Michael J. Fell, Alexandra Schneiders, David Shipworth
Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading could help address grid management challenges in a decentralizing electricity system, as well as providing other social and environmental benefits. Many existing and proposed trading schemes are enabled by blockchain, a distributed ledger technology (DLT) relying on cryptographic proof of ownership rather than human intermediaries to establish energy transactions. This study used an online survey experiment (n=2064) to investigate how consumer demand for blockchain-enabled peer-to-peer energy trading schemes in the United Kingdom varies depending on how the consumer proposition is designed and communicated. The analysis provides some evidence of a preference for schemes offering to meet a higher proportion of participants’ energy needs, and for those operating at the city/region (as compared to national or neighbourhood) level. People were more likely to say they would participate when the scheme was framed as being run by their local council, followed by an energy supplier, community energy organization, and social media company. Anonymity was the most valued DLT characteristic and mentioning blockchain’s association with Bitcoin led to a substantial decrease in intended uptake. We highlight a range of important questions and implications suggested by these findings for the introduction and operation of P2P trading schemes.
This paper presents TXSC, a framework that provides smart contract developers with transaction primitives. These primitives allow developers to write smart contracts without the need to reason about the anomalies that can arise due to concurrent smart contract function executions.
Digital assets are hot right now. Whether cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, or initial coin offerings and tokens, this new asset class has captured the imagination of American investors. While it remains to be seen if this phenomenon has staying power, there is no doubt that these assets and their promoters have attracted the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But neither Congress nor the SEC has formally elucidated which digital assets are securities and which are not. This Article seeks to provide clarity in determining which digital assets are securities. It proposes two tests that operationalize the Supreme Court’s test in SEC v. W. J. Howey Co. The first test is the Bahamas Test, which asks whether a digital asset is sufficiently decentralized such that it is not a security. The second test is the Substantial Steps Test which is used to determine whether an investment is made with an expectation of profit. This Article takes a rules-based approach to provide clarity and begin a conversation about crafting more predictable jurisprudence and regulation in this area.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible contributions of blockchain technology to creating new governance structures that facilitate social cooperation. Design/methodology/approach Conceptual analysis with key ideas in new institutional economics and political theory is used in this paper. Findings Blockchain technology provides a new tool through which political entrepreneurs can credibly alienate some of their power within a system of rules that they have established. Originality/value This paper links discussion of blockchain entrepreneurship in commercial markets to research into private governance.
Yoon-Chow Yeong, Khairul Shafee Kalid, Savita K. Sugathan
Dated back in 2008, the first blockchain-powered cryptocurrency-Bitcoin was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto. Over the years, the types of cryptocurrencies available in the market amounted to more than 2,000. With the disruptive potential to revolutionize the traditional financial services, cryptocurrencies become a topic of interest among scholars, global regulators, investors, business operators, information technology enthusiasts and consumers. Nevertheless, the negative activities associated with cryptocurrencies such as money laundering and illicit trading, have resulted in the legality of cryptocurrencies remain controversial in the global context.As the worldwide regulators expressed different stance towards cryptocurrency acceptance and adoption, this study sought to gauge the individual’s behavioral intention to use cryptocurrency. Recognizing the dearth of study in Asian countries, especially the developing country, this study addresses the literature gap by focusing the case of Malaysian individuals. Specifically, this study investigated the effects of age, education level and income level differences in an individual’s behavioral intention to use cryptocurrency.The sample is made up of 176 Malaysian individuals who are equipped with cryptocurrency knowledge. The empirical data were gathered using online survey questionnaire via Google form. Subsequently, the data were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to understand the demographics effect on the intention to adopt cryptocurrency.Finally, the results revealed that the role of age, education and income level are not significant in influencing an individual’s behavior towards cryptocurrency adoption.
This paper examines the risks, accounting practices and disclosures of companies who accept cryptocurrency for the payment of products or services. We provide a brief history of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology that allows the reader to deepen their understanding of the subject before moving on to a discussion of how regulatory bodies such as the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are treating the accounting for cryptocurrency transactions.
