Cryptocurrencies represent one of the most attractive markets for financial speculation. As a consequence, they have attracted unprecedented attention on social media. Besides genuine discussions and legitimate investment initiatives, several deceptive activities have flourished. In this work, we chart the online cryptocurrency landscape across multiple platforms. To reach our goal, we collected a large dataset, composed of more than 50M messages published by almost 7M users on Twitter, Telegram and Discord, over three months. We performed bot detection on Twitter accounts sharing invite links to Telegram and Discord channels, and we discovered that more than 56% of them were bots or suspended accounts. Then, we applied topic modeling techniques to Telegram and Discord messages, unveiling two different deception schemes - “pump-and-dump” and “Ponzi” - and identifying the channels involved in these frauds. Whereas on Discord we found a negligible level of deception, on Telegram we retrieved 296 channels involved in pump-and-dump and 432 involved in Ponzi schemes, accounting for a striking 20% of the total. Moreover, we observed that 93% of the invite links shared by Twitter bots point to Telegram pump-and-dump channels, shedding light on a little-known social bot activity. Charting the landscape of online cryptocurrency manipulation can inform actionable policies to fight such abuse.
Christoph Kinkeldey, Jean‐Daniel Fekete, Tanja Blascheck, Petra Isenberg
We present BitConduite, a visual analytics tool for explorative analysis of financial activity within the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency worldwide and a phenomenon that challenges the underpinnings of traditional financial systems - its users can send money pseudo-anonymously while circumventing traditional banking systems. Yet, despite the fact that all financial transactions in Bitcoin are available in an openly accessible online ledger - the blockchain - not much is known about how different types of actors in the network (we call them entities) actually use Bitcoin. BitConduite offers an entity-centered view on transactions, making the data accessible to non-technical experts through a guided workflow for classification of entities according to several activity metrics. Other novelties are the possibility to cluster entities by similarity and exploration of transaction data at different scales, from large groups of entities down to a single entity and the associated transactions. Two use cases illustrate the workflow of the system and its analytic power. We report on feedback regarding the approach and the the software tool gathered during a workshop with domain experts, and we discuss the potential of the approach based on our findings.
Blockchain technology has evolved as a promising means to transform data management models in many domains including healthcare, agricultural research, tourism domains etc. In the research community, a usable blockchain-based system can allow users to create a proof of ownership and provenance of the research work, share research data without losing control and ownership of it, provide incentives for sharing and give users full transparency and control over who access their data, when and for what purpose. The initial adoption of such blockchain-based systems is necessary for continued use of the services, but their user acceptance behavioral model has not been well investigated in the literature. In this paper, we take the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a foundation and extend the external constructs to uncover how the perceived ease of use, perceived usability, quality of the system and perceived enjoyment influence the intention to use the blockchain-based system. We based our study on user evaluation of a prototype of a blockchain-based research data sharing framework using a TAM validated questionnaire. Our results show that, overall, all the individual constructs of the behavior model significantly influence the intention to use the system while their collective effect is found to be insignificant. The quality of the system and the perceived enjoyment have stronger influence on the perceived usefulness. However, the effect of perceived ease of use on the perceived usefulness is not supported. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings.
In this work, we investigate how the governance features of a managed currency (e.g., a fiat currency) can be built into a cryptocurrency in order to leverage potential benefits found in the use of blockchain technology and smart contracts. The resulting managed cryptocurrency can increase transparency and integrity, while potentially enabling the emergence of novel monetary instruments. It has similarities to cash in that it enables the general public to immediately transfer funds to a recipient without intermediary systems being involved. However, our system is account-based, unlike circulating bank notes that are self-contained. Our design would allow one to satisfy know your customer laws and be subject to law enforcement actions following legal due process (e.g., account freezing and fund seizure), while mitigating counterparty risk with checks and balances. Funds can thus be transferred only between approved and authenticated users. Our system has on-chain governance capabilities using smart contracts deployed on a dedicated, permissioned blockchain that has different sets of control mechanisms for who can read data, write data, and publish blocks. To enable the governance features, only authorized identity proofed entities can submit transactions. To enable privacy, only the block publishers can read the blockchain; the publishers maintain dedicated nodes that provide access controlled partial visibility of the blockchain data. Being permissioned, we can use a simple consensus protocol with no transaction fees. A separate security layer prevents denial of service and a balance of power mechanism prevents any small group of entities from having undue control. While permissioned, we ensure that no one entity controls the blockchain data or block publishing capability through a voting system with publicly visible election outcomes.
