Blockchain Papers

Nir Kshetri, Jeffrey Voas

A large proportion of the population in the developing world can benefit from blockchain. In this article, the authors discuss key concerns that have been raised regarding institutions in the developing world and evaluate the potential role of blockchain to address them.

Chris Jaikaran

This report explains the technologies which underpin blockchain digital financial ledgers, how blockchain works, potential applications for blockchain, concerns with it, and potential considerations for Congress.

M Meima, Yoga Nugraha Pratama

Uang merupakan alat tukar menukar yang sangat mudah dibawa kemana–mana dan tahan awet. Uang diciptakan untuk mempermudah masyarakat atau manusia dalam jual beli dimanapun berada dan kapanpun berada, karena itu kita harus mempergunakan uang dengan sebaik-baiknya. Pada tanggal 2 November 1949 merupakan hari ditetapkan uang menjadi mata uang resmi negara Indonesia yang diatur dalam Undang-Undang No 7 Tahun 2011 Tentang Mata Uang. Seiring berkembangnya jaman mata uangpun berkembang dan saat ini yang muncul adalah mata uang virtual (Bitcoin), pengertian bitcoin adalah sebuah mata uang virtual yang pertama kali dikembangkan pada tahun 2009, oleh Satoshi Nakatomo, (nama samaran), Pada tahun 2017 Pemerintah Indonesia berencana untuk melegalkan mata uang virtual didalam kegiatan transaksi di pasar modal untuk mengikuti perkembangan jaman dan meningkatkan ekonomi di Indonesia menurut Undang-Undang No 8 Tahun 1995 Tentang Pasar Modal adalah kegiatan yang bersangkutan dengan Penawaran Umum dan perdagangan Efek, Perusahaan Publik yang berkaitan dengan Efek yang diterbitkannya, serta lembaga dan profesi yang berkaitan dengan Efek, dalam hal ini identfikasi masalah dari pernyataan diatas adalah bagaimanakan legalitas mata uang virtual (bitcoin) dalam transaksi pasar modal menurut hukum di Indonesia dan bagaimanakah penggunaan mata uang virtual (bitcoin) dalam pasar modal dikaitkan dengan Undang-Undang Nomor 8 Tahun 1995 Tentang Pasar Modal. Hasil penelitian menyimpulkan bahwa Penerapan pengaturan mengenai legalitas untuk menggunakan Bitcoin sebagai mata uang di Indonesia sangatlah sulit karena dalam Undang Undang Nomor 7 Tahun 2011 Tentang Mata Uang sudah sangat jelas bahwa mata uang yang sah d Indonesia adalah rupiah, terlebih BI menyatakan larangan tentang penggunaan Mata Uang Bitcoin dan Bitcoin juga bukan merupakan mata uang atau alat pembayaran yang sah di Indonesia. Penggunaan mata uang Bitcoin di pasar modal akan sangat terkendala karena PT Bitcoin Indonesia harus menyerahkan semua kewenangan dan pengaturan mata uang Bitcoin kepada Otoritas Jasa Keuangan sebagai lembaga pengawas pasar modal dan PT Bitcoin Indonesia juga harus menjadi Bank Kustodian karena Bank Kustodian adalah lembaga penyimpanan dan penyelesaian, perusahaan efek, atau bank umum yang telah mendapat persetujuan Bapepam.

