The blockchain web platform, most famous for its use in support of Bitcoin, is a sophisticated and unique technology, which many believe is the next disruptive technology that will span across a vast range of industries. Scholars identified more than ten features of this technology that makes it, like no other: open-ledger, encrypted, everlasting, accessible to all, enables peer to peer transactions, fast, global, trustworthy, decentralized, consensus mechanisms, and irreversible. By embracing all of these features, blockchain technology offers an alternative tool to traditional multi-player economic models for conducting transactions without the necessity of relying on third parties.
This article addresses the misperception of blockchain, perceiving it, similarly to the common understanding of the Internet, as an open platform, accessible to the public, with free entry and most important, in the public domain. Hardly anyone thought to consider protected intellectual property (IP) rights in regard to this technology, that was coined democratic. However, this concept, that there is only one public domain blockchain platform that serves all or that blockchain platforms are free from any IP rights is false. This article alleges, for the first time, that unlike the common perception, not only is blockchain technology patentable, but the U.S. Patent Office granted patents in blockchain platforms and keeps on examining inventions of new and different types of blockchain technologies.
This false assumptions may be based on misunderstanding the technology of different types of blockchain platforms or on the legend about the unknown figure, entity or artificial intelligence (AI) system, named Satoshi Nakamoto, who mysteriously created the technology and donated this platform technology, in 2009, without identifying him/her/itself, for the benefit of society.
Additionally, this paper innovatively takes a step further and investigates, the implications of patent law concerning blockchain technology, in order to unveil the emerging risks of patent infringements, which users are unaware of while naively using blockchain platforms. By understanding the peer-to-peer multi-player structure of these platforms, one can evaluate the threat the inevitable patent infringements may cause. This article further argues that this threat will become more crucial and weighty with the rising popularity of blockchain platforms. Finally, this research not only points out unexpected legal and economic risks, but also proposes a simple solution to mitigate this potential patent minefield.
The proposal of this paper is to present a summary of ten years of research at the P2P Foundation, including by our own P2P Lab but also by our partners in common research programs, of what we know today about the emerging commons economy. It includes a basic account of why the ‘invention’ of the blockchain has been important, but stresses that the needed distributed ledgers may take other forms in the future. This section may not offer a lot of new elements for those that are already technologically savvy about the topic, but it does offer a critical engagement with the qualities and flaws of the current model, and suggests how it can be tweaked and transformed, to also serve as a basis for a post-capitalist, commons-centric economy.
Bruno W. França, Sophie Radermacher, Reto Trinkler
Katallassos is a new blockchain that provides a standard way to build and deploy decentralized financial applications.
It brings together all the components necessary for the backend of a financial application, namely: a high-performance consensus, an authenticated data feed system, a standard for financial contracts and connectivity to the rest of the blockchain ecosystem.
Katallassos enables and simplifies the creation of financial services that are non-custodial, trustless, fast, convenient and interoperable.
Blockchain technology and cryptoassets may have seized the attention of the financial services space, but as the technology ecosystem continues to mature there are additional considerations coming to the forefront. Smart contracts represent an important piece of the blockchain conversation and play a critical role in how blockchains interact with other technology platforms. Accounting and auditing professionals will need to understand both how smart contracts function, and also how these applications will impact accounting and auditing processes. The present paper, written keeping both the academic and practitioner audience in mind, seeks to examine how smart contracts interact with blockchain technology, analyze how these applications can change audit processes, and propose potential future roles for the profession.
We have reviewed the potential impact of blockchain technology on the music industry by analyzing the views of academia and the industry experts. The music industry had rapid changes from the physical market to the digital market in the past decades. The consumers download and stream music online and mobile during the digital dominant market. While streaming music has been recently growing at a fast rate, fair distribution of revenue to the artists continues to be an issue. Some industry experts believe that the issue of fair distribution of revenue to the artist may be resolved using blockchain technology, while some are skeptical about the application or the duration of impact. The blockchain may enhance speedier payment using smart contracts, provide additional revenue and promote the music if excellent fan support is achieved. The positive impact on the music industry may only be possible if there are detailed consideration of the industry and careful understanding of the customers.
Abstract The goal is to identify the characteristics of innovative business models that use blockchain technology. Through a qualitative and descriptive research, we sought, in the Crunshbase database, the companies that had in their activity description the word Blockchain, obtaining a total of 810 companies. The data obtained were tabulated in Excel spreadsheet and we carried out a collection of additional information on the websites of the organizations. The process of data analysis used the technique of document analysis and content analysis. The results allowed us to identify that most organizations' foundation date from 2014 and are located in North America. Regarding the area of expertise of these organizations, it can be observed that most of them belong to financial and technology areas. Moreover, 10 companies were already in operation before the creation of blockchain technology, pointing out the characteristic of a disruptive technology, which is the readjustment of established companies. Finally, we highlight the contributions related to the field, by identifying the main areas of business that use blockchain technology, as well as revealing important descriptions about these companies. In addition to contributions to the theory, by presenting empirical evidences of active business with this technology and its contributions to the various areas.
