi-annual rebalancing amplifies the advantages of adding bitcoin to most portfolios except for the semi-constrained portfolio, although the weights analysis show significant shifts in weights which might not represent a feasible strategy in realistic scenarios.

Ruiping Liu, Zhichao Shao, Guodong Wei, Wei Wang

In the era of diminishing power from US dollar and increasing competition among world currencies, Bitcoin, as a completely new concept as a medium of exchange, has received increasing attentions over the world. Nowadays, Bitcoin also becomes an investment vehicle, which carries attractive opportunities but also significant risks for the investment community. In this paper, we have compared the empirical performance of a newly-developed heavy-tailed distribution, the normal reciprocal inverse Gaussian (NRIG), with the most popular heavy-tailed distribution, the Student’s t distribution, under the GARCH framework in fitting the daily Bitcoin exchange rate returns. Our results indicate the heavy-tailed distribution has better performance in capture the daily Bitcoin exchange rate returns dynamics than the standard normal distribution. Our results also show the older fashioned Student’s t distribution still performs better than the new heavy-tailed distribution.

Usman W. Chohan

No abstract is available for this record.

Andriana Gkaniatsou, Myrto Arapinis, Aggelos Kiayias

No abstract is available for this record.

Önder Gürcan, Antonella Del Pozzo, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni

No abstract is available for this record.

Thorsten V. Koeppl, Jeremy Kronick

Blockchain technology has the potential to transform dramatically how a modern economy deals with maintaining and updating records. This innovation has already created lots of turbulence in financial markets and beyond. It will be a challenge to let markets figure out how to best use this technology while ensuring consumer safety and efficiency. Our goal in this paper is to unveil the potential of blockchain technology and guide regulators in how to approach the challenges this technology entails. The most well-known examples of blockchains are found in the area of payments systems and, more generally, in financial markets. It is thus understandable that the financial industry is leading the charge to unearth the potential of this technology in order to find cost efficiencies, but also to recapture above normal profits. The potential application of this technology, however, reaches much further than merely being a currency like bitcoin or a record-keeping system. Early applications of this technology include smart contracts and attempts by governments to build universal online identification systems. Blockchain technology also introduces new concepts such as cryptographic communication protocols and distributed data storage that can increase the safety of electronic networks and offer potential cost efficiency. We do not expect distributed ledgers to completely supplant traditional intermediaries, especially in areas where these intermediaries are of systemic importance or provide services that require a high degree of ad hoc coordination. Still, many elements of this new technology offer a unique opportunity for such intermediaries to modernize their infrastructures and offer their clients safer and cheaper systems. It is not clear, however, how to realize such benefits in a way that makes sure they are passed on to the economy as a whole. This leads us to identify three major challenges and priorities for policymakers and regulators arising from blockchain technology: 1. Design a principle-based regulation regime that achieves high safety standards, legal certainty and a stable environment for transactions based on distributed ledger technology; 2. Ensure that this technology leads to appropriate end-user cost efficiencies rather than simply a redistribution of above-normal profits among intermediaries; and 3. Determine areas where government involvement is advisable, be it in the role of facilitator for a private or public distributed ledger, or as a direct central node that applies elements of the technology but retains the monopoly of managing the ledger entries.

Fabrizio Lamberti, Valentina Gatteschi, Claudio Giovanni Demartini, Chiara Pranteda · 5 authors

Blockchain has been considered a breakthrough technology-but does your company need it? In this article, the authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain technology using examples from the insurance sector, which can be generalized and applied to other sectors.

Mark Fenwick, Wulf A. Kaal, Erik P. M. Vermeulen

No abstract is available for this record.

Joe Blankenship

Cryptocurrencies and blockchains are increasingly used, implemented and adapted for numerous purposes; people and businesses are integrating these technologies into their practices and strategies, creating new political economies and spaces in and of everyday life. This thesis seeks to develop a foundation of geographic theory for the study of spatial production within and surrounding blockchain technologies focusing on acute studies of Bitcoin as cryptocurrency, Ethereum as digital marketplace, and their conditions of possibility as decentralized autonomous organizations. Utilizing concepts from Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space, this thesis situates blockchain technologies within the wider discussion about the political economy of modes of spatial production, dialectical material methods, code/space, and network society through an examination of human and machine relations within their unique and emergent spaces. Combining phenomenological and dialectical material methods with the methodological practice of discourse analysis and systems theory, this thesis explores an understanding of how systemic mechanisms and actant actions driving blockchain technologies are indications of new evolutions in our conceptions of space and place in everyday life of later informational capitalism.

Yueliang Su, Baoyu Zhong

The innovation of supply chain financial services can alleviate the plight of SMEs financing difficulties. In the aspect of supply chain finance model, there is a credit guarantee financing model, which is different from the simple external financing and internal financing mode of supply chain. Based on this, this paper studies the decision-making of supply chain finance under the partial credit guarantee of core enterprises. First of all, the paper constructs a simple supply chain financing model, consisting of a bank, a core enterprise and a retailer. And then, considering the credit guarantee financing model, calculate the expected profit function. Stackelberg game model is used to give the optimal decision of each subject in decentralized system and the optimal decision in centralized system. Finally, in order to make a more specific and detailed study on the profit and decision-making based on the credit guarantee financing model, the important parameters of the model are analyzed. Through the calculation, it is proved that under the credit guarantee of the core enterprise, the retailer has the optimal ordering strategy, and the core enterprise has the best wholesale price. The influences of the partial credit guarantee coefficient and the retailer’s loan coefficient on the supply chain finance decision-making are also studied.

D. O. Kondyrev, V. S. Bobrov, I. E. Efremov, V. N Vlasov

1. Свон М. Блокчейн: Схема новой экономики. М.: Олимп-Бизнес, 2017. 240 с.: ил. 2. Wattenhofer R. The Science of the Blockchain. 1st ed. Inverted Forest Publishing, 2016. 115 p. 3. Равал С. Децентрализованные приложения. Технология Blockchain в действии. СПб.: Питер, 2017. 240 с. : ил. 4. Antonopoulos A. M. Mastering Bitcoin. 1st ed. O’Reilly Media, 2014. 296 p. 5. Дейт К. Дж. Введение в системы баз данных. 8-е изд. М.: ИД «Вильямс», 2005. 1328 с.: ил. 6. Гарсия-Молина Г., Ульман Д., Уидом Д. Системы баз данных. Полный курс. М.: ИД «Вильямс», 2003. 1089 с.: ил. 7. Таненбаум Э., Стеен М. ван. Распределенные системы. Принципы и парадигмы. СПб.: Питер, 2003. 877 с.: ил.

Eric Pichet

Created in 2009, bitcoin reaches record heights every week, having hit $17,000 on 11 December 2017 - the first day a bitcoin futures contract traded at the CBOE - versus $1,000 in early 2017 and $1 in 2001. Yet there is still no consensus among economists whether bitcoin comprises a new decentralised currency free of central bank influence, or is a purely speculative instrument.

Darcy W E Allen

No abstract is available for this record.