Efpraxia D. Zamani, George M. Giaglis

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to argue for the role of the blockchain, i.e., distributed ledger technology, in building innovative business models, including machine money, autonomous economic agents and decentralised organisations. Design/methodology/approach The paper is conceptual/argumentative. As such, it draws on research on (e-)commerce, theories of markets, disruptive innovation and extant studies and conceptual work at the intersection of cryptocurrencies, machine-to-machine commerce and the Internet of Things. Findings The authors highlight three application areas for blockchains, whereby they can function as applications, can help develop autonomous economic agents and can lead the development of decentralised autonomous organisations. With regards to the question of market disintermediation, the authors suggest that, rather than complete disintermediation, the most probable scenario is that of new types of intermediaries finding previously unthinkable roles to play in mediating blockchain-based economic transactions. With regards to the inhibitors that slow down the technology’s adoption and, therefore, the development of new business applications, the authors posit that these relate mainly to the inherent risk of the technology, infrastructure requirements, scepticism of early decision makers and the lack of required new skills and competencies. Originality/value The authors examine how new forms of digital money and technologies embedding trust in decentralised networks will alter markets and commerce, at a time when many regulatory issues remain unresolved; in doing so, the authors focus on how blockchain-enabled technologies can be used to enable and further develop decentralised trusted peer-to-peer transaction ledger systems and applications and lead to sustainable business models.

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

Blockchain is receiving increasing attention from academy and industry, since it is considered a breakthrough technology that could bring huge benefits to many different sectors. In 2017, Gartner positioned blockchain close to the peak of inflated expectations, acknowledging the enthusiasm for this technology that is now largely discussed by media. In this scenario, the risk to adopt it in the wake of enthusiasm, without objectively judging its actual added value is rather high. Insurance is one the sectors that, among others, started to carefully investigate the possibilities of blockchain. For this specific sector, however, the hype cycle shows that the technology is still in the innovation trigger phase, meaning that the spectrum of possible applications has not been fully explored yet. Insurers, as with many other companies not necessarily active only in the financial sector, are currently requested to make a hard decision, that is, whether to adopt blockchain or not, and they will only know if they were right in 3–5 years. The objective of this paper is to support actors involved in this decision process by illustrating what a blockchain is, analyzing its advantages and disadvantages, as well as discussing several use cases taken from the insurance sector, which could easily be extended to other domains.

G. S. Bektenova

British Financial Supervision and Control Authority has identified new technologies as a component of fintech. These components include regtech, insurtech, blockchain. These new areas of the market development are incomprehensible to a wide range of people. However, this area attracts venture capital which is actively growing worldwide. The prospects of development of these areas are interesting for many reasons: reduction of financial costs for market participants, reduction of information processing time, security of financial transactions, information security and completeness. The article describes: objective reasons of the occurrence of such a kind of the product, risks of using these products and advantages of their introduction in all spheres of life, as well as the scope of regtech implementation.Keywords: Fintech, regtech, blockchain, insurtech

Roberto Tonelli, G. A. Pierro, Marco Ortu, Giuseppe Destefanis

Smart contracts (SC) are software programs that reside and run over a blockchain. The code can be written in different languages with the common purpose of implementing various kinds of transactions onto the hosting blockchain. They are ruled by the blockchain infrastructure with the intent to automatically implement the typical conditions of traditional contracts. Programs must satisfy context-dependent constraints which are quite different from traditional software code. In particular, since the bytecode is uploaded in the hosting blockchain, the size, computational resources, interaction between different parts of the program are all limited. This is true even if the specific programming languages implement more or less the same constructs as that of traditional languages: there is not the same freedom as in normal software development. The working hypothesis used in this article is that Smart Contract specific constraints should be captured by specific software metrics (that may differ from traditional software metrics). We tested this hypothesis on 85K Smart Contracts written in Solidity and uploaded on the Ethereum blockchain. We analyzed Smart Contracts from two repositories "Etherscan" and "Smart Corpus" and we computed the statistics of a set of software metrics related to Smart Contracts and compared them to the metrics extracted from more traditional software projects. Our results show that generally, Smart Contract metrics have more restricted ranges than the corresponding metrics in traditional software systems. Some of the stylized facts, like power law in the tail of the distribution of some metrics, are only approximate but the lines of code follow a log-normal distribution which reminds us of the same behaviour already found in traditional software systems.

