Blockchain Papers

Gianluca Miscione, Donncha Kavanagh

No abstract is available for this record.

Ruslana Bilyk

The paper studies issues of strengthening the financial basis of regional development as a component of economic security policy and one of the most important areas of administrative decentralization in Ukraine. Main problems of regional development financing identified, ineffectiveness of inter-budget relations proved and the obstacles for accumulation of financial resources of local communities determined. It has been shown that main consequence of regional financial “weakness” was the inability to concentrate resources for prior investment projects and activities of regional development. The measures for strengthening of the financial security of regions in the context of regional policy objectives and according to the announced decentralization and fiscal reforms in regions offered. It is proved that for strengthening the financial base of support for regional development and ensuring self-sufficiency of territorial communities, in terms of the objectives of the new regional policy, it is necessary: to gradually expand the list of instruments used by local authorities to increase the amount of cool tools; disseminate program-target method of compilation and execution of local budgets with the aim of increasing transparency and efficiency of use of budgetary funds; to organize intergovernmental relations, to increase the share of targeted funding, to ensure the formation of horizontal intergovernmental relations; to provide for the expansion of the revenue base of local budgets, transfer of shares separate national taxes, the search for extra-budgetary financial resources.

Liam Morris

Cash in the real world allows for parties to exchange currency without the need to go through some sort of central authority. One person, Alice, can simply hand cash over to another person, Bob. In this transaction the only two people that have knowledge of this exchange are Alice and Bob. Until recently there was no electronic equivalent to this exchange. In 1982 David Chaum proposed a system of anonymous electronic cash based on blind signatures, and in 1990 founded DigiCash as an electronic cash company. There were a few banks that implemented electronic cash systems, but these banks and DigiCash ultimately went bankrupt in 1997 and 1998 despite the enthusiasm surrounding anonymous electronic cash. Between 1998 and 2008 there were no successful implementations of electronic cash that offer a decentralized, anonymous, and untraceable system.\nIn 2008 a paper was published by Satoshi Nakamoto on the cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin. A cryptocurrency is a form of electronic cash backed by mathematical and cryptographic constructs, unlike traditional currency which was historically backed by gold or silver. Cryptocurrencies have seen rising popularity in recent years due to their decentralized, distributed, peer-to-peer protocols. Part of this rising popularity is also attributable to the supposed anonymity of these protocols; however, due to the public transaction history required for these protocols and the fact that transactions are pseudonymous and not purely anonymous, this supposed anonymity does not exist. While the systems may achieve the goal of decentralized currency it does not achieve the goal of untraceability. In this thesis we analyze the technical implementations of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to determine the level of anonymity provided by these protocols. We also analyze proposed improvements for their feasibility.

J.A. Bergstra

Six assertions concerning the status of Bitcoin are formulated and defended: (i) Bitcoin is not and will not become a currency-like informational commodity, (ii) currency-like informational commodities that aren’t currencies must be frauds, (ii) specific BTC amounts may become monetized and thus may be turned into financial assets, (iii) currently no BTC amounts are monetized in any currency area and therefore none are financial assets, (iv) by means of burocratic steps only some BTC volumes can be turned in to an informational currency within a given currency area, modified client software is not required for that step, (v) if a specific amount of BTC qualifies as currency, it also qualifies as money, (vi) moneyness of Bitcoin, or rather of a specific occurrence of an amount of BTC, should be questioned only after one has agreed positively on its status as a financial asset, and negatively on its status as an amount of currency. Factions in the Bitcoin promoting movement are viewed from a perspective of organizational multi-threading. Different factions of the Bitcoin movement may wish to see status issues about Bitcoin settled in different ways. Overall consistency in these matters should not be expected from the union of factions in the Bitcoin movement.

Daniel Folkinshteyn, Mark M. Lennon, Tim Reilly

No abstract is available for this record.

Nirupama Devi Bhaskar, Lam Pak Nian, David Lee Kuo Chuen

No abstract is available for this record.

Hanna Hałaburda, Miklós Sárváry

No abstract is available for this record.

Hong‐Seok Park, Ngoc-Hien Tran

Smart manufacturing considered as a new trend of modern manufacturing helps to satisfy objectives associated with the productivity, quality, cost and competiveness. The smart manufacturing system is characterized by decentralized, distributed, networked compositions of autonomous systems. The model of smart manufacturing is inherited from the organization of the living systems in biology and nature such as ant colony, school of fish, bee's foraging behaviors, and so on. In which, the resources of the manufacturing system are considered as biological organisms, which are autonomous entities so that the manufacturing system has the advanced characteristics inspired from biology such as self-adaptation, self-diagnosis, and self-healing. In this paper, a cloud based smart manufacturing system for machining transmission cases is considered as research object in which the advanced information and communication technology such as cognitive agent, swarm intelligence, and cloud computing are used to integrate, organize and allocate the machining resources.