Speculation on Bitcoin, the evolution of money in the digital age, and the underlying blockchain technology are attracting growing interest. In the context of the Eurosystem, this briefing paper analyses the legal nature of privately issued virtual currencies (VCs), the implications of VCs for central bank’s monetary policy and monopoly of note issue, and the risks for the financial system at large. The paper also considers some of the proposals concerning central bank issued virtual currencies. This document was provided by Policy Department A at the request of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.
Blockchain, arguably the most discussed and promising of FinTech trends, has incredible potential to transform legal technology. Infamous as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, distributed ledger technology (DLT) has developed far beyond these origins and may prove far more valuable than the currency it supports. As a form of DLT, blockchain allows for secure decentralisation of peer-to-peer, irreversible exchanges, providing a transparent and irrevocable record as these occur. The technology is already used across the legal industry and a plethora of opportunities to extend its application bubble beneath the surface, under development, waiting to break into the current market.
In recent years, blockchain technology has been developing rapidly in social economy. As blockchain technology has many excellent properties, it is used for the transaction of Bitcoin at first. With the rise of Bitcoin, the connection between blockchain technology and financial market will be closer more integrative. And then more and more financial institutions have recognized the importance of blockchain technology and started to try to use this technology in financial operations, such as R3CEV, Hyperledger and Qiwi. Many financial institutions have started trying to apply blockchain technology into financial transactions in order to decrease transaction costs and increase operational efficiencies, especially in financial note, cross-border payment and asset-backed securitization. It can be seen that blockchain technology will have widely application prospects in financial fields in the future.
Abstract This paper critically examines the intersection and interactions between conventional law produced and enforced by national legal systems (ie the ‘code of law’) and the internal rules of blockchain systems, which take the form of executable software code and cryptographic algorithms operating across a distributed computing network (‘code as law’). In so doing, it seeks to identify whether, and to what extent, ‘regulation by blockchain’ will successfully avoid governance by conventional law. It identifies three different ways in which the code of law is likely to interact with code as law, based primarily on the intended motives and purposes of those engaged in activities in developing, maintaining or undertaking transactions upon the network. It argues that these different classes of case are likely to generate different kinds of dynamic interaction between the blockchain code and conventional legal systems, and critically examines the normative foundations of these emerging and anticipated interactions.
Recently, the world has seen the emergence of new phenomenal technology named crypto currency (Bitcoin) which is attracted to several international networkers across the globe. Yet, the Bitcoin was the online currency which is replaced the hard currency in a business online transaction and was accepted only by internet users so far. Though, this invisible currency was not allowed or even accepted in Arab world society because of religious circumstances or governmental consent. In this study, we tried to analyze the real challenges and necessitates that face the Bitcoin in the Arabian region. Therefore, the outcomes have been found that Islamic business rules somehow have restricted the using of the Bitcoin process in financial transactions. Furthermore, the lowest and highest service cost of internet represent the key consequences behind lessen of using Bitcoin. According to Google trends Data from 2013 to 2019, many Arabian-individuals did not know or even unfamiliar with the use of Bitcoin. Keywords: key words, Bitcoin; Arabic countries; Islamic; Internet services DOI : 10.7176/JESD/10-6-18 Publication date :March 31 st 2019
In September 2018 the authors released a report funded by the Law Foundation entitled “Regulation of Cryptocurrencies in New Zealand”. This article includes the report’s recommendations as well as background on the implications of cryptocurrencies and blockchain to society and the law.
Cryptocurrencies, in particular bitcoin, have captured the public’s attention. It is hard to find a person who has not heard about bitcoin, albeit blockchain, the technology that the creators of bitcoin devised, is still a mystery to most. Blockchain, however, is just one form of distributed ledger technology (DLT). For the sake of simplicity, the term blockchain is used in this article.
The purpose of article hereof is to introduce the significant characters of the smart contracts and certain ideas and proposals de lege ferenda on regulatory framework for smart contracts. Furthermore, present legislation with regard to the legal definition of the smart contract will be discussed from a comparative perspective. Particular note will be devoted to smart contracts in a relation to the contract law. Substantively, legal issues arising from the use of smart contracts, focussing upon actual and potential conflicts with established principles of contract law, will be introduced.