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are viewed as one of the most promising scalability solutions for cryptocurrencies today. Roughly, PCNs are networks where each node represents a user and each directed, weighted edge represents funds escrowed on a blockchain; these funds can be transacted only between the endpoints of the edge. Users efficiently transmit funds from node A to B by relaying them over a path connecting A to B, as long as each edge in the path contains enough balance (escrowed funds) to support the transaction. Whenever a transaction succeeds, the edge weights are updated accordingly. In deployed PCNs, channel balances (i.e., edge weights) are not revealed to users for privacy reasons; users know only the initial weights at time 0. Hence, when routing transactions, users typically first guess a path, then check if it supports the transaction. This guess-and-check process dramatically reduces the success rate of transactions. At the other extreme, knowing full channel balances can give substantial improvements in transaction success rate at the expense of privacy. In this work, we ask whether a network can reveal noisy channel balances to trade off privacy for utility. We show fundamental limits on such a tradeoff, and propose noise mechanisms that achieve the fundamental limit for a general class of graph topologies. Our results suggest that in practice, PCNs should operate either in the low-privacy or low-utility regime; it is not possible to get large gains in utility by giving up a little privacy, or large gains in privacy by sacrificing a little utility.
Advocates of blockchain believe that distributed ledger technologies can provide us with a technological infrastructure to challenge the concentrated power of tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, and create a more equitable, sustainable and decentralized world. This paper considers these claims and concludes that they are preferable to defending the status quo or arguing that a solution might be found in more and better regulations. Nevertheless, the future remains highly uncertain and we are currently living in a rapidly evolving “space” between two competing realities: a centralized old-world reality and a fast-emerging, but, as yet, incomplete, decentralized reality. We remain optimistic that decentralization is coming but identify powerful competing forces seeking to preserve the status quo. As such, we must encourage more organizations – business, government, investors, charities – to experiment with distributed ledger technologies and to participate actively in the digital transformation. We need more experimentation to address the current shortcomings of decentralisation and to ensure the early arrival of mainstream applications of a technology that has the potential to solve some of the most pressing global challenges of a digital age.
Summary With the increasing popularity of blockchain technologies in recent years, blockchain‐based decentralized applications (DApps for short in this paper) have been rapidly developed and widely adopted in many areas, being a hot topic in both academia and industry. Despite of the importance of DApps, we still have quite little understanding of DApps along with its ecosystem. To bridge the knowledge gap, this paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study of blockchain‐based DApps to date, based on an extensive dataset of 995 Ethereum DApps and 29,846,075 transaction logs over them. We make a descriptive analysis of the popularity of DApps, summarize the patterns of how DApps use smart contracts to access the underlying blockchain, and explore the worth‐addressing issues of deploying and operating DApps. Based on the findings, we propose some implications for DApp users to select proper DApps, for DApp developers to improve the efficiency of DApps, and for blockchain vendors to enhance the support of DApps.
Banks and financial institutions have been spending significant sums to explore potential applications of blockchain technology. The financial services industry is among those areas predicted to benefit the most from blockchain use in the years to come. This chapter investigates this prediction after providing a primer on blockchain. It analyses the potential of blockchain to increase efficiencies and to transform business processes in a number of areas within the industry such as the trade life-cycle of securities and of derivatives, payments, traditional financing arrangements, asset management, insurance and corporate governance. It also examines new currencies and cryptoassets, phenomena ultimately enabled by the use of blockchain technology.
Both the functionality and the flexibility of distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems can raise complex questions of applicable law for users. This chapter considers the challenges of establishing what laws or regulations may be relevant to the operation and governance of DLT systems and transactions conducted on them. It highlights the risks of failing to include express contractual clauses to make the parties' choice of law and forum for dispute resolution clear. It also discusses how governing law and jurisdiction will be assessed in the absence of any express contractual clauses, including an explanation of common DLT governance systems.
Today’s economy is being transformed by digitisation, prompting central banks to seriously consider the issuance of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs’. In that context, many central banks are examining the relevant economic and political factors, as well as necessary regulatory reforms in order to weigh the benefits and disadvantages of issuing CBDCs. In addition to these factors, legal issues related to CBDCs and the possible need to adopt new legislation to address them, also deserve consideration. This chapter examines the legal characteristics of CBDCs by reference to the features of sovereign currencies and cryptocurrencies. It concludes that the issuance of CBDCs will require adapting national legal and regulatory frameworks, in order to ensure clarity around the status and legal characteristics of CBDCs.