Nick Vogel

Bitcoin’s popularity increased as its value increased and people became excited about the prospect of a trustless, decentralized currency that could be used on the Internet. Within the last two years, however, people and organizations began exploiting the potential of the block chain that powers the bitcoin network. These people realized that the block chain—a transparent public ledger that cannot be altered—can be used for more than digital currency. One such organization calls itself Ethereum and its developers plan to use block chains to allow decentralized autonomous applications to operate free of government censorship or corruption. While such a network would have a profound effect on society—allowing trustless voting, uncensored social networking and the like—its impact on copyrights could be devastating. This paper argues that the emerging, decentralized Internet (also known as Web 3.0) will be the straw that breaks the copyright owner’s back. This paper argues that, with block chain technology and decentralized applications, those buying and selling unauthorized copies of copyrighted material cannot be subject to court injunctions; making enforcement of copyrights nearly impossible on a decentralized Internet. This paper then proposes that copyright holders get out in front of the problem by embracing a decentralized Internet. This can only be done by drastically reducing the price of copyright licenses. In other words, by offering cheap licenses at the dawn of Web 3.0, copyright holders can instill a sense that it’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to the ongoing struggle between technology and copyrights.

Akonwi Nebasifu Ayonghe

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Daniel Folkinshteyn, Mark M. Lennon

Bitcoin is widely represented in the popular press, but far less so in serious academic inquiry. Researchers have analyzed Bitcoin from various discipline-specific perspectives using their own sets of theories and jargon. Yet cross-disciplinary research has been muddled by the inaccurate interpretation of terminology across fields of research. This results in polarized assessments. In an effort to examine the Bitcoin phenomenon in a more holistic and multidisciplinary manner, this paper compares Bitcoin with another innovative technology – the World Wide Web – as first envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee. By exploring the early development of the World Wide Web, we seek to compare and contrast its development with that of Bitcoin and blockchain technology. The goal of this study is to show similarities and differences in their historic development, in order to identify key success factors related to the adoption of these technologies. Through identification of these factors we seek to guide both academics and practitioners towards fruitful avenues of research and development.

Amy J. Connolly, Andreas Kick

This paper describes a study to understand what differentiates organization adopters of Bitcoin from nonadopters by comparing their IT-readiness, innovativeness and social media presence. The craze over cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin has been likened to a modern-day gold rush, yet academic research has not caught up. Governments are struggling with the very idea of cryptocurrency systems. After the price of Bitcoin fell from $1,200 to $300 in 2014, consumer interest flagged, leaving the future of Bitcoin adoption uncertain despite a slow and steady increase of organization adopters. Organization adoption is more important than consumer, because consumers can’t use cryptocurrency if organizations don’t accept them as payment. This research serves as a basis for future research on Bitcoins and Bitcoin adoption by highlighting some important hurdles to its adoption as a new innovation, in the hope that such endeavors move us ever closer to the vision of a true “people’s currency.”

Steve Y. Yang, Jinhyoung Kim

Bit coin, as the foundation for a secure electronic payment system, has drawn broad interests from researchers in recent years. In this paper, we analyze a comprehensive Bit coin transaction dataset and investigate the interrelationship between the flow of Bit coin transactions and its price movement. Using network theory, we examine a few complexity measures of the Bit coin transaction flow networks, and we model the joint dynamic relationship between these complexity measures and Bit coin market variables such as return and volatility. We find that a particular complexity measure of the Bit coin transaction network flow is significantly correlated with the Bit coin market return and volatility. More specifically we document that the residual diversity or freedom of Bit coin network flow scaled by the total system throughput can significantly improve the predictability of Bit coin market return and volatility.

Matthew P. Ponsford

No abstract is available for this record.

Charles G. Cascarilla

Bitcoin is a new financial system that has the potential to have a big impact on the way the world does business. Its open ledger system and distribution network make it a valuable system. Although it is still in its infancy, as bitcoin becomes larger and more sophisticated, it may very well provide solutions to many of the current financial system’s problems.

Tore Kasper Frederiksen, Jesper Buus Nielsen, Claudio Orlandi

No abstract is available for this record.

Robert Viglione

No abstract is available for this record.

Cinzia Di Novi, Massimiliano Piacenza, Silvana Robone, Gilberto Turati

This paper aims at investigating empirically the impact of fiscal decentralization reforms on inequality in well-being. In particular, we look at the effects on health inequalities following the assignment of larger tax power to the Italian Regions for financing their health expenditure, starting from the end of the Nineties. Exploiting large differences in the size of the tax base across Regions, we find that fiscal decentralization processes that attribute a greater tax power to lower government tiers, besides reducing inefficiencies of healthcare policies, seem to be effective in reducing also within-regional disparities in health outcomes. However, the degree of economic development � on which depends the actual fiscal autonomy from Central government � significantly affects the effectiveness of these reforms and highlights the importance to take properly into account the specific features of the context where the decentralization of power is implemented.

