Oliver James Scholten, David Zendle, James Alfred Walker
This paper describes the York Combined Transaction Set (YCTS), which offers a single consolidated list of publicly available gambling related transactions derived from the Ethereum blockchain. This data includes over 1.4M individual transactions across 17,000+ unique addresses, which represent spending on decentralised gambling smart contracts. These contracts, and corresponding applications, have been selected based on their popularity as presented by an officially recognised ranking service, and have transacted over £240M by naive estimation over the past 10 months. Given the historical opacity of data driven gambling research, our contribution is to identify, and make available in a simple form, the transaction data found on the Ethereum blockchain such that existing questions surrounding player spending can be explored, and differences between decentralised and traditional forms of gambling can be identified.
Libra is the first private cryptocurrency with the potential to change the worldwide payment and monetary system landscape. Due to the scale and reach provided by its affiliation with Facebook, the question will be not whether, but how, to regulate it. This short paper introduces the Libra project and analyses the potential responses open to regulators worldwide.
Blockchain offers a drastically new way to record, process, and store financial transactions and information, and has the potential to fundamentally change the landscape of the accounting profession and reshape the business ecosystem. In this article, we introduce two types (i.e. permissionless and permissioned) of blockchain and layout their technological features. We further discuss implication of blockchain to auditing and elaborate opportunities and challenges of two types of blockchain to auditors. We conclude by making specific recommendations for auditors to adapt, adjust, and elevate themselves to the role of strategic partners in blockchain implementation.
Blockchain is considered by many to be a disruptive core technology. Although many researchers have realized the importance of blockchain, the research of blockchain is still in its infancy. Consequently, this study reviews the current academic research on blockchain, especially in the subject area of business and economics. Based on a systematic review of the literature retrieved from the Web of Science service, we explore the top-cited articles, most productive countries, and most common keywords. Additionally, we conduct a clustering analysis and identify the following five research themes: “economic benefit,” “blockchain technology,” “initial coin offerings,” “fintech revolution,” and “sharing economy.” Recommendations on future research directions and practical applications are also provided in this paper.
Blockchains provide decentralised, tamper-free registries of transactions among partners that may not trust each other. For the scientific community, blockchain smart contracts have been proposed to decentralise and make more transparent multiple aspects of scholarly communications. We show how an Ethereum-based suite of smart contracts running on top of a Web-enabled governance framework can facilitate decentralised computation of citations that is trustworthy. We implement and evaluate Smart Papers, and extend it with a model for decentralised citation counts. We show how our approach complements current models for decentralised publishing and informetrics calculation, and analyse cost and performance implications.
Discusses how blockchain is transforming international business practices and relatioships. Blockchain and smart contracts are transforming international trade activities. Proof-ofconcepts (PoCs), prototypes, pilot projects, and actual deployments indicate that smart contracts can bring benefits to those involved in trading.
Leonando Ismanto, H Suwito Ar, Ahmad Nurul Fajar, Sfenrianto Sfenrianto · 5 authors
Abstract The progress of technology and information system force digitalization process such as e-commerce to emerge. In Indonesia, the utilization of e-commerce has flourished because it has many benefits and advantages to broaden the market and stay competitive. However, it is faced with many challenges such as fraud, commission fees, limited contact between buyer and seller and misuse of personal data. Blockchain implementation has the potential to solve this problem with increased security and transparency through the implementation of cryptocurrency in payment and smart contracts. This paper explores the usage of the blockchain, cryptocurrency and smart contract to e-commerce for a secure and efficient transaction in Indonesia. The result will be used to propose blockchain technology as e-commerce platform architecture and systems in Indonesia.
