Bitcoin emerged as a cryptocurrency relying on new blockchain technology in 2009, but how to regulate it was not immediately clear. The recent emergence of bitcoin futures poses a new level of risk to the economy, again raising questions of regulation. This is the first law review article to examine the potential regulatory regime for bitcoin futures.
Since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009, it has gained a significant popularity around the world. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment system where payment transactions are stored in a data structure named the block-chain. Based on a fully decentralized network, the blockchain is maintained by a community of participants. In Bitcoin system, mining is the fundamental concept. In this paper, we design a new Bitcoin mining scheme based on the multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game model. To effectively implement the peer-to-peer relationship of Bitcoin system agents, we assume that mining pool operators are leaders and mining participating users are followers in our Stackelberg game. By using the dynamics of feedback-based repeated process, leaders, and followers can be interacting with one another and make their decisions in a way to reach an efficient system solution. Without the influence of any central authorities and organizations, the proposed method is practically applied to a distributed Bitcoin system. Through system level simulations, we show that our game approach outperforms the existing Bitcoin schemes in providing a better fair-efficient system performance.
As the exchange and trade with cryptocurrencies is steadily rising, consequently, they become subject to financial reporting.The essence of financial reporting derives from the objective to provide stakeholders of an enterprise with sustainable information about the financial well-being of the business.Accountants might face complications meeting the objective of financial reporting considering cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins due to the absence of guidelines in both, IFRS and US GAAP.In the first part, this paper applies the existing IAS and IFRS guidelines to this practical issue and contributes to the process by which diversification in practice can be avoided.Broadly speaking, the problem can be addressed by classifying Bitcoins as intangible assets.Whereas, Bitcoins fail the definition of cash, cash equivalents, financial instruments, as well as the definition of inventory.In the second part, a discussion concerning non-financial reporting of Bitcoins can be found.
Cryptocurrencies are a cryptography based technology, that has increased massively in popularity in recent years. These currencies are traded on markets that specialize in cryptocurrency trade. There, you can trade one cryptocurrency for another, or buy one with real world money. These markets are quite volatile, meaning that the price of most cryptocurrencies swing up and down a lot. The largest cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, but there is also more than 1500 smaller ones, that goes by the name alternative coins, or altcoins. This thesis will try to find out if it is possible to make accurate predictions about the future price of the altcoin Ethereum, and also see if Bitcoin may have some influence over the price of the selected altcoin. The predictions were made with the use of an artificial neural network, an LSTM network, that was trained on labeled data from 2017. The predictions were then made in intervals of one hour ahead, six hours ahead, and one day ahead through early 2018. The predictions showed that it is possible to make somewhat accurate predictions about the future. The predictions that were made one hour ahead were more accurate than both the six hours ahead predictions and the full day ahead predictions. By comparing the loss rates of the neural networks that were only trained on Ethereum, with the loss rates of the networks that trained on both Bitcoin and Ethereum, is was made clear that training on both cryptocurrencies did not improve the prediction accuracies.
Bitcoin is one of the first decentralized, peer to peer, payment systems based on the so-called Proof-of-Work (PoW). PoW is an algorithm that requires the computation of a hard function in order to gain access to a resource but, at the same time, the correctness of the computed result should be easily checked. The use of a PoW removes the necessity of a centralized third party and so the consistency of the network may be altered directly by the involved users. Peers, to solve the PoW more efficiently, usually organize themselves into mining pools, to increase the overall computational power: this situation, unfortunately, leads to a network centralization. In this paper we consider two typical scenarios of a Bitcoin network and we model them by probabilistic logic programming (PLP): the centralization of the hashing power by large pools and the “double spending attack”. In the first one, we verify the effectiveness of a protocol that attempts to discourage the formation of large pools. In the second one, we compute the probability of success of an attacker. Both scenarios are modeled using the PLP package cplint.
Advocates of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin believe that having currency competition will help achieve the economic objective of price stability. This Issue Brief summarizes research that explores whether competition among privately issued fiat currencies can actually produce price stability. The research finds that in most cases, a system of private monies does not deliver price stability. And even when it does, it always is subject to self-fulfilling inflationary episodes, and it supplies a suboptimal amount of money. Although there is no economic reason to curb the use of cryptocurrencies at the moment, it is important to review key regulatory issues that policymakers need to consider now, before the use of cryptocurrencies becomes even more widespread.
Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency on the planet. It relies on strong cryptography and peer-to-peer network. Bitcoin is gaining more and more popularity in criminal society. That is why Bitcoin is often used as money laundering tool or payment method for illegal products and services. In this paper we explore various methods for Bitcoin users deanonimization, which is an important task in anti-money laundering process and cybercrime investigation.