Gaganjeet Singh Reen, Manasi Mohandas, S. Venkatesan
Electronic Health Records(EHR) are gaining a lot of popularity all over the world. The current EHR systems however have their fair share of problems related to privacy and security. We have proposed a mechanism which provides a solution to most of these problems. Using a permissioned Ethereum blockchain allows the hospitals and patients across the world to be connected to each other. Our mechanism uses a combination of symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography to ensure the secure storage and selective access of records. It gives patients full control over their health records and also allows them to grant or revoke a hospital's access to his/her records. We have used IPFS(inter planetary file system) to store records which has the advantage of being distributed and ensures immutability of records. The proposed model also maintains the statistics of diseases without violating the privacy of any patient.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The problem of reliable democratic governance is important for survival of any community, and it will be more critical over time communities with levels of social connectivity in society rapidly increasing with speeds and scales of electronic communication. In order to face such challenge, different sorts of rating and reputation systems are being developed, however reputation gaming and manipulation in such systems appears to be serious problem. We are considering use of advanced reputation system supporting "liquid democracy" principle with generalized design and underlying ontology fitting different sorts of environments such as social networks, financial ecosystems and marketplaces. The suggested system is based on "temporal weighted liquid rank" algorithm employing different sorts of explicit and implicit ratings being exchanged by members of the society. For the purpose, we suggest "incremental reputation" design and graph database used for implementation of the system. Finally, we present evaluation of the system against real social network and financial blockchain data. The entire framework is expected to be the foundation of any multi-agent AI framework, so the evolution of distributed multi-agent AI architecture and dynamics will be based on the organic reputation scores earned by the agents that are part of it.
With blockchain technology, information is recorded in a permanent distributed ledger that is maintained by multiple computers in a peer-to-peer network. There is no central authority that can alter records or change network consensus rules. Such technology could be utilized for voting, title transfers, issuance of company shares, document notarization, but currently, the most popular use-case are virtual currencies. An interesting feature that some virtual currencies have is a multisignature (multisig) protocol that requires the electronic signatures from more than one private key to initiate a transfer of funds. Raw data of a multisig transaction may be recognized as an arbitral award under the New York Convention, where the law of England is the lex arbitri and parties have opted-out of a reasoned award.
Swati Megha, Joseph Lamptey, Hamza Salem, Manuel Mazzara
The energy industry needs to shift to a new paradigm from its classical model of energy generation, distribution, and management. This shift is necessary to handle digitization, increased renewable energy generation, and to achieve goals of environmental sustainability. This shift has several challenges on its way and has been seen through research and development that blockchain which is one of the budding technology in this era could be suitable for addressing those challenges. This paper is aimed at the survey of all the research and development related to blockchain in the energy industry and uses a software engineering approach to categories all the existing work in several clusters such as challenges addressed, quality attribute promoted, the maturity level of the solutions, etc. This survey provides researchers in this field a well-defined categorization and insight into the existing work in this field from 3 different perspectives (challenges, quality attributes, maturity).