Chelsea M. Anderson, Vivian W. Fang, James Moon, Jonathan E. Shipman
ABSTRACT This paper explores U.S. public firms’ cryptocurrency holdings and accounting practices from 2013 to 2022 against the backdrop of the recently enacted crypto accounting rule, ASU 2023‐08. Descriptive analyses suggest exponential growth in corporate crypto holdings and significant variation in crypto accounting practices, underscoring the rule's necessity. Hypothesis tests using the pre‐rule data reveal three insights with direct relevance to the rule. First, firms appear to view crypto assets more akin to investments than intangible assets, consistent with the rule's mandate of the fair value model. Second, Big 4 auditors steer firms toward the impairment model and less detailed presentation choices. This conservative approach is unlikely to meet the new rule's goal of providing the most decision‐useful information. Third, increased liquidity of crypto markets prompts the use of the fair value model and a more detailed presentation, consistent with the rule's focus on more actively traded tokens. However, within our sample, we find some evidence consistent with fair value reporting increasing stock return volatility and no evidence that it enhances earnings informativeness.
Maryam Jameelah Hashim, Mohd Faizal Kamarudin, Nur Afizah Muhamad Arifin, Mohd Rahim Khamis
Cryptocurrency is a digital currency that is powered by blockchain technology. One of it is bitcoin, a system that is digitally created and traded tokens to which value is assigned. The level of adoption of bitcoin has accelerated due to several fiscal crises that leads to financial crashes that have affected the lives of millions of people. This has created a demand for new kinds of niche money. Issues need to be closely discussed before it is fully accepted by customers as a medium of exchange. Even though bitcoin is used as a medium of exchange, there is still no specific guidance and benefits to the users. The issues concernedare whether the customers will get the benefits of privacy, lower transaction costs and freedom in payment. Therefore, the aims of this paper are to identify the relationship between transaction cost, privacy and digital payment as a benefit of bitcoin as a medium of exchange. This research will be conducted in Klang Valley area and the questionnaires will be disseminated directly to respondents. These respondents will be identified using probability simple random sampling. A regression analysis will be conducted comprising 200 observations in Klang Valley, Malaysia. Partial least square-structural equation (PLS-SEM) will be used. In the measurement model, reliability will be assessed by examining the Composite Reliability (CR), while validity will be assessed by convergent validity and discriminant validity. Subsequently, structural model testing with 500 re-samples was applied to test the hypothesized relationships between exogenous variables and endogenous variable. Digital payment and privacy are statistically significant towards the benefit of using bitcoin as a medium of exchange. It was found that the digital payment contributes the highest benefit to the customers followed by privacy. The results provide interesting insight into the determinants for the customers benefit using bitcoin. Although the findings show significant results customers should always decide the good and bad thoroughly before finalizing their decisions on the usage of bitcoin. Therefore, it is hoped that this study will enrich the growing literature on the subject and future research needs to explore on the benefits of using bitcoin among the real users. This study is expected to give guidelines to the policymakers on the implementation of bitcoin as a medium of exchange. It is also expected that the results may provide interesting insight into the determinants of customer benefits using bitcoin. Simultaneously, it will contribute to the elements of industry, innovation and infrastructure.
Unfulfilled expectations from macro-economic initiatives during the Great Recession and the massive shift into globalization echo today with political upheaval, anti-establishment propaganda, and looming trade/currency wars that threaten domestic and international value chains. Once stable entities like the EU now look fragile and political instability in the US presents unprecedented challenges to an International Monetary System (IMS) that predominantly relies on the USD and EUR as reserve currencies. In this environment, it is critical for an international organization mandated to ensure stability to plan and act ahead. This paper argues that Decentralized Ledger-based technology (DLT) is key for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to mitigate some of those risks, promote stability and safeguard world prosperity. Over the last two years, DLT has made headline news globally and created a worldwide excitement not seen since the internet entered the mainstream. The rapid adoption and open-to-all philosophy of DLT has already redefined global socioeconomics, promises to shake up the world of commerce/finance and challenges the workings of central governments/regulators. This paper examines DLT core premises and proposes a two-step approach for the IMF to expand Special Drawing Rights (SDR) into that sphere so as to become the originally envisioned numeraire and reserve currency for cross-border transactions in this new decentralized century.
