Soon after its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been adopted by cyber-criminals, which rely on its pseudonymity to implement virtually untraceable scams. One of the typical scams that operate on Bitcoin are the so-called Ponzi schemes. These are fraudulent investments which repay users with the funds invested by new users that join the scheme, and implode when it is no longer possible to find new investments. Despite being illegal in many countries, Ponzi schemes are now proliferating on Bitcoin, and they keep alluring new victims, who are plundered of millions of dollars. We apply data mining techniques to detect Bitcoin addresses related to Ponzi schemes. Our starting point is a dataset of features of real-world Ponzi schemes, that we construct by analysing, on the Bitcoin blockchain, the transactions used to perform the scams. We use this dataset to experiment with various machine learning algorithms, and we assess their effectiveness through standard validation protocols and performance metrics. The best of the classifiers we have experimented can identify most of the Ponzi schemes in the dataset, with a low number of false positives.
Several years after the inception of the most dominant cryptocurrency, bitcoin, the European Central Bank in 2015 indicated the need for establishing legal clarity by relevant authorities through explaining how the current legal framework applies to cryptocurrencies. Three years later, no meaningful step has been taken by any of the European Union (EU) institutions including the parliament. By examining the EU’s legal framework governing payments services, including the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) Regulation, the Electronic Money Directive, the Payment Services Directive and the proposed AML/CTF Directive, this article concludes that (a) because the existing payment services laws apply to payments effected in currencies (legal tenders) and cryptocurrencies are not defined as currencies under the EU law or the laws of member states, they do not cover cryptocurrencies. It also argues that it is impossible to design sui generis payments services law for cryptocurrencies without curbing their essential features, especially decentralization. Lastly, the article proposes centralization and the creation of state cryptocurrency as possible solutions moving forward and examines their strengths and challenges.
In this article, the author tracks developments in bitcoin trading and considers regulatory responses. 2017 has witnessed a so-called bitcoin bubble, as entrepreneurs and professional investors rushed into the market to take a bet on the upcoming cryptocurrency age. The price of a bitcoin exceeded $19,300 in December 2017, worth only $0.06 in July 2010. The popularity of bitcoin mining and trading activities has raised legal and regulatory concerns pertaining to anti-money laundering, evasion of forex regulations, the illegal fundraising of start-ups by Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), as well as a potential financial crisis. Global financial regulators have acted proactively to regulate bitcoin. Most recently, China, once accounting for 90% of bitcoin trading volume, issued an immediate ban of ICOs and ordered the reorganisation of three major bitcoin exchanges: OKCoin, Huobi and BTCC. Over-The-Counter (OTC) transactions have not been affected. Financial authorities in certain countries have been testing state-backed cryptocurrencies.
Leopoldo Catania, Stefano Grassi, Francesco Ravazzolo
This paper studies the predictability of cryptocurrencies time series. We compare several alternative univariate and multivariate models in point and density forecasting of four of the most capitalized series: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple and Ethereum. We apply a set of crypto–predictors and rely on Dynamic Model Averaging to combine a large set of univariate Dynamic Linear Models and several multivariate Vector Autoregressive models with different forms of time variation. We find statistical significant improvements in point forecasting when using combinations of univariate models and in density forecasting when relying on selection of multivariate models.
Mareena Fernandes, Saloni Khanna, Leandra Monteiro, Anu Thomas · 5 authors
Advancement in technological developments introduced virtual currency exchange methods viz Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and so on which are evolving rapidly. Cryptocurrencies were introduced to eliminate financial intermediaries leading to direct peer-to-peer transactions. With the spread of the global Coronavirus pandemic, the relationship between Bitcoin and the equity market has expanded. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile but can also prove to be good investments. Cryptocurrency, being a novel technique for transaction systems, has led to a lot of confusion among investors and any rumours or news on social media has been claimed to significantly affect the prices of cryptocurrencies. The huge percentage increase/decrease in Bitcoin's price over a short period of time is an intriguing phenomenon that cannot be foreseen. For a long time, bitcoin price prediction has been a hot topic of study.In this paper, we discuss the implementation and results of the Deep Learning Bitcoin Price Prediction Model and prepare a strategy to maximize gains for investors. The paper covers to framework with a set of deep learning models, analysis methods with a fixed set of factors to predict daily Bitcoin prices and design-integration of price prediction of different cryptocurrencies using RNN (Recurrent Neural Network), LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) and GRU (Gated recurrent units). The idea of incorporating Public Sentiment in the prediction of the hikes and falls of the Bitcoin market from Social Media platforms like Reddit and Twitter leading to meaningful predicted results. This prediction can bring confidence to the common man to invest with lesser risk and more profit. Also, this can enable the digital new-age currency to become a primary method of transaction.