Yunpeng Wang, Hui Zhao, Tao Li, Fan Zhang · 5 authors
The blockchain architecture with distributed and decentralized as the main features often face problems such as long transaction confirmation time, low system throughput, and waste of computing resources. These problems are exactly what the traditional centralized architecture can solve. At the same time, in order to improve the distributed consensus efficiency, consensus algorithms such as Proof of stake, delegated proof of stake, proof of space, proof of authority, and PBFT have emerged from Bitcoin's Pow consensus mechanism. These consensus algorithms have their own advantages and Disadvantages. Disadvantages, such as Pos, DPos can improve transaction efficiency, PBFT can improve the fairness of voting, but at the same time POS also bring benefits and voting rights to hold a lot of user tilt issues to a small number of tokens, PBFT brings about a low cost of malicious user attacks and other issues. In order to effectively take advantage of the high security, high reliability of the blockchain, and high efficiency of traditional centralized architectures, and fully utilizing existing consensus mechanisms, this paper presents an innovative hybrid blockchain approach, which mixed the blockchain architecture, Hybrid-chain, consists of the following three type nodes in the architecture: service center nodes responsible for efficient transaction confirmation, dynamic transaction verification nodes participating in transactions, and random verification nodes responsible for transaction fairness verification. On the consensus mechanism, the consensus algorithm selects the corresponding consensus mechanism according to the transaction characteristics. Experiments show that compared with the traditional blockchain architecture, hybrid chain has obvious performance advantages in transaction sending, transaction confirmation and block information storage, which can greatly reduce the transaction sending time by 96%, shorten the confirmation time by 95%, and reduce the number of 79. % Block information storage space, etc.
Over the last decade, blockchain technology has facilitated a method by which a network of equipotent and equally privileged peers can jointly maintain and edit databases in an entirely decentralized manner, without any kind of an intermediary exhibiting unilateral control. As a consequence it has enabled the creation of a new type of multi-sided platform architecture with distributed governance. As the different platform provision functions are opened to free market competition rather than monopolized by a single entity, the monopoly-like pricing structure typical of platforms is overhauled. Instead, blockchain-enabled distributed platforms appear to share value more evenly between the all the different market sides connected to the platform. Our analysis reveals that blockchain technology adds new considerations to how multi-sided platform architectures should be perceived and analyzed.
Online and offline storage of digital currency present conflicting risks for a Bitcoin exchange. While bitcoins stored on online devices are continually vulnerable to malware and other network-based attacks, offline reserves are endangered on access, as transferring bitcoins requires the exposure of otherwise encrypted and secured private keys. In particular, fluctuations in customer demand for deposited bitcoin require exchanges to periodically refill online storage systems with bitcoins held offline. This raises the natural question of what upper limit on online reserves minimizes losses due to theft over time. In this article, we investigate this optimization problem, developing a model that predicts the optimal ceiling on online reserves, given average rates of deposits, withdrawals, and theft. We evaluate our theory with an event-driven simulation of the setup, and find that our equation yields a numerical value for the threshold that differs by less than 2% from experimental results. We conclude by considering open questions regarding more complex storage architectures.
C. Kouzinopoulos, Γεώργιος Σπαθούλας, Konstantinos M. Giannoutakis, Konstantinos Votis · 9 authors
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that became popular as the foundational block of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Over the past few years it has seen a rapid growth, both in terms of research and commercial usage. Due to its decentralized nature and its inherent use of cryptography, Blockchain provides an elegant solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem and is thus a good candidate for use in areas that require a decentralized consensus among untrusted peers, eliminating the need for a central authority. Internet of Things is a technology paradigm where a multitude of small devices, including sensors, actuators and RFID tags, are interconnected via a common communications medium to enable a whole new range of tasks and applications. However, existing IoT installations are often vulnerable and prone to security and privacy concerns. This paper studies the use of Blockchain to strengthen the security of IoT networks through a resilient, decentralized mechanism for the connected home that enhances the network self-defense by safeguarding critical security-related data. This mechanism is developed as part of the Safe-Guarding Home IoT Environments with Personalised Real-time Risk Control (GHOST) project.
Abstract This paper documents inconsistent terminologies and misleading analogies in current discussions of digital money and payments. It offers a more consistent framework for understanding the potential of technological innovation in providing the functions of money and payments: as media of exchange, stores of value, and units of account and the implications of cryptographic technologies underpinning cryptocurrencies for the future of money and payments. These could support efficiency gains in money and payments, but decentralization is not inherent to their application. Radical reform leading to improved economic outcomes is conceivable, but not through disruptive displacement of existing institutional arrangements.
Saide Zhu, Wei Li, Hong Li, Chunqiang Hu · 5 authors
The past three years have seen the rapid increase of Bitcoin difficulty, which has led to a substantial variance in solo mining. As a result, miners tend to join a large open pool to get a more stable reward. Nowadays, mining pools take up over 98% of Bitcoins total computation power. In a sense, this is a manifestation of Bitcoin that tends to be centralized. Thus, researchers have shown an increased interest in pool mining payoff and security. The purpose of this paper is to review and summarize recent research in Bitcoin pool mining system. We first introduce several common reward distribution schemes, and analyze their advantages and disadvantages with some improvement mechanisms; In the second section, to address pool security problems, we examined the practical utility of some existing and potential attack strategies. To study those malicious attack in details, several defense methods are collected. Finally, we make an outlook on Bitcoin future.
Bitcoin as a payment system indisputably offers an advantage over the government currencies in transaction time and costs. On the other hand the moneyness of Bitcoin itself is questioned. This paper analyzes Bitcoin from the Austrian perspective and compares the qualities of Bitcoin with qualities of good money in order to find out whether Bitcoin could serve as money. The examined properties are portability, storability, divisibility, recognizability, homogeneity and scarcity. Moreover it examines the consistency of Bitcoin emergence as a medium of exchange with Mises' regression theorem and identifies the non-monetary value of Bitcoin. The result of this theoretical analysis shows that Bitcoin's properties can facilitate the functions of money.