This is an exploration of Blockchain technology that is growing in popularity and it seems to be able to disrupt a plethora of industries. A research is being conducted to examine Blockchain potential to be adopted by enterprises from different sectors as well as the parameters that could affect its adoption. Mostly known as the technology that underpins Bitcoin, this concept raised a significant interest within various markets. Blockchain offers a new approach to valued information management and sharing and it is introduced as a solution against the inefficiencies that affect the industry. Experts, infrastructure providers and banks can now work on this technology and explore its uses. This is a new technology journey with obstacles that will need to be overcome and it can not be clear yet what will eventually arise. Professionals from around the world express their views on the adoption of Blockchain by organisations and how these plan to support its deployment. Thoughts are shared in terms of the required budget and the parameters that can impact its adoption. There is a great interest in Blockchain technology and its revolutionary potential to modernize the world economy and this is only the beginning.
Nearly twenty-five years ago, the internet disrupted the world and started a new era of technological supremacy. Today, with the rise of cryptocurrencies and its underlying technology, we stand at the helm of another such revolution. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are decentralised, digital currencies relying on a peer-to-peer network which operates without the need for a third-party intermediary like the Reserve Bank of India. Coupled with lack of regulatory guidance, its unique technical aspects create huge complications in its taxation. While much ignorance still prevails in respect of cryptocurrencies, countries around the world have finally started taking notice and acting upon it. This paper focuses on what cryptocurrencies are, why they are important, and the prevailing regulatory structure concerning them. It overviews the complete landscape for taxation of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, analysing the indirect and direct tax structure, particularly after the implementation of Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017, while also addressing the issues concerning the evasionary practices. The findings help in assessing the regulatory aspects in light of the technological, economic, social and financial forces, and establishing a set framework for taxation of cryptocurrencies.
Mobile security has become more and more important due to the boom of mobile commerce (m-commerce). However, the development of m-commerce is facing many challenges regarding data security problems. Recently, blockchain has been introduced as an effective security solution deployed successfully in many applications in practice, such as, Bitcoin, cloud computing, and Internet-of-Things. However, the blockchain technology has not been adopted and implemented widely in m-commerce because its mining processes usually require to be performed on standard computing units, e.g., computers. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a new m-commerce application using blockchain technology, namely, MobiChain, to secure transactions in the m-commerce. Especially, in the MobiChain application, the mining processes can be executed efficiently on mobile devices using our proposed Android core module. Through real experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed model and show that blockchain will be an efficient security solution for future m-commerce.
Bitcoin is a computerized digital money and exchange network, represents an essential change in financial sectors, an interesting number of customers and excellent evaluation of channel inspection. In this research, dataset related to ten cryptocurrencies are used and created a new dataset by taking the closing price of each cryptocurrency for the research goal to ascertain how the direction and accuracy of price of the Bitcoin can be predicted by using data mining methods. Features engineering evaluated that all the ten cryptocurrencies are strongly correlated with each other. The task is achieved by implementation of supervised learning method in which random forest, support vector classifier, gradient boosting classifier, and neural network classifier are used under classification category and linear regression, recurrent neural network, gradient boosting regressor are used under regression category. In the classification category, support vector classifier achieved the highest accuracy of 62.31% and precision value 0.77. In regression category, gradient boosting regressor got the highest R-squared value 0.99.
A controvérsia acerca da emergência do bitcoin como um novo meio de troca e sua conciliação com o teorema da regressão de Mises tem se intensificado nos últimos tempos. A questão principal do debate pode ser assim formulada: teria o bitcoin um valor de uso direto? O presente estudo afirma que o teorema da regressão não tem aplicabilidade à questão da gênese do bitcoin, pois o teorema limita-se a explicar a emergência de um novo meio de troca sob uma economia de troca pura ou escambo. O debate, portanto, está fundamentado em um erro de interpretação do teorema. Entretanto, a questão do valor de uso direto do bitcoin, se é que se pode afirmar que exista, tem sim importância para a avaliação da probabilidade de o bitcoin tornar-se um meio de troca generalizadamente aceito – isto é, dinheiro.
Bitcoin is an electronic monetary system, where transactions are carried out without a third party . The Bitcoins network is not dependent on the central organization .Bitcoin is based on an open cryptographic protocol. The Bitcoin network is distributed between a computer connected to the network. Bitcoin allows you to pay through a computer or smartphone without financial organizations. In this article, we analyzed the scientific-theoretical and practical issues in the Bitcoin network, attacks on the Bitcoin network, security and anonymity issues in the Bitcoin e-wallet .