This study is part of the project ‘Incentives and innovative finance for scaling Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) up and out’ which as part of the flagship ‘Climate-Smart Technologies and Practices’. Through case study research, the project aims to develop context-specific knowledge on the factors and conditions which constitute an effective technical and financial package to scale up and scale out CSA practices and businesses. The impact of these packages on the adoption of CSA and the resilience of farmers and Small to Medium Enterprises to climate change will be assessed by means of three case studies. The first case aimed at upscaling CSA with small scale food producers who were organised in village savings and loans in Tanzania. The second case study focused on climate smart villages using climate-smart financial diaries for scaling in Kenya. This third study focuses on the financial resilience of smallholder farmers in Kenya who are affected by climate change. We will use blockchain technology as a lens to discuss the potential impact provided through this innovative technology. In the next year we envisage to run a small pilot with blockchain technology in Kenya. Kenya is particularly interesting considering blockchain, as mobile payment systems are well and widely adopted. This enhances possibilities for linking blockchain technology.
Sté́phane Ducasse, Henrique Rocha, Santiago Bragagnolo, Marcus Denker · 5 authors
Smart contracts are new computational units with special properties: they act as classes with aspectual concerns; their memory structure is more complex than mere objects; they are obscure in the sense that once deployed it is difficult to access their internal state; they reside in an append-only chain.There is a need to support the building of new generation tools to help developers.Such support should tackle several important aspects: (1) the static structure of the contract, (2) the object nature of published contracts, and (3) the overall data chain composed of blocks and transactions.In this chapter, we present SmartAnvil an open platform to build software analysis tools around smart contracts.We illustrate the general components and we focus on three important aspects: support for static analysis of Solidity smart contracts, deployed smart contract binary analysis through inspection, and blockchain 1 Accepted to appear in "Blockchain and Web 3.0:
This article argues that there are many questions that lawyers might ask, and conversations that they might have, about smart contracts; that some questions that are asked are more important than others; and that there are some questions that are not asked but which should be asked. First, it is argued that the question that preoccupies ‘coherentists’ (concerning the application of the law of contract to smart contracts, and the fit between smart contracts and the paradigmatic ‘fiat contracts’ that are recognised by the law of contract) is neither as puzzling nor as important as might be supposed. Secondly, it is argued that, if there are concerns about the acceptability of smart contracts, then the conversation that needs to be had is of a ‘regulatory-instrumentalist’ nature; in particular, if the question is one of public policy restrictions on the use of smart contracts, then the appropriate balance of interests needs to be made by an institution that has both the necessary mandate and the appropriate mind-set. Thirdly, it is argued that there are conversations that we currently do not have but which urgently need to be had. Blockchain is a potentially transformative technology and it is important to have more fundamental conversations about the kind of community that we want to be.
In recent years, we have seen a great deal of both academic and practical interest in the topic of vulnerabilities in smart contracts, particularly those developed for the Ethereum blockchain. While most of the work has focused on detecting *vulnerable* contracts, in this paper, we focus on finding how many of these vulnerable contracts have actually been *exploited*. We survey the 23,327 vulnerable contracts reported by six recent academic projects and find that, despite the amounts at stake, only 1.98% of them have been exploited since deployment. This corresponds to at most 8,487 ETH (~1.7 million USD), or only 0.27% of the 3 million ETH (600 million USD) at stake. We explain these results by demonstrating that the funds are very concentrated in a small number of contracts which are *not exploitable* in practice.
Shayan Eskandari, Seyedehmahsa Moosavi, Jeremy Clark
We consider front-running to be a course of action where an entity benefits from prior access to privileged market information about upcoming transactions and trades. Front-running has been an issue in financial instrument markets since the 1970s. With the advent of the blockchain technology, front-running has resurfaced in new forms we explore here, instigated by blockchains decentralized and transparent nature. In this paper, we draw from a scattered body of knowledge and instances of front-running across the top 25 most active decentral applications (DApps) deployed on Ethereum blockchain. Additionally, we carry out a detailed analysis of Status.im initial coin offering (ICO) and show evidence of abnormal miners behavior indicative of front-running token purchases. Finally, we map the proposed solutions to front-running into useful categories.
Abeer ElBahrawy, Laura Alessandretti, Andrea Baronchelli
The production and consumption of information about Bitcoin and other digital-, or crypto- , currencies have grown together with their market capitalization. However, a systematic investigation of the relationship between online attention and market dynamics across multiple digital currencies is still lacking. Here, we quantify the interplay between the attention towards digital currencies in Wikipedia and their market performance. We consider the entire edit history of currency-related pages and their view history from July 2015. First, we quantify the evolution of the cryptocurrency presence in Wikipedia by analyzing the editorial activity and the network of co-edited pages. We find that a small community of tightly connected editors is responsible for most of the production of information about cryptocurrencies in Wikipedia. Then, we show that a simple trading strategy informed by Wikipedia views performs better than baseline strategies, in terms of returns on investment, for most of the covered period although the ‘buy and hold strategy’ dominates during the periods of explosive market expansion. Our results contribute to the recent literature on the interplay between online information and investment markets, and we anticipate it will be of interest for researchers as well as investors.