Yeray Mezquita, Alfonso González‐Briones, Roberto Casado‐Vara, Pablo Chamoso · 6 authors
Logistics services involve a wide range of transport operations between distributors and clients. Currently, the large number of intermediaries are a challenge for this sector, as it makes all the processes more complicated. This paper proposes a system that uses smart contracts and blockchain technology to remove intermediaries and speed up logistics activities. Our model combines smart contracts and a multi-agent system to improve the current logistics system by increasing organization, security, transparency and significantly improving distribution times.
Governance issues limit blockchains' ability to evolve and face unforeseen challenges. It seems possible to argue that this impasse is because most blockchains lack meta-rules. This work considers blockchains as a socio-technical system of rules, in order to draw a comparison with legal systems. Following the comparison, one finds that most blockchains lack what, in legal theory, are considered secondary rules. That is, the meta-rule of the system.
Smart contracts are written in programming languages rather than in natural languages. This might seem to insulate them from ambiguity, because the meaning of a program is determined by technical facts rather than by social ones. It does not. Smart contracts can be ambiguous, too, because technical facts depend on socially determined ones. To give meaning to a computer program, a community of programmers and users must agree on the semantics of the programming language in which it is written. This is a social process, and a review of some famous controversies involving blockchains and smart contracts shows that it regularly creates serious ambiguities. In the most famous case, The DAO hack, more than $150 million in virtual currency turned on the contested semantics of a blockchain-based smart-contract programming language.
Proof-of-Storage (PoS) is a collective term for protocols that allow proving data integrity and availability. There exist several PoS schemes. While they differ in detailed specifications, their common primary advantage is eliminating the need for trust between storage providers and data owners. However, there does not exist a mechanism to provide self-emerging delivery of requests for proof of storage, commonly known as challenges.\n\nThis paper presents a decentralized system for PoS using self-emerging challenges built on smart contract in the Ethereum platform. Self-emerging challenges provide an automated mechanism for ensuring integrity and persistence of data at chosen time intervals. The design employs participating nodes in the Ethereum blockchain, commonly referred to as peers, to store and route challenges to storage providers. The peers are compensated for their service by their respective employers. Data owners are enabled to schedule the time of emergence of a challenge to storage providers. Upon a received challenge, storage providers prove the integrity and persistence of data by responding correctly to the challenge. The design builds on the existing work of decentralized self-emerging data systems over Ethereum blockchain networks. We show that this work can be utilized for PoS and solve the problems that the incorporation and adaptation of this work raises.\n\nWe evaluate the proposed system based on several factors. We investigate the security of the system based on the different attacks that the participants may execute for exploitation. Moreover, we evaluate the attractiveness of participating in the system based on the gained remuneration by peers and the positive reputation gained by storage providers for proving the integrity of their clients’ data. We also evaluate the expenses of data owners utilizing the proposed system based on the inherited costs of invoking smart contract functions in the Ethereum platform. Lastly, through analysis, we find that to minimize the total costs in the system, the number of employed peers should be restricted to one in each path. In other words, one peer to deliver a PoS challenge to the storage service provider. We show that this additionally improves the fairness of remuneration payout to peers and analyze how security is affected by always utilizing one peer in each path. We discover that this improves prevention against drop attacks, while it to some degree decreases the prevention of release-ahead attacks which we deem less critical. Through these analyses, we recognize that the benefits greatly outweigh the drawback, and we make a suggestion that data owners should select exactly one peer per path in their services.
Josep Lluís Ferrer Gomila, M. Francisca Hinarejos, Andreu Pere Isern-Deyà
Electronically signing contracts is fundamental for e-commerce transactions. The main property that contract signing protocols must achieve is fairness of the exchange. The solutions presented to date are divided into two major types: those that have a trusted third party (TTP) to achieve fairness and those that do not. In the literature, we find more than 40 published proposals, but none of these proposed protocols has become a recognized or de facto standard in the market. Blockchain has provided a new way to address classic problems such as double spending, as well as problems such as fairness. In this article, we present a protocol for contract signing based on blockchain. Our proposed protocol does not require a conventional TTP, and it does not present the disadvantages of solutions without a TTP (computational and/or communication cost). The protocol satisfies the necessary security requirements: fairness, timeliness and non-repudiation. We demonstrate the feasibility of the protocol with a cost analysis and a proof of concept implementation. In addition, we show how Ethereum can be integrated in our solution as an alternative platform to the use of Bitcoin. Finally, we show how our proposal improves previous solutions for contract signing based on blockchain in terms of cost, efficiency and security.