Allan D. Grody

Setting proprietary standards for elemental data components of financial transactions, once the province of market participants and intermediaries, their sovereign regulators, and software and data vendors, has evolved into a global open source standards requirement. Global data standards initiatives are now seeking to eliminate unnecessary infrastructure costs and risks arising from use of proprietary data and interoperability standards and processes. Data standards have taken on new meaning and urgency as they have also become a prerequisite to securing financial networks from cyberattacks and enabling new technologies of the digital age. A new generation of innovation led by distributed ledger technology (DLT), a supportive database technology of the Blockchain, is being actively pursued by financial institutions and their financial market utilities. It is also of interest to many financial market regulators who are requesting access to more granular standardised transactional data. It has tremendous potential to eliminate reconciliation processes at financial institutions and refocus many of the hundreds of data intermediaries and financial market utilities that play a significant role in reconciling risk prone and costly non-standard data. This paper argues that the components of a sustainable financial industry infrastructure rebuild are coming into existence, but uncoordinated efforts across the globe will stifle the effectiveness of these changes. Therefore, this paper proposes a new global industry/ government partnership to coordinate implementation of data identification standards, accelerate data harmonisation initiatives and sponsor a secure financial-sector DLT protocol standard.

육태우

No abstract is available for this record.

Joost de Kruijff, Hans Weigand

Smart contracts gain rapid exposure since the inception of blockchain<br/>technology. Today's smart contracts are coded in non-mainstream<br/>procedural programming languages (e.g. Solidity for Ethereum),<br/>which lifts the requirement to draft enterprise ready smart contract to<br/>both a legal professional and a programmer instead of only the former.<br/>In search for a smart contract language that reduces the threshold to<br/>draft one, this conceptual paper elaborates how business logic can be<br/>converted to executable code for commitment-based smart contracts.<br/>Hereby, a contract is viewed as a set of reciprocal commitments. The<br/>smart contract ensures the automated execution of all or most of these<br/>commitments. In order to leverage its event processing capabilities,<br/>Reaction RuleML has been used to appropriately represent the<br/>elements and working of passive and active rules within a<br/>commitment based smart.

Yining Hu, Ahsan Manzoor, Parinya Ekparinya, Madhusanka Liyanage · 8 authors

Digital banking as an essential service can be hard to access in remote, rural regions where the network connectivity is unavailable or intermittent. The payment operators like Visa and Mastercard often face difficulties reaching these remote, rural areas. Although micro-banking has been made possible by short message service or unstructured supplementary service data messages in some places, their security flaws and session-based nature prevent them from wider adoption. Global-level cryptocurrencies enable low-cost, secure, and pervasive money transferring among distributed peers, but are still limited in their ability to reach people in remote communities. We propose a blockchain-based digital payment scheme that can deliver reliable services on top of unreliable networks in remote regions. We focus on a scenario where a community-run base station provides reliable local network connectivity while intermittently connects to the broader Internet. We take advantage of the distributed verification guarantees of the Blockchain technology for financial transaction verification and leverage smart contracts for secure service management. In the proposed system, payment operators deploy multiple proxy nodes that are intermittently connected to the remote communities where the local blockchain networks, such as Ethereum are composed of miners, vendors, and regular users. Through probabilistic modeling, we devise design parameters for the blockchain network to realize robust operation over the top of the unreliable network. Furthermore, we show that the transaction processing time will not be significantly impacted due to the network unreliability through extensive emulations on a private Ethereum network. Finally, we demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed system by developing Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled payment gateways on Raspberry-Pis, a mobile wallet application and mining nodes on off-the-shelf computers.