Dirk Andreas Zetzsche, Ross P. Buckley, Douglas W. Arner, Anton N. Didenko
The transformative potential of distributed ledger technology (DLT) is attracting significant interest around the world. Many institutions are investing heavily in proof of concept demonstrations, pilot initiatives and the rollout of applications of DLT. Part of the attraction of distributed ledger systems, such as blockchain, lies in their perceived ability to transcend law and regulation. Yet, while the law may be dull and the technology exciting, the impact of the law cannot be simply wished away. With data distributed among many ledgers, legal risks will remain. Legal relationships recorded on, or evidenced by, distributed ledgers may give rise to various forms of liability based on contract, tort, partnership or joint venture structures, specific legislation or breach of fiduciary duties. At the same time, despite existing similarities among common law and civil law systems, the sources of DLT-linked liability may vary substantially across jurisdictions.
Motivated by numerous drivers, blockchain-based peer-to-peer energy trade whitepapers surged in the past two years. Assuming disruption through blockchain technology, they envisioned a transformation of energy systems through technosocio-economic solutions. Few impartial and sober assessments of blockchain-based energy projects exist, and many publications praise disruptive potential without further examination. A more distant and critical perspective, however, is imperative for a responsible use of a novel, in particular disruptive, technology. This review aims at surveying the energy system envisioned by the projects through discussing the projects by their characteristics, their perspective on the transactive energy lifecycle and the energy ecosystem envisioned in the white papers. This review is descriptive and comparative in nature, and attempts to synthesize topics raised in the white papers through methods of grounded theory, as well as assessing the disruptive potential of blockchain technology in energy systems. Through this and a critical and neutral perspective, it strives to (soberly) contribute to a discussion on the digitization of elements of the energy system, and how blockchain-based use cases can contribute constructively to the problems at hand.
Rafaa Ibrahim Al-Hamdani, Laila Abdul Karim Mohammed, Jamal Hadash Mohammed
The purpose of research is focused on the insight into the future of Bitcoin on the financial situation, its implications and challenges. The problem of study is to investigate how to deal with a new type of digital currencies (such Bitcoin) that does not have a physical presence and there is no specific body to issue. Thus, this study aims to identify the nature of Bitcoin currency and what are the challenges associated with it as well as exchange rates with some currencies, as the research hypothesized the main hypothesis that Bitcoin will contribute to financial development in the future, the research also used the analytical rooted approach to present concepts and data, using financial technical analysis to display the results The research also came up with a number of conclusions and recommendations. The results of paper significantly contribute to the literature through providing evidence from financial data of Bitcoin.
Climate change enforces the integration of distributed renewable energy sources and development of carbon price scheme. Whilst the energy is traded among distributed prosumers, the carbon responsibilities and corresponding allowances trading need to be transferred from large-scale energy suppliers to prosumers. During this transformation, the issues of energy imbalance, carbon reduction imbalance, and residential privacy leakage in centralised trading market present serious challenges. In this paper, we propose a fully decentralised blockchain-based peer-to-peer trading scheme coupling energy and carbon markets. We implement pay-to-public-key-hash with multiple signatures as a transaction standard to realise a more secure transaction and reduced storage burden of senders. A script is hashed during the wallet address generation for each new transaction to protect residential privacy. A novel carbon accounting method and corresponding incentive mechanism for carbon reduction are designed to evaluate emission behaviours of distributed prosumers. Case studies demonstrate that the proposed scheme leads a reduced costs and carbon emissions compared to centralised trading systems and existing blockchain-based trading schemes.
Distributed ledger technology allows for data to be recorded, shared, and synchronized across multiple distributed data stores. This brought forth the idea of using this technology to build consensus. Implementing this technology within the Syndicated Loan Market through Smart Contracts allows for reduced manual labor and back-office workloads as well as the removal of reconciliation and corporate actions. As a result, counterparty risk and settlement times will be minimized, and performance and transparency for regular reporting will increase. However, an individual's embrace of this new technology will determine its successful implementation. To address this issue, this article examines the trust model, trust in technology drivers, and the revised unified theory of acceptance and use of the technology model to construct the trust and adoption of the technology model. This article culminates in guidelines for the implementation of Smart Contracts. Avenues for future work include the investigation of a multimotive information systems acceptance model.