New technologies, such as blockchain, cryptocurrency (e.g., Bitcoin), and artificial intelligence are rapidly changing how transactions occur in the United States. While scholars have started to examine how a number of areas of law should adapt, very little work has been done on what these changes mean for taxation. Yet these developments could have a huge impact on tax revenues. For example, some approaches to taxing transactions using cryptocurrency could result in these transactions being conducted abroad, beyond the reach of the U.S. taxing authorities. And if robots replace large segments of the labor force, this could drastically shrink federal and state income tax bases.
The approach to taxing new technologies is a careful balance of capturing value and not disincentivizing growth. For example, if governments decide to levy a “robot tax” to replace revenues the income tax is no longer generating, they may accidentally stifle innovation in that jurisdiction.
At the same time, these new technologies also provide tools that governments can harness to levy taxes far more effectively than they currently do. For example, using blockchain technology to track the history of income and company shares allows for the potential of an integrated tax system, which combines the currently separate corporate and personal taxes into one unified taxation regime. The effects of this transition are a removal of many distortions and behavioral inefficiencies.
Just because technology can be used to levy taxes far more creatively does not mean that it should be. But given the rapid rate at which technological change is occurring, governments cannot afford to sit back and make these decisions by inertia. Rather, the main argument of this is that governments should: (i) recognize and adapt to shifting tax bases; and (ii) use technology such as blockchain to better target the populations and behaviors desired to be taxed. The paper recommends specific examples of how to better tax and use technologies, such as blockchain, to reform current taxation schemes.
There is also ample discussion of whether cryptocurrency will be regulated as a security (as per the Howey test and recent SEC enforcement actions), a discussion of foreign jurisdictions' approaches to cryptocurrency regulation and taxation, and recommendations to the SEC and IRS on how they should adjust their taxation of cryptocurrency.
Recently, cryptocurrencies and bitcoin have become the main topics in the financial industry. A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography for security. A cryptocurrency is difficult to counterfeit because of this security feature. A defining feature of a cryptocurrency, and arguably its most endearing allure, is its organic nature; it is not issued by any central authority, rendering it theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation. Cryptocurrencies have their benefits and drawbacks. The paper elaborates different aspects of cryptocurrencies, starting with their early development, challenges and risks, opportunities, advantages and disadvantages, and their future. In addition, the paper covered issues related to the practical and technical function of cryptocurrencies. It was concluded that is not easy to predict the future of cryptocurrencies, since there is a lot to be done especially in the field of formal regulations. However, the banks and other financial institutions should see and consider cryptocurrencies as an alternative for the financial transactions in the future. Key words: cryptocurrencies, development, advantages disadvantages, financial transactions
Ying‐Ying Hsieh, Jean‐Philippe Vergne, Philip C. Anderson, Karim R. Lakhani · 5 authors
Bitcoin represents the first real-world implementation of a “decentralized autonomous organization” (DAO) and offers a new paradigm for organization design. Imagine working for a global business organization whose routine tasks are powered by a software protocol instead of being governed by managers and employees. Task assignments and rewards are randomized by the algorithm. Information is not channeled through a hierarchy but recorded transparently and securely on an immutable public ledger called “blockchain.” Further, the organization decides on design and strategy changes through a democratic voting process involving a previously unseen class of stakeholders called “miners.” Agreements need to be reached at the organizational level for any proposed protocol changes to be approved and activated. How do DAOs solve the universal problem of organizing with such novel solutions? What are the implications? We use Bitcoin as an example to shed light on how a DAO works in the cryptocurrency industry, where it provides a peer-to-peer, decentralized, and disintermediated payment system that can compete against traditional financial institutions. We also invited commentaries from renowned organization scholars to share their views on this intriguing phenomenon.
Zcash is a fork of Bitcoin with optional anonymity features. While transparent transactions are fully linkable, shielded transactions use zero-knowledge proofs to obscure the parties and amounts of the transactions. First, we observe various metrics regarding the usage of shielded addresses. Moreover, we show that most coins sent to shielded addresses are later sent back to transparent addresses. We then search for round-trip transactions, where the same, or nearly the same number of coins are sent from a transparent address, to a shielded address, and back again to a transparent address. We argue that such behavior exhibits high linkability, especially when they occur nearby temporally. Using this heuristic our analysis matched 31.5% of all coins sent to shielded addresses.