In the early 1970s, the legal community grappled with whether to allow payment of legal fees by then-innovative means: the credit card. The first ABA opinion on the subject permitting payment of legal services by credit card was issued in 1974.
Today, attorneys are faced with another cutting-edge method of paying legal fees: virtual currency, also known as cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is not money - it is property. Attorneys accepting cryptocurrency in payment of fees raises a number of ethical and practical issues which should be addressed by the attorney in the engagement letter with the client.
This document outlines our approach to conducting a rapid realist review to identify evidence for potential impacts on people and society of peer-to-peer energy trading (and of distributed ledger technology used in this context). Our motivation for the study is to help anticipate who might stand to win or lose (and how and why), inform policy/regulation to help maximize benefits and minimize harm, and identify research gaps. While our focus is in the energy sector, we also plan to draw on evidence (where relevant) from examples of sharing economy models in non-energy sectors. We have already developed and engaged around a provisional programme theory (presented as a set of Context-Mechanism-Outcome statements), which we will develop as the review progresses. We set out where and how we will seek to identify evidence (through online searching, reference checking and calling for evidence). In line with our exploratory and iterative approach, we propose broad inclusion criteria. We will assess evidence quality subjectively on the basis of relevance and rigour for each Context-Mechanism-Outcome group, not at document level. Synthesis will be achieved through developing our programme theory and connecting evidence to it. We will disseminate findings through an academic paper (or papers), one or more policy briefings (with associated engagement events), one or more public blogs, and materials will be openly shared on an ongoing basis through an Open Science Framework page.
Smart contract platforms, the most notable of which is probably Ethereum, facilitate the development of important and diverse distributed applications (e.g., naming services and fungible tokens) in a simple manner. This simplicity stems from the inherent utility of employing the state of smart contracts to store, query and verify the validity of application data. In Ethereum, data storage incurs an underpriced, non-recurring, predefined fee. Furthermore, as there is no incentive for freeing or minimizing the state of smart contracts, Ethereum is faced with a tragedy of the commons problem with regards to its monotonically increasing state. This issue, if left unchecked, may lead to centralization and directly impact Ethereum's security and longevity. In this work, we introduce an alternative paradigm for developing smart contracts in which their state is of constant size and facilitates the verification of application data that are stored to and queried from an external, potentially unreliable, storage network. This approach is relevant for a wide range of applications, such as any key-value store. We evaluate our approach by adapting the most widely deployed standard for fungible tokens, i.e., the ERC20 token standard. We show that Ethereum's current cost model penalizes our approach, even though it minimizes the overhead to Ethereum's state and aligns well with Ethereum's future. We address Ethereum's monotonically increasing state in a two-fold manner. First, we introduce recurring fees that are proportional to the state of smart contracts and adjustable by the miners that maintain the network. Second, we propose a scheme where the cost of storage-related operations reflects the effort that miners have to expend to execute them. Lastly, we show that under such a pricing scheme that encourages economy in the state consumed by smart contracts, our ERC20 token adaptation reduces the incurred transaction fees by up to an order of magnitude.
In recent years, the status of cooperation and innovation has become increasingly important. Research on the behavior of production, education, and research organizations has attracted widespread attention. Blockchain technology is considered as another subversive technology following cloud computing, wireless sensor networks, and big data. It is highly concerned by governments, financial institutions, and technology companies. Blockchain technology is essentially a technical solution that collectively maintains a reliable database through a decentralized, high-trust way. Blockchain WEB technology has not only used in financial and other fields, but also has a great potential for application in the fields of production, education, and research. It has expected to play an important role in the establishment of a trust mechanism in the “Internet +” production, research, and innovation and promote education. Drawing on the experience in blockchain applications in the financial sector, the blockchain in the education sector mainly embodies six application modes: building individual science credit data, creating an intelligent education Taobao platform, developing a degree certificate system, and building a new ecology of open educational resources. Of course, due to the uniqueness and complexity of the trust field in the cooperation innovation of industry, universities, and research institutes, the application of blockchain technology is also faced with difficulties in the application, promotion, and operation of production and research, fuzzy ownership of educational big data, limited data storage space, and potential safety problems of blockchain technology. There are many challenges such as the privacy protection risks of teachers and students.