Abeer ElBahrawy, Laura Alessandretti, Leonid Rusnac, Daniel Goldsmith · 6 authors
Dark markets are commercial websites that use Bitcoin to sell or broker transactions involving\ndrugs, weapons, and other illicit goods. Being illegal, they do not offer any user protection, and\nseveral police raids and scams have caused large losses to both customers and vendors over the past\nyears. However, this uncertainty has not prevented a steady growth of the dark market phenomenon\nand a proliferation of new markets. The origin of this resilience have remained unclear so far, also due\nto the difficulty of identifying relevant Bitcoin transaction data. Here, we investigate how the dark\nmarket ecosystem re-organises following the disappearance of a market, due to factors including raids\nand scams. To do so, we analyse 24 episodes of unexpected market closure through a novel datasets\nof 133 million Bitcoin transactions involving 31 dark markets and their users, totalling 4 billion USD.\nWe show that coordinated user migration from the closed market to coexisting markets guarantees\noverall systemic resilience beyond the intrinsic fragility of individual markets. The migration is\nswift, efficient and common to all market closures. We find that migrants are on average more active\nusers in comparison to non-migrants and move preferentially towards the coexisting market with\nthe highest trading volume. Our findings shed light on the resilience of the dark market ecosystem\nand we anticipate that they may inform future research on the self-organisation of emerging online\nmarkets.
In this report, the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) has written down lessons learned on how blockchain technology can have an impact on the healthcare domain. By looking at two use-cases, the hospital challenged several teams, participating in an open innovation program and blockchain hackathon, to find a solution that showed the added value of the technology for patient care and scientific research. Besides this practical perspective, the report also considers literature discussing the current state of blockchain technology in regard to developments in the healthcare domain (touching on patient empowerment, data management, regulations, and interoperability between healthcare systems).
August Thio-ac, Erwin John Domingo, Ricca May Reyes, Nilo Arago · 6 authors
This paper presents the development of an online procurement system and the integration of blockchain technology. Various tools such as PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and jQuery were used in designing the graphical, programming logic, and blockchain aspect of the system. Every page and function will have their respective construction and result. In addition, the proposed system's flow of process and the methods on the testing and hosting of the site as well as the different web development languages used in every part of the development and design process were presented. The proposed system was successfully and functionally developed starting from the execution of procurement proper, to the placement of procured items or goods, and up to the signing of contracts by the winner and the procurer. Lastly, features were added such as user profiles of the bidder and procurer.
Kazi Sadia, Md Masuduzzaman, Rajib Kumar Paul, Anik Islam
Voting is a very important issue which can be beneficial in term of choosing the right leader in an election. A good leader can bring prosperity to a country and also can lead the country in the right direction every time. However, elections are surrounds with ballot forgery, coercion and multiple voting issues. Moreover, while giving votes, a person has to wait in a long queue and it is a very time consuming process. Blockchain is a distributed database in which data are shared with the participant of the node and each participant holds the same copy of the data. Blockchain has properties like distributed, pseudonymous, data integrity etc. In the paper, a fully decentralized evoting system based on blockchain technology is proposed. This protocol utilizes smart contract into the evoting system to deal with security issues, accuracy and voters privacy during the vote. The protocol results in a transparent, non editable and independently verifiable procedure that discards all the intended fraudulent activities occurring during the election process by removing the least participation of the third party and enabling voters right during the election. Both transparency and coercion are obtained at the same time.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Cybercriminals exploit cryptocurrencies to carry out illicit activities. In this paper, we focus on Ponzi schemes that operate on Bitcoin and perform an in-depth analysis of MMM, one of the oldest and most popular Ponzi schemes. Based on 423K transactions involving 16K addresses, we show that: (1) Starting Sep 2014, the scheme goes through three phases over three years. At its peak, MMM circulated more than 150M dollars a day, after which it collapsed by the end of Jun 2016. (2) There is a high income inequality between MMM members, with the daily Gini index reaching more than 0.9. The scheme also exhibits a zero-sum investment model, in which one member's loss is another member's gain. The percentage of victims who never made any profit has grown from 0% to 41% in five months, during which the top-earning scammer has made 765K dollars in profit. (3) The scheme has a global reach with 80 different member countries but a highly-asymmetrical flow of money between them. While India and Indonesia have the largest pairwise flow in MMM, members in Indonesia have received 12x more money than they have sent to their counterparts in India.