Maoran Zhu, Xin Liu

With development of Big Data technology these years, Internet financial companies in China started trying using big data technology to do credit investigation instead of traditional methods. But there is some limitation and problem in terms of data acquisition channel, information asymmetry and data privacy protection, etc. Block chain, characterized in unalterability and decentralization comes into people's sight. This paper will introduce block chain technology, explore the use of block chain technology in Internet financial credit investigation, and put forward an internet financial credit data sharing model based on block chain, which mainly composed by the Fin-tech Federate Servers group (FFS), the user data storage structure and a distributed database system (DDBS). By combining DPoS and re-encryption technology, the model has the characteristics of non-tampering, authorized access and convenient accountability. Through this model, the user data is recorded by the trusted agent, encrypted by asymmetric encryption technology, and anchored to the chain of the block periodically.

Siti Rohaya Mat Rahim, Zam Zuriyati Mohamad, Juliana Abu Bakar, Farhana Hanim Mohsin · 5 authors

This study examines the two important aspect of latest technology issues in Islamic finance that related to artificial intelligence (AI) and smart contract. AI refers to the ability of machines to understand, think, and learn in a similar way to human beings, indicating the possibility of using computers to simulate human intelligence. Smart contract is a computer code running on top of a block-chain containing a set of rules under which the parties to that smart contract agree to interact with each other. The main objectives of this article are to evaluate the operations of AI and smart contract, to make comparison between the operations of AI and smart contract. This article concludes that AI and smart contract will have a huge impact in future for Islamic Finance industry.

Wenbo Wang, Dusit Niyato, Ping Wang, Amir Leshem

Blockchains enables tamper-proof, ordered logging for transactional data in a decentralized manner over open-access, overlay peer-to-peer networks. In this paper, we propose a decentralized framework of proactive caching in a hierarchical wireless network based on blockchains. We employ the blockchain-based smart contracts to construct an autonomous content caching market. In the market, the cache helpers are able to autonomously adapt their caching strategies according to the market statistics obtained from the blockchain, and the truthfulness of trustless nodes are financially enforced by smart contract terms. Further, we propose an incentive-compatible consensus mechanism based on proof-of-stake to financially encourage the cache helpers to stay active in service. We model the interaction between the cache helpers and the content providers as a Chinese restaurant game. Based on the theoretical analysis regarding the Nash equilibrium of the game, we propose a decentralized strategy-searching algorithm using sequential best response. The simulation results demonstrate both the efficiency and reliability of the proposed equilibrium searching algorithm.

P. M. Krafft, Nicolás Della Penna, Alex Sandy Pentland

As cryptocurrencies gain popularity and credibility, marketplaces for cryptocurrencies are growing in importance. Understanding the dynamics of these markets can help to assess how viable the cryptocurrnency ecosystem is and how design choices affect market behavior. One existential threat to cryptocurrencies is dramatic fluctuations in traders' willingness to buy or sell. Using a novel experimental methodology, we conducted an online experiment to study how susceptible traders in these markets are to peer influence from trading behavior. We created bots that executed over one hundred thousand trades costing less than a penny each in 217 cryptocurrencies over the course of six months. We find that individual "buy" actions led to short-term increases in subsequent buy-side activity hundreds of times the size of our interventions. From a design perspective, we note that the design choices of the exchange we study may have promoted this and other peer influence effects, which highlights the potential social and economic impact of HCI in the design of digital institutions.

Enas Qutieshat, Bassam Al-Tarawneh

<em>This paper aims to identify the practices involved in the formation of smart contracts and the limitations that are faced by the organizations through development of smart contracts in business. The Smart contract is developed based on specific criteria in the business. The smart chain in the business identify the block chains that are developed in the business to resolve different financial issues in the company. In this report, the elements of smart contracts are evaluated and analyzed along with a discussion of previous researchers on the same criteria. This study identifies that smart contracts become essential for business practices with development of technology. The form of smart contracts has captured the attention of legal attorney and its impact on contract law of business. This report implements the descriptive methodology approach in which the secondary data is analyzed to identify the formation of smart contracts and its liability on business. Additionally, the research data is analyzed through secondary qualitative analysis. </em>

Munindar P. Singh, Amit K. Chopra

We examine blockchain technologies, especially smart contracts, as a platform for decentralized applications. By providing a basis for consensus, blockchain promises to upend business models that presuppose a central authority. However, blockchain suffers from major shortcomings arising from an over-regimented way of organizing computation that limits its prospects. We propose a sociotechnical, yet computational, perspective that avoids those shortcomings. A centerpiece of our vision is the notion of a declarative, violable contract in contradistinction to smart contracts. This new way of thinking enables flexible governance, by formalizing organizational structures; verification of correctness without obstructing autonomy; and a meaningful basis for trust.