This paper studies the liquidity of Bitcoin using the time series daily data over the period 1/1/2014 to 12/31/2015. Based on the available data for Bitcoin, five liquidity measures are chosen to compare the liquidities among five Bitcoin exchanges and the liquidities of different sizes of stocks. The results suggest that the liquidity of Bitcoin depends on the choice of the Bitcoin exchanges, and Bitfinex, one of the Bitcoin exchanges, provides the highest liquidity for Bitcoin trading. Moreover, the results indicate that, on average, stocks are more liquid than Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has recently attracted considerable attention in the fields of economics, cryptography, and computer science due to its inherent nature of combining encryption technology and monetary units. This paper reveals the effect of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) by analyzing the time series of Bitcoin process. We also select the most relevant features from Blockchain information that is deeply involved in Bitcoin's supply and demand and use them to train models to improve the predictive performance of the latest Bitcoin pricing process. We conduct the empirical study that compares the Bayesian neural network with other linear and non-linear benchmark models on modeling and predicting the Bitcoin process. Our empirical studies show that BNN performs well in predicting Bitcoin price time series and explaining the high volatility of the recent Bitcoin price.
Mediante la elaboración de este trabajo se ha querido dar una visión general y sencilla de los elementos claves para conocer que es el bitcoin, como funciona y su evolución. Por ello presentamos los elementos técnicos básicos de su funcionamiento: la criptografía y el blockchain, que son básicos para entender las cuestiones relacionadas con su implantación, seguridad y estabilidad. Asimismo recogemos el perfil actual del usuario, su evolución en el tiempo y la presencia en diferentes países. Por último, se analizan las ventajas, inconvenientes y perspectiva del futuro. Finalizamos con una serie de conclusiones.
Objectives: From the area of the research conducted, Malaysian acceptance towards the idea of online payment methods and understanding the concept of cryptocurrency has been studied. Our main area of focus was in the area of Klang Valley, which has been found that they are one of the most technological savvy people in Malaysia. Methods: One of the main areas of our research is the level of acceptance of the Malaysian market towards the idea of the cryptocurrency, which in our area of interest was Bitcoin. Findings: This research can be further used to identify the mitigating factors that influence peoples’ interest towards online payments such as debit/credit card payments and other channel such as PayPal. Technology acceptance among the Malaysian market can be the main factor that affects the use of the online payment method. Besides, it was also been found several factors that affects the consumers choice on the acceptance of the online payment, which was used as the main variable used to measurement on the level on acceptance. Application: Acceptance of Bitcoin by the Malaysian market. Keywords: Bitcoin, Malaysian Market, Online Payment, Technology Acceptance
Blockchain is one of the hottest topics in the discussion of technologies lately. As the enabling technology for Bitcoin, the pioneering cryptocurrency, blockchain is an append-only distributed ledger that is virtually impossible to attack given sufficient scale of participants. Hence, blockchain holds great promises as the fundamental technology to enable Internet-based electronic voting. However, Internet-based voting has additional requirements than monetary transactions. In this paper, we analyze these requirements, review existing proposed solutions, and outline possible improvements. Specifically, we propose to use live biometrics of the voter to perform secure and highly reliable remote authentication. We also propose a scheme to protect the secrecy of the ballots and eliminate the influence of votes already cast. Finally, we propose to impose a hierarchy to the voting infrastructure that aligns naturally with traditional voting, which enables parallel processing of multiple blockchains, to overcome the intrinsic scalability limitation of the blockchain technology.
This paper examines the comprehensive idea about the growth and future sustainability of bitcoin as a cryptocurrency. The transaction volume of bitcoin is used as the growth of the bitcoin and the bitcoin log return is used for testing the volatility which is helpful for the future sustainability of bitcoin. The study period says that the growth of bitcoin’s transaction volume is an increasing trend as more day to day transaction is minting with the exchange of Bitcoin. The study also uses ARCH & GARCH methodology to know the volatility of this emerging digital currency, and the GARCH result shows that it is a highly volatile currency. As a result, most of the governments have not given their legal status for the use of bitcoin in their country. But if bitcoin will be stable in the future, then it is easily accepted through worldwide and in the long run, people will have more faith in the cryptocurrency technology and its usability.
Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer payment system and digital currency, is often involved in illicit activities such as scamming, ransomware attacks, illegal goods trading, and thievery. At the time of writing, the Bitcoin ecosystem has not yet been mapped and as such there is no estimate of the share of illicit activities. This paper provides the first estimation of the portion of cyber-criminal entities in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Our dataset consists of 854 observations categorised into 12 classes (out of which 5 are cybercrime-related) and a total of 100,000 uncategorised observations. The dataset was obtained from the data provider who applied three types of clustering of Bitcoin transactions to categorise entities: co-spend, intelligence-based, and behaviour-based. Thirteen supervised learning classifiers were then tested, of which four prevailed with a cross-validation accuracy of 77.38%, 76.47%, 78.46%, 80.76% respectively. From the top four classifiers, Bagging and Gradient Boosting classifiers were selected based on their weighted average and per class precision on the cybercrime-related categories. Both models were used to classify 100,000 uncategorised entities, showing that the share of cybercrime-related is 29.81% according to Bagging, and 10.95% according to Gradient Boosting with number of entities as the metric. With regard to the number of addresses and current coins held by this type of entities, the results are: 5.79% and 10.02% according to Bagging; and 3.16% and 1.45% according to Gradient Boosting.