Currently, there is no universal method to track who shared what, with whom, when and for what purposes in a verifiable way to create an individual incentive for data owners. A platform that allows data owners to control, delete, and get rewards from sharing their data would be an important enabler of user data-sharing. We propose a usable blockchain- and smart contracts-based framework that allows users to store research data locally and share without losing control and ownership of it. We have created smart contracts for building automatic verification of the conditions for data access that also naturally supports building up a verifiable record of the provenance, incentives for users to share their data and accountability of access. The paper presents a review of the existing work of research data sharing, the proposed blockchain-based framework and an evaluation of the framework by measuring the transaction cost for smart contracts deployment. The results show that nodes responded quickly in all tested cases with a befitting transaction cost.
Libra was presented as a cryptocurrency on June 18, 2019 by Facebook. On the same day, Facebook announced plans for Calibra, a subsidiary in charge of the development of an electronic wallet and financial services. In view of the primary risk of sovereignty posed by the creation of Libra, regulators and Central Banks quickly took very clear positions against the project and expressed a lot of questions focusing on regulation aspects and national sovereignty. The purpose of this paper is to provide a holistic analysis of the project encompassing several aspects of its implementation and the issues it raises. We address a set of questions that are part of the cryptocurrency environment and blockchain technology that support the Libra project. We describe the governance of the project based on two levels, one for the Association and the other for the Libra Blockchain. We identify the main risks considering at the same time political, financial, economic, technological and ethical risks. We emphasize the difficulty to regulate such a project as it will depend on several countries whose legislations are very different. Finally, the future of this kind of projects is discussed through the emergence of Central Bank Digital Currencies.
August Thio-ac, Alfred Keanu Serut, Rayn Louise Torrejos, Keenan Dave Rivo · 5 authors
Electronic systems tend to simplify the tedious traditional scheme and basically focuses on the platform design and process organization. The integrity of the output of an automated system is not left behind but the possibility of internal manipulation is still high. This paper presents the current issues in company procurements and the solution in the form of blockchain technology. Several individuals and professionals were asked to evaluate a blockchain-based procurement system in comparison to the current electronic (e-procurement) system. A blockchain-based system has the capability to hold transactional data with complete decentralization and eliminate the growing number of fraud cases in companies and organizations. This paper mainly focuses on the effectiveness of a blockchain-based system in company procurements.
Jonathan Passerat‐Palmbach, Tyler Farnan, Robert Miller, Marielle S. Gross · 6 authors
We propose a novel architecture for federated learning within healthcare consortia. At the heart of the solution is a unique integration of privacy preserving technologies, built upon native enterprise blockchain components available in the Ethereum ecosystem. We show how the specific characteristics and challenges of healthcare consortia informed our design choices, notably the conception of a new Secure Aggregation protocol assembled with a protected hardware component and an encryption toolkit native to Ethereum. Our architecture also brings in a privacy preserving audit trail that logs events in the network without revealing identities.
Sofia Terzi, Konstantinos Votis, Dimitrios Tzovaras, Ioannis Stamelos · 5 authors
The adoption of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and Web 3.0 contributes to the e-government sector by transforming how public administrations provide advanced and innovative services to interact with citizens. Blockchain (BC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) disruptive technologies will reshape how we live, work, and interact with government sectors and industries. This paper presents how Blockchain 3.0 and Artificial Intelligence enhance robust, secure, scalable, and authenticity provenance solutions. Two validation scenarios are analyzed to present how blockchain smart contracts and AI agents support energy and health-oriented e-government services.