Stjepan Begušić, Zvonko Kostanjčar, H. Eugene Stanley, Boris Podobnik
Detection of power-law behavior and studies of scaling exponents uncover the characteristics of complexity in many real world phenomena. The complexity of financial markets has always presented challenging issues and provided interesting findings, such as the inverse cubic law in the tails of stock price fluctuation distributions. Motivated by the rise of novel digital assets based on blockchain technology, we study the distributions of cryptocurrency price fluctuations. We consider Bitcoin returns over various time intervals and from multiple digital exchanges, in order to investigate the existence of universal scaling behavior in the tails, and ascertain whether the scaling exponent supports the presence of a finite second moment. We provide empirical evidence on slowly decaying tails in the distributions of returns over multiple time intervals and different exchanges, corresponding to a power-law. We estimate the scaling exponent and find an asymptotic power-law behavior with 2 < α < 2.5 suggesting that Bitcoin returns, in addition to being more volatile, also exhibit heavier tails than stocks, which are known to be around 3. Our results also imply the existence of a finite second moment, thus providing a fundamental basis for the usage of standard financial theories and covariance-based techniques in risk management and portfolio optimization scenarios.
The goal of this paper is to ascertain with what accuracy the direction of Bitcoin price in USD can be predicted. The price data is sourced from the Bitcoin Price Index. The task is achieved with varying degrees of success through the implementation of a Bayesian optimised recurrent neural network (RNN) and a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network. The LSTM achieves the highest classification accuracy of 52% and a RMSE of 8%. The popular ARIMA model for time series forecasting is implemented as a comparison to the deep learning models. As expected, the non-linear deep learning methods outperform the ARIMA forecast which performs poorly. Finally, both deep learning models are benchmarked on both a GPU and a CPU with the training time on the GPU outperforming the CPU implementation by 67.7%.
Nathaniel Popper leaves in DIGITAL GOLD the following passage. But the week in Austin could not help fueling suspicion that perhaps, as in the old way of doing things, the economic benefits of all the new technology were, at least so far, accruing only a small elite, while the 99 percent that Occupy Wall Street had worried about were left reading about it at home on Twitter. Bitcoin itself faced the same concerns. Years earlier, Bitcoin had promised that it would spread its benefits to all its users, but by 2014 large chunks of Bitcoin economy were owned by a few people who had been wealthy enough before Bitcoin came along to invest in this new system. Most of the new coins being released each day were collected by a few large mining syndicates. If this was the new world, it did not seem all that different from the old one－at least not yet. This is reality of Bitcoin. It does not have stability of supply. It does not have ability of credit creation. It does not have stability of value. It does not have wide agreement as a means of settlements. It exposes itself to speculation. So in conclusion, Bitcoin could not be money at least in the near future.
In this work, we propose a novel approach, called Conflicts Check Protocol (CCP), which enables preventing potential attacks on bitcoin system. Based on the observation and discovery of a common symptom that many attacks may generate, an arbitration mechanism is proposed to determine the approval or abandon of certain transactions involved in confliction. Experimental results verified our statistical assumption and proved that the CCP is robust in handling many transactions in confliction scenarios and can significantly enhance the security of the current bitcoin systems. Unlike many of the existing efforts, this work examines the security issue of bitcoin from a new perspective, which can be extended further to a much larger scope of attack analysis and prevention.