Leonardo Ermann, Klaus M. Frahm, Dima L. Shepelyansky
We construct and study the Google matrix of Bitcoin transactions during the time period from the very beginning in 2009 till April 2013. The Bitcoin network has up to a few millions of bitcoin users and we present its main characteristics including the PageRank and CheiRank probability distributions, the spectrum of eigenvalues of Google matrix and related eigenvectors. We find that the spectrum has an unusual circle-type structure which we attribute to existing hidden communities of nodes linked between their members. We show that the Gini coefficient of the transactions for the whole period is close to unity showing that the main part of wealth of the network is captured by a small fraction of users.
In this article, the author considers the implications of the blockchain technology for trade finance, in particular the letter of credit transaction and the escrow arrangement.
The blockchain technology was invented to create the Bitcoin cryptocurrency around 2009. Since then, various types of blockchains have been developed. In common to all of them, the technology generates, via a chain of blocks, append-only ledgers, which are distributed on an online network and maintains them in sync with each other without the involvement of any trusted intermediary.
This article consists of five sections. The first section, “Two Aspects of the Blockchain Technology,” will highlight two particular aspects of the blockchain technology that are relevant to the subsequent analysis. The second section, “Blockchain for the Letter of Credit Transaction,” will then examine the implementation of the technology for trade finance, looking in particular at letter of credit transactions and, in the third section, “Blockchain for the Escrow Arrangement,” escrow arrangements. This analysis will explore the question of whether the blockchain technology with its ancillary functionality brings about any advantages over the current practice. Before concluding in the fifth section, “Recapitulation,” this article will consider in the fourth section, “The Potential of the Multisig-Fortified Escrow Service for Making an Inroad into the Market of the Letter of Credit,” whether an escrow service fortified with the blockchain technology has the potential of making an inroad into the market of the letter of credit and other methods of payment.
As the technologies are evolving day by day, they are able to rejuvenate any sector either individually or by incorporating other technologies. There are many prominent sectors in the market such as healthcare, education, entertainment, business, information technology, retail, etc. Every sector has its own set of profits and consequences, but apart from all, the banking or finance sector is the only sector that provides dynamicity to all other sectors and helps them to generate maximum revenue from their principal investment. In this chapter, the authors are focusing on the traditional and modern ways of banking, currencies such as cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and how the modern currency will change the transaction procedure in the global banking system, creating an amalgamation of such currency with a current transaction system with the role of technology such as Blockchain in the betterment of the global banking system making the system fully decentralized, distributed, transparent, fast, immutable, and efficient.
Bitcoin is a digital currency based on a peer-to-peer payment system managed by an open source software and characterized by lower transaction costs, greater security and scalability than fiat money and no need of a central bank. Despite criticisms about illegal uses and social consequences, it is attracting the interest of the scientific community. The purpose of this work is to define and evaluate the current trends of the literature concerned with the sustainability of bitcoin, considering the environmental impacts, social issues and economic aspects. From the analysis it emerges that the transition of the whole monetary system in the new cryptocurrency will result in an unacceptable amount of energy consumed to mine new bitcoins and to maintain the entire virtual monetary system, and probably bitcoin will remain a niche currency. Blockchain, which is the base for a distributed and democratically-sustained public ledger of the transactions, could foster new and challenging opportunities. Sharing the framework of medical data, energy generation and distribution in micro-grids at the citizen level, block-stack and new state-driven cryptocurrencies, may benefit from the wide spread of blockchain-based transactions. Under the perspective of its being a driver of social change, bitcoins and related blockchain technologies may overcome the issues highlighted by numerous detractors.
This chapter describes a short-lived experiment in organizational governance that attempted to utilize algorithmic authority through cryptocurrency and block-chain technologies to create a social and political world quite unlike anything we have seen before. It details the governance structures that were promised by the developers and community members involved in the making of The decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), and in contrast, those that were observed in its discourses before, during, and after the “exploit.” The DAO was a decentralized, crowdfunded, direct-management organization and investment platform. In the original vision of decentralized autonomous organizations, as proposed by Vitalik Buterin, founder and member of the Ethereum Foundation, a DAO is a pseudo-legal organization run by an assemblage of human and “robot” participants. From the earliest days of The DAO, many community members acknowledged that the enormous complexity of decentralized and algorithmic governance required a new kind of experimental “science” to map the “uncharted territory” The DAO was entering.
Blockchain uses the idea of storing transaction data in the form of a distributed ledger wherein each node in the network stores a current copy of the sequence of transactions in the form of a