This paper presents a system architecture to promote the development of smart transportation systems. Thanks to the use of distributed ledgers and related technologies, it is possible to create, store and share data generated by users through their sensors, while moving. In particular, IOTA and IPFS are used to store and certify data (and their related metadata) coming from sensors or by the users themselves. Ethereum is exploited as the smart contract platform that coordinates the data sharing and provisioning. The necessary privacy guarantees are provided by the usage of Zero Knowledge Proof. We show some results obtained from some use case scenarios that demonstrate how such technologies can be integrated to build novel smart services and to promote social good in user mobility.
Henry Kim, Marek Laskowski, Michael Zargham, Hjalmar Turesson · 6 authors
The study of how to set up cryptocurrency incentive mechanisms and to operationalize governance is token economics. Given the $250 billion market cap for cryptocurrencies, there is compelling need to investigate this topic. In this paper, we present facets of the token engineering process for a real-life 80-person Swiss blockchain startup, Insolar. We show how Insolar used systems modeling and simulation combined with cryptocurrency expertise to design a mechanism to incentivize enterprises and individual users to use their new MainNet public blockchain network. The study showed subsidy pools that incentivize application developers to develop on the network does indeed have the desired positive effect on MainNet adoption. For a startup like Insolar whose success hinge upon how well their model incentivizes various stakeholders to participate on their MainNet network versus that of numerous alternatives, this token economics simulation analysis provides invaluable insights.
Scott Ruoti, Benjamin Kaiser, Arkady Yerukhimovich, Jeremy Clark · 5 authors
Bitcoin's success has led to significant interest in its underlying components, particularly Blockchain technology. Over 10 years after Bitcoin's initial release, the community still suffers from a lack of clarity regarding what properties defines Blockchain technology, its relationship to similar technologies, and which of its proposed use-cases are tenable and which are little more than hype. In this paper we answer four common questions regarding Blockchain technology: (1) what exactly is Blockchain technology, (2) what capabilities does it provide, and (3) what are good applications for Blockchain technology, and (4) how does it relate to other approache distributed technologies (e.g., distributed databases). We accomplish this goal by using grounded theory (a structured approach to gathering and analyzing qualitative data) to thoroughly analyze a large corpus of literature on Blockchain technology. This method enables us to answer the above questions while limiting researcher bias, separating thought leadership from peddled hype and identifying open research questions related to Blockchain technology. The audience for this paper is broad as it aims to help researchers in a variety of areas come to a better understanding of Blockchain technology and identify whether it may be of use in their own research.
In this paper, we discuss the integration of blockchain in smart energy systems. We present various blockchain technology solutions, review important blockchain platforms, and several blockchain based smart energy projects in different smart energy domains. The majority of blockchain platforms with embedded combination of blockchain technology solutions are computing- and resource- intensive, and hence not entirely suitable for smart energy applications. We consider the requirements of smart energy systems and accordingly identify appropriate blockchain technology solutions for smart energy applications. Our analysis can help in the development of flexible blockchain platforms for smart energy systems.
Traditional elections satisfy neither citizens nor political authorities in recent years. They are not fully secure since it is easy to attack votes. It threatens also privacy and transparency of voters. Additionally, it takes too much time to count the votes. This paper proposes a solution using Blockchain to eliminate all the disadvantages of conventional elections. Security and data integrity of votes are absolutely provided theoretically. Voter privacy is another requirement that is ensured in the system. Lastly, the waiting time for results decreased significantly in the proposed Blockchain voting system.
With the advent of blockchain technology, multiple research avenues and platforms for dialogue have opened up. However technology transfer to the pubic has not been implemented, such that regular public can access and make use of secure and decentralized software. Most blockchain solutions till date deal with financial applications or monetary transactions, which may not be helpful or be accessible to the general public, especially the lower levels of the financial society. Medi-Chain is a people-first medical blockchain with a usable desktop application and interface which makes use of cutting-edge blockchain technology along with BFT consensus protocols to ensure highly secure and private medical data records. This paper aims to bring about a change in how blockchains-as-a-service is perceived and how adoption of new technology is largely based on usability and ease of adoption.