Hamza Baqa, Nguyen B. Truong, Noël Crespi, Gyu Myoung Lee · 5 authors
The emerging Blockchain (BC) and Distributed Ledger technologies have come to impact a variety of domains, from capital market sectors to digital asset management in the Internet of Things (IoT). As a result, more and more BC-based decentralized applications for numerous cross-domain services have been developed. These applications implement specialized decentralized computer programs called Smart Contracts (SCs) which are deployed into BC frameworks. Although these SCs are open ato public, it is challenging to discover and utilize such SCs for a wide range of usages from both systems and end-users because such SCs are already compiled in form of byte-codes without any associated meta-data. This motivates us to propose a solution called Semantic SC (SSC) which integrates RESTful semantic web technologies in SCs, deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain platform, for indexing, browsing and annotating such SCs. The solution also exposes the relevant distributed ledgers as Linked Data for enhancing the discovery capability. To achieve this goal, the OWL-S service ontology is extended by incorporating some domain specific terminologies, which are used in the development of the proposed SSCs. As a result, SSC can be utilized to enrich queries for a domain-specific terms across multiple distributed ledgers, which greatly increases the discovery capability of decentralized IoT applications and services. Contribution in standardization is also discussed. We believe that our research work takes the first steps towards connecting BC-based decentralized services with semantic web services in order to provide better IoT ecosystems.
Since it takes time and effort to put a new product or service on the market,\none would like to predict whether it will be a success. In general this is not\npossible, but it is possible to follow best practices in order to maximise the\nchance of success. A smart contract is intended to encode business logic and is\ntherefore at the heart of every new business on the Ethereum blockchain. We\nhave investigated how to measure the success of smart contracts, and whether\nsuccessful smart contracts have characteristics that less successful smart\ncontracts lack. The appearance of a smart contract on a listing website such as\nEtherscan or StateoftheDapps is such a characteristic. In this paper, we\npresent a three-pronged analysis of the relative success of listed smart\ncontracts. First, we have used statistical analysis on the publicly visible\ntransaction history of the Ethereum blockchain to determine that listed\ncontracts are significantly more successful than their unlisted counterparts.\nNext, we have conducted a survey among more than 200 developers via an\nanonymous online survey about their experience with the listing process. A\nsignificant majority of respondents do not believe that listing a contract\nitself contributes to its success, but they believe that the extra attention\nthat is typically paid in tandem with the listing process does contribute.\nFinally, based on the respondents' answers, we have drafted 10 recommendations\nfor developers and validated them by submitting them to an international panel\nof experts.\n
Over the last decade, blockchain technology has emerged to provide solutions to the complexity and privacy challenges of using distributed databases. It reduces cost for customers by eliminating intermediaries and builds trust in peer-to-peer communications. Over this time, the concept of blockchain has shifted greatly due to its potential in business growth for enterprises and the rapidly evolving applications in a collaborative smart-city ecosystem, healthcare, and governance. Many platforms, with different architectures and consensus protocols, have been introduced. Consequently, it becomes challenging for an application developer to choose the right platform. Furthermore, blockchain has misaligned with the goals for an efficient green collaborative digital ecosystem. Therefore, it becomes critical to address this gap and to build new frameworks to align blockchain with those goals. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of blockchain architecture and consensus protocols, bringing a retrospective analysis and discussing the rationale of the evolution of the various architectures and protocols, as well as capturing the assumptions conducive to their development and contributions to building collaborative applications. We introduce a classification of those architectures helping developers to choose a suitable platform for applications and providing insights for future research directions in the field to build new frameworks.
An advantage of blockchain protocols is that a decentralized community of users may each update and maintain a public ledger without the need for a trusted third party. Such modifications introduce important economic and ethical considerations that we believe have been not been considered among the community of blockchain developers. We clarify the problem and provide one implementable ethical framework that such developers could use to determine which aspects should be immutable and which should not.