Olivier Hueber

This paper provides a description of the blockchain that underpins the Bitcoins. This paper provides a new mechanism to reinforce the credibility of online transactions based on blockchain technology. It then becomes possible to explore the future of the blockchain technology in other online electronic markets of goods and services. We assert that the blockchain technology, still linked with the BT, could become in the near future the keystone of many electronic markets and could considerably increase online transactions. A cryptocurrency regime based on sidechain is modelled and a public blockchain controlled by a central is proposed.

Schlomit Azgad-Tromer

Recent declarations and investigations by the Securities and ExchangeCommission suggest that blockchain-based assets are potentially subject to regulation as securities under the Securities Act.This Article presents a systematic analysis of the risks and embedded costs of investments in blockchainbased assets and assesses their potential regulation as securities.This Article offers a comprehensive account of the pertinent properties of blockchain-based assets, the technology of the blockchain, the markets available for their trade, and their varied underlying sources of value.It identifies unique costs and risk factors inherent to the blockchain technology, and examines whether securities laws can potentially add value and protect investors from these unique risks.Identified costs and risks factors include controlling costs prevalent even in decentralized ledgers, monitoring costs that vary according to the costs of automatic verification, technology risks rooted in the vulnerability of the blockchain to bugs in its software, and systemic risks embedded in limited transparency and contractual rigidity of the blockchain-based investment contract.This Article examines these unique costs and risk factors and assesses their normative implications for securities regulation of blockchain-based assets.With current efforts by regulatory authorities to designate blockchain-based assets as securities, a coherent approach is presented based on the type of the offering, investors' profile, and the technical and legal contours of the blockchain-based

Wolfgang Prinz

This exploratory paper examines the relationship between CSCW and emerging blockchain technologies. Although the blockchain technology is at first sight not directly related to CSCW, this paper will identify a number of CSCW research areas that are relevant and that can either profit or contribute to blockchain research. To open CSCW research to new areas and to stipulate a discussion between the disciplines, the paper will start with a brief introduction to basic blockchain concepts followed by an exploration of the relationships between the two research areas. It concludes with an initial proposal on how CSCW research results and concepts can inform blockchain design.

Trevor Clohessy, Thomas Acton, Reuben Godfrey, Michelle Houston

Research carried out at NUI Galway has found a 40% blockchain adoption rate among Irish enterprises to date. The study investigated why implementation in Ireland is relatively low, and proposes recommendations to increase blockchain awareness and adoption that can provide opportunities not only for economic growth but also create a new foundation for how Irish organisations and government conduct business.

Alexis Collomb, Primavera De Filippi, Klara Sok

No abstract is available for this record.

Gilbert Fridgen, Guggenmoos, Florian, Jannik Lockl, Alexander Rieger · 6 authors

The public sector presents several promising applications for blockchain technology. Global organizations and innovative ministries in countries such as Dubai, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Germany have recognized these potentials and have initiated projects to evaluate the adoption of blockchain technology. As these projects can have a far-reaching impact on crucial government services and processes, they should involve a particularly thorough evaluation. In this paper, we provide insights into the development of a framework to support such an evaluation for the German asylum process. We built this framework evolutionarily together with the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Its final version consists of three levels and eighteen categories of evaluation criteria across the technical, functional and legal domains and allows specifying use-case specific key performance indicators or knockout criteria.

Darcy W E Allen, Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Mikayla Novak · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.