O presente artigo objetivou demonstrar como a arbitragem tem o potencial de ser um meio adequado para lidar com conflitos envolvendo a tecnologia blockchain. Para tanto, num primeiro momento, buscou-se delinear os aspectos fundamentais desta nova tecnologia, as mudanças que propõe este fenômeno, destacando-se, dentre suas diversas aplicações, o uso dos smart contracts, analisando-se a sua diferença em relação aos contratos tradicionais, em especial a seus possíveis conflitos que possuem características próprias. É por esse prisma que se desejou analisar as vantagens atuais do uso da arbitragem, e como elas se adequam para lidar com tais litígios. Trata-se de uma abordagem cujo objeto, isto é, a blockchain, ainda está em fase inicial de usos, desenvolvimentos e aplicações, assim, não possui o presente estudo a pretensão de respostas inteiramente conclusivas.
In the summer of 2017, a new method of funding startup businesses exploded from a small capital market to one worth billions. “Initial Coin Offerings” (“ICOs”) can appear to be a simple crowdfunding campaign or a public stock offering at the same time and, until recently, have been conducted with no regulatory oversight. Due to the high risk of fraud, the SEC has begun cracking down on ICOs, requiring many issuers to register their “ICO tokens” as securities or halt trading entirely. This Note looks at the regulatory precedents and factors that the SEC has considered to decide whether a token is a security, and proposes an alternative legal system to securities law that may be better suited for regulating certain types of ICO tokens. This Note concludes that, for ICOs that raise money for a decentralized autonomous organization—in which all token purchasers hold equal management rights—uniform partnership law is the ideal mode of regulation.
PeerCash is an decentralized application built on Ethereum blockchain technology. Decentralization means that there is no concept of having admin. Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger secured technology which is immutable and verifiable. Every events in blockchain is recorded on blocks and it is encrypted using cryptography hashing. The advantage of PeerCash is that we can completely avoid the middle man from the web shopping payment system. That is we can completely remove the bank from interfering with our payment system and the buyer and seller can directly proceed their transaction and make their purchase. PeerCash transactions is completely recorded on blocks and the transactions is secured. So we can call PeerCash as a cryptocurrency. This paper describes about this application.
Efficient information flow in an intelligent system is vital for effectively controlling the entire system. Currently, intelligent systems are used in many industries related to energy production, sustainable agriculture/transport, and intelligent building/cities. Information technology (IT) and information and communication technologies (ICT) play vital roles in introducing technical or technological innovation in these industries as well as establishing a collaborative network. Also, the digitization of existing systems has been quite effective at creating a sustainable global environment as it allows more efficient and well-balanced control of socio-economic factors. However, it has become clear that adopting an intelligent system to achieve innovation, sustainability, and safety may well depend on the quality of the algorithms to be used for that very system. Despite recent controversies, new and renewable energies are considered as a realistic alternative to fossil fuels, which have been integral to modern industries but are regarded as a cause of environmental or economic problems, not to mention their limited deposits. Therefore, since renewable energies will gradually replace existing energy sources but require more time to be fully available, it is essential to find a method of managing them in a fair and transparent way. The United States, Japan, and some European countries are attempting to achieve such a goal by utilizing a blockchain system, but the issues pertaining to its functionality, security, or efficiency have yet to be addressed. This study introduces a viable consensus algorithm (Hyper Delegation Proof of Randomness, or HDPoR algorithm) for blockchain and attempts to validate its parallel computing capability through simulations. This study also attempts to design an efficient but secure peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction service model for these energies for the future where blockchain-based systems will hold a key position in the digitalized world. As its main contribution, this study introduces an effective method of applying blockchain to a new and renewable energy transaction system by presenting a consensus algorithm that can improve its infrastructure and performance.