Adam Hayes

Bitcoin has become the de facto 'gold' standard among cryptocurrencies as it is the most widely accepted in commerce, has the largest mining network, and greatest volume of transactions. Because of this, miners of other SHA-256 cryptocurrencies will tend to convert those altcoins into bitcoin in order to transact in a meaningful way with the real economy. The result is that bitcoin mining regulates that of all other SHA-256 blockchains. Specifically, what matters is the expected number of bitcoins produced per day given a unit of hashing (mining) power, whatever the equivalence in the coin being mined. If mining for a different coin would yield a greater return in bitcoins at the margin (per day) for a miner, an apparent arbitrage opportunity will exist to direct mining effort at that cryptocurrency and subsequently exchange those for bitcoin. These opportunities, once taken, quickly eliminate the profitable arbitrage and appear to operate in a fairly efficient and predictable manner. A model is developed in this paper to formalize this process where cryptocurrency miners seeking to maximize production in terms of bitcoins earned in a day will exploit any such opportunities. If no such opportunities exist, they will simply revert to mining bitcoins directly. There are some important implications to this process, such as a tendency for cryptocurrencies to fall in price relative to bitcoin over time, and for changes in bitcoin mining difficulty to indirectly influence the market prices of altcoins. Finally, it seems that those undertaking this process of miners' arbitrage do so at the expense of speculators and noise traders who make decisions regarding buy and sell trades without the use of fundamental data. These participants generally have poor timing, follow trends, and over-react to good and bad news. Altcoins are produced by miners and subsequently offered for sale in the market in order to obtain bitcoins; meanwhile noise traders serve as the only bid-side to the market, on average.

William J. Luther

This paper assesses costs and benefits of regulating Bitcoin. A review of the main justifications for regulating it shows that scope for efficient regulation is limited. Private governance structures and fee-based services have already begun addressing many of the known problems. Furthermore, since a regulation would discourage use, the costs—in terms of technological gains forgone—are potentially high. Nonetheless, there is scope for regulation, to ensure one has recourse in the event of theft, as long as the following are addressed: 1) provide a clear regulatory framework; 2) supervise transactions to dissuade crime, without compromising the medium; 3) regulate exchanges, rather than users; 4) encourage technological progress by committing to an environment of permissionless innovation.

Maria Letizia Perugini, Paolo Dal Checco

No abstract is available for this record.

Nirupama Devi Bhaskar, David Lee Kuo Chuen

No abstract is available for this record.

Adam Hayes

This paper aims to identify the likely determinants for cryptocurrency value formation, including for that of bitcoin. Due to Bitcoin’s growing popular appeal and merchant acceptance, it has become increasingly important to try to understand the factors that influence its value formation. Presently, the value of all Bitcoins in existence represent approximately $7 billion, and more than $60 million of notional value changes hands each day. Having grown rapidly over the past few years, there is now a developing but vibrant marketplace for bitcoin, and a recognition of digital currencies as an emerging asset class. Not only is there a listed and over-the-counter market for bitcoin and other digital currencies, but also an emergent derivatives market. As such, the ability to value bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies is becoming critical to its establishment as a legitimate financial asset.Using cross-sectional empirical data examining 66 of the most widely used cryptocurrencies, a regression model was estimated that points to three main drivers of cryptocurrency value: the level of competition in the network of producers, the rate of unit production, and the difficulty of algorithm used to “mine” for the cryptocurrency. These amount to relative differences in the cost of production of one digital currency over another at the margin, pointing to differences in relative cost of production – electricity goes in, cryptocurrency comes out. Using that as a starting point, a no-arbitrage situation is established for Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies followed by the formalization of a cost of production model to determine the fair value of a bitcoin.

Martina Matta, Maria Ilaria Lunesu, Michele Marchesi

In the last decade, Web 2.0 services such as blogs, tweets, forums, chats, email etc. have been widely used as communication media, with very good results. Sharing knowledge is an important part of learning and enhancing skills. Furthermore, emotions may affect decisionmaking and individual behavior. Bitcoin, a decentralized electronic currency system, represents a radical change in financial systems, attracting a large number of users and a lot of media attention. In this work, we investigated if the spread of the Bitcoin’s price is related to the volumes of tweets or Web Search media results. We compared trends of price with Google Trends data, volume of tweets and particularly with those that express a positive sentiment. We found significant cross correlation values, especially between Bitcoin price and Google Trends data, arguing our initial idea based on studies about trends in stock and goods market.