Bitcoin cryptocurrency has risen in popularity. Therefore, it not only attracts users to use it, but also it attracts the malware developers to attack it. While online Bitcoin wallets allow users to conveniently store and manage their bitcoins, they are vulnerable to several attacks.
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.
Guilherme Albuquerque Barbosa Silva, Carlo Kleber da Silva Rodrigues
Este artigo tem o objetivo de analisar a rentabilidade econômica da mineração individual de criptomoedas bitcoins e litecoins. Essa análise é baseada na avaliação da métrica eficiência energética de cada criptomoeada em cinco países da América Latina, almejando-se uma margem de lucro de 0,10 USD/hora. Três variáveis são consideradas para o cálculo da métrica em comento: a taxa de processamento de hashes do equipamento, o consumo de energia elétrica do equipamento em watts, e o valor do quilowatt-hora do país onde se realiza a mineração. Os resultados obtidos indicam que a criptomoeda litecoin é uma alternativa mais viável para mineração que a criptomoeda bitcoin. Por fim, sugestões para trabalhos futuros encerram este artigo.
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic incentives, it permits censorship resistant public read-write access to its append-only blockchain database without the need for any mediating central authority. Not until its advent has such a trusted, transparent, comprehensive and granular data set of digital economic behaviours been available for public network analysis. In this article, by translating the cumbersome binary data structure of the Bitcoin blockchain into a high fidelity graph model, we demonstrate through various analyses the often overlooked social and econometric benefits of employing such a novel open data architecture. Specifically we show (a) how repeated patterns of transaction behaviours can be revealed to link user activity across the blockchain; (b) how newly mined bitcoin can be associated to demonstrate individual accumulations of wealth; (c) through application of the naive quantity theory of money that Bitcoin's disinflationary properties can be revealed and measured; and (d) how the user community can develop coordinated defences against repeated denial of service attacks on the network. All of the aforementioned being exemplary benefits that would be lost with the closed data models of the 'private permissioned' distributed ledger architectures that are dominating enterprise level development due to existing blockchain issues of governance, scalability and confidentiality.
Nowadays, the Internet is indispensable when it comes to information dissemination. People rely on the Internet to inform themselves on current news events, as well as to verify facts. We, as a community, are quickly approaching an 'electronic information age' where the majority of information will be distributed electronically and tools to preserve this information will become essential. While archiving online digital information is a good way to preserve online information for future generations, it has many disadvantages including the easy manipulation of archived information, e.g. by the archiving authority. Online information is also prone to getting hacked or being taken offline. Therefore, it is necessary that archived online news information is securely time-stamped with the date and time when it was first archived in a way that cannot be manipulated. The process of 'trusted timestamping' is an established approach for claiming that particular digital information existed at a particular 'point in time' in the past. However, traditional approaches for trusted timestamping depend on the time-stamping authority's fidelity. Directly embedding the hash of a digital file into the blockchain of a cryptocurrency is a more recent method that allows for secure time-stamping, since digital information is stored as part of the transaction information in, e.g. Bitcoin's, blockchain, and not stored at a centralized time-stamping authority. However, there is no system yet available, which uses this approach for archiving and time-stamping online news articles. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to develop a system that 1) enables decentralized trusted time-stamping of web and news articles as a means of making future manipulation of online information identifiable, and 2) allows users to determine the authenticity of articles by checking different versions of the same article online.
The trading volume of Bitcoin has increased immensely since its conception. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, it is not a legal currency but rather a private monetary system that manages by itself and does not depend on governments or central banks. It is an autonomous currency system that is not liable to any governing body. Some fear that the increase of Bitcoin usage, as it is quite different from traditional currencies and is free from control or regulations by monetary authorities. Although its popularity has grown worldwide, fluctuations of the prices are sometimes erratic. Hence, such large and sudden movements would dampen the sound development of Bitcoin. This paper examines how the volatile price of Bitcoin changes empirically. The empirical results show that there is a difference between short-term volatility and long-term volatility. Traders should see not only the short-term movements in volatile Bitcoin pricing but also long-term developments.
Farid Ablayev, D. A. Bulychkov, D. A. Sapaev, Alexander Vasiliev · 5 authors
Bitcoin and blockchain in general is a hot topic nowadays. In the paper we propose a quantum empowering of this technology and show how to speed-up the mining procedure using the modified Grover's algorithm.
Auf dem bisherigen Höchststand des Bitcoins-Kurses Mitte Dezember 2017 kündigte die Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt an, sie wolle 126 beschlagnahmte Bitcoins (damaliger Wert: 1,9 Millionen Euro) veräußern. Die in Gießen angesiedelte Außenstelle der hessischen Zentralstelle zur Bekämpfung der Internet- und Computerkriminalität ZIT hatte 2014 mehrere Online-Marktplätze abgeschaltet, auf denen u.a. mit Drogen gehandelt wurde. Bei einer Razzia beschlagnahmte sie die Server der Betreiber und gelangte so in den Besitz von Bitcoins. Im Folgenden wird erläutert, wie eine die Beschlagnahme bzw. Sicherstellung von Bitcoins strafprozessual und polizeirechtlich umgesetzt wird und warum die erhofften Millionengewinne die Ausnahme bleiben werden.
The article discusses the retrospective of cryptocurrencies, theoretical understanding of the digital currency, its value and essence. The tendencies and prospects of cryptocurrencies development. The article focuses on the lack of a legal framework regulating relations in the field of "mining" and circulation of cryptocurrencies. Keywords: cryptocurrency; digital currencies; bitcoin; electronic money; mining; cryptographic methods of information protection.
The technology of BlockChain and cryptocurrency is an actual topic for humanity today. There are different policies regulating cryptocurrencies, but they are still far from perfect. The difficulty of technical regulation of these systems is beyond doubt, many countries are only at the stage of discussing the status of the currencies, some are extremely supportive of them. However, it is undeniable that more and more countries will introduce regulations in the field of cryptocurrencies, focusing, firstly, on the structure of their own economy. Keywords: BlockChain, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, mining.
The article provides an analytical overview of cryptocurrencies, the dynamics of bitcoin from the origin to the present time. The specific risks of the virtual currencies use were identified.Keywords: bitcoin, cryptocurrency, risks, electronic money; financial technology.
This article explores the mechanisms of the organization and operation of virtual payment systems. The appearance of such payment systems is associated with the development of Internet technologies in the field of mutual settlements for goods (works and services). The study aims at analyzing the classification, types of emission of cryptocurrencies, the mechanism of functioning of cryptocurrency systems; evaluating their impact on the monetary system and the involvement of individuals in the laundering of illegal incomes using cryptocurrencies; estimating prospects for the development of virtual payment systems in Russia and abroad, and defining mechanisms to counteract illegal activities. As a result, the current status of virtual cryptocurrency systems is estimated, their distinctive features and advantages are considered. The study also identifies drawbacks in the use of cryptocurrency with the involvement of individuals in the system of non-cash settlements. The results of the analysis of cryptocurrency systems can be useful for the improvement of the state monetary policy. Keywords: electronic money, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain, money laundering.
A. Goriacheva, N. Jakubenko, O. Pogodina, Dmitry S. Silnov
This article is devoted to the exploration of services of anonymizing transactions, based on the Mixer, CoinJoin and CoinSuffle technologies, as well as to the description of the core principles of operation of these technologies and technical details. It analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of different realizations of this service. It formulates the problem of cryptocurrency laundering through anonymization services and offers solutions to this problem.Keywords: cryptocurrency, blockchain, bitcoin, mixing service, mining, money laundering.
The paper gives the author's understanding of the real matter of a bitcoin actual paradigm, economic and legal issues related to bitcoin functioning are investigated, perspectives of bitcoin evolution in Russia are observed on the basis of the systematic approach. In conclusion recommendations for the payment system in Russia are given. Keywords: Russia, bitcoin, economic and legal issues, bitcoin industry stakeholders, stability of payment system.