Chris Reed, Uma M Sathyanarayan, Shuhui Ruan, Justine K. Collins
Blockchain technology allows the creation of distributed ledgers. These distribute control among the players rather than requiring a centralized database, and so can reduce costs and speed-up transactions. However, when it is used for assets which exist outside the blockchain itself, an unmodified adoption of the technology would bypass legal and regulatory requirements which, for these kinds of assets, cannot be bypassed without fundamental change to the law. Building those requirements into any blockchain-based system introduces features which are not necessary for performing its core functions, and we call these ‘legal impurities’. The most important legal impurities required are those relating to identification of the parties, and introducing the ability of a trusted third party to make modifications to the ledger. Not only does introducing these legal impurities make fundamental changes to the concept behind blockchain, but it is also essential that they are implemented in ways which do not threaten the integrity of the blockchain as evidence. This article has been produced by members of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre, a collaboration between the Cloud Legal Project, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London and the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. The authors are grateful to members of the MCCRC team and to attendees at the fourth Annual MCCRC Symposium (Windsor, September 2017) for helpful comments and to Microsoft for the generous financial support that has made this project possible. Responsibility for views expressed, however, remain with the authors.
An appealing feature of blockchain technology is smart contracts. A smart contract is executable code that runs on top of the blockchain to facilitate, execute and enforce an agreement between untrusted parties without the involvement of a trusted third party. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective. The aim of doing so is to identify current research topics and open challenges for future studies in smart contract research. We extract 24 papers from different scientific databases. The results show that about two thirds of the papers focus on identifying and tackling smart contract issues. Four key issues are identified, namely, codifying, security, privacy and performance issues. The rest of the papers focuses on smart contract applications or other smart contract related topics. Research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies are provided. http://aircconline.com/ijcsit/V9N5/9517ijcsit11.pdf
Smart contracts" are decentralized agreements built in computer code and stored on a blockchain.Proponents imagine a future where commerce takes place exclusively using smart contracts, avoiding the high costs of contract drafting, judicial intervention, opportunistic behavior, and the inherent ambiguities of written language.These decentralized code-only contracts are part of a decades-long quest to eliminate supposed inefficiencies in traditional written agreements.Electronic data interchange (EDI), a contracting technology from the 1970s, was designed with the same goal and garnered similar fanfare.Commentators at the time imagined a revolution in the way firms transacted and a full shift away from anything resembling a paper contract.Ultimately EDI failed to achieve these goals-it empowered, rather than circumvented, human decisionmakers along with their "inefficient" way of forming agreements.In doing so, EDI successfully reduced some transaction costs while preserving efficient forms of contractual flexibility.Smart contracts are indeed more technologically sophisticated than EDI.Smart contract scripting languages offer a broader range of operations and greater scalability.Smart contracts are capable of seamlessly integrating with the operational and financial systems at the core of modern firms, whereas EDI transactions occurred in very early digital environments that required human intermediaries.
C. Lemmen, P. Knight, B. Beentjes, Jeroen van der Ham · 8 authors
Land and its administration are always negatively affected during conflicts and in post-conflict contexts.This has been confirmed both in the literature and in practice.This research has shown that if land and its administration are neglected or not properly addressed after the end of a conflict, they can be a cause for a renewed armed conflict and an obstacle in the rebuilding of a post-conflict society.The author's initial research on the topic revealed that there is a relation between land administration and post-conflict state building.Therefore, the main research objective was to identify which interventions in land administration and under which circumstances facilitate postconflict state building.In order to achieve the main research objective, a qualitative research approach with a fieldwork was applied on two main case studies: Kosovo and Rwanda.Findings from the main case studies were supported with three supportive case studies: Mozambique, Cambodia and Timor-Leste, by collecting data from the literature.Empirical data and literature were used to set the theoretical propositions as: (1) a framework for rebuilding post-conflict states, and (2) interventions in land administration for post-conflict state building.For the final discussions and for the analytical generalisation correlating analyses were performed in a three-dimensional matrix, where the theoretical propositions (1) and (2) formed a skeleton of the matrix and empirical data from the main case studies constitutes the third dimension.The research first derived general findings on land, conflict and post-conflict contexts and, finally, specific findings were presented as in the framework for rebuilding post-conflict states grouped as: institutional weaknesses, economic and social problems, and serious security problems.Main findings from this research lead to conclusion that the identified interventions in land administration can be seen as facilitators of post-conflict state building.
By Riikka Koulu. As cross-border online transactions increase the issue of cross-border dispute resolution and enforcement becomes more and more topical. Disputes arising from e-commerce are seldom taken into the public courts and therefore online dispute resolution (ODR) is becoming a mainstream solution for resolving them. Simultaneously, different applications and possibilities of blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies have caught the attention of both computer scientists and legal scholars, increasingly gaining momentum. However, the potential of blockchains reach further than their use as a currency: they can be used for the decentralised execution of programmable contracts known as smart contracts, completely without the need for intermediaries like e-commerce sites, credit card companies or courts. These possibilities have not previously been discussed in relation to dispute resolution. This article provides an introduction to this new technological possibility by examining self-executing smart contracts that utilise novel blockchain technologies. To demonstrate the logic behind smart contracts more concretely, a weather bet (i.e. a bet on what the weather is going to be in a given location) is translated into a programmable smart contract and then discussed in lines of code with further explanations. In addition to this, the author suggests that smart contracts could also be employed for the purposes of dispute resolution, which might provide a solution for the problem of enforcing ODR decisions. Instead of normative analysis, the article provides an introductory analysis of the legal implications that the blockchain technology has outside its application as virtual currency.
Шульгина Анастасия Николаевна, Колядина Марина Геннадьевна, Бикалова Надежда Александровна
в работе рассмотрены основные особенности платежной системы Bitcoin, история и перспективы развития данной системы. Приведены сведения по использованию данной платежной системы в разных странах, а также выполнен краткий анализ позитивных и негативных сторон использования Bitcoin. Системы стимулирования развития операций с данной «валютой». Развитие информационных технологий способствует развитию системы быстрых платежей. Отношение к данному процессу неразрывно связано с уровнем развития и культуры и экономики стран. Приведенные положения являются самыми важными, но не единственными, которые делают систему ВТС противоречивой, неповторимой, притягательной и непредсказуемой. Идеи Bitcoin революционны, несут в себе возможность создания уникальной финансовой системы, при которой люди будут защищены от любых посягательств на их капитал
Jason M. Gordon, Jennifer E. Chapman, Benjamin W. Akins
Bitcoin is rapidly increasing in use throughout the world. Instrumental to the Bitcoin system, the process for introducing new bitcoin into the system is known as “mining.” Mining involves the use of powerful computer systems and complex, computational algorithms to verify or validate prior bitcoin transactions. The reward for successfully undertaking this process is the creation and award of new bitcoin to the miner. Bitcoin mining has become a tedious and difficult process. The race to verify transactions, and thereby earn bitcoin, necessitates more sophisticated processes for verification and greater computational power. Many bitcoin miners band together in groups called “pools” to create a powerful mining platform. Some miners invest time and effort to build or maintain a suitable computer system, while others passively provide money or other resources toward the creation of the mining system. Many such mining pools have grown to allow individuals to collectively contribute effort to the transaction verification process in exchange for an interest in the proceeds from the mining activity. The bitcoin mining pool has largely escaped regulation. This paper argues that the mining pool should be regulated under the existing federal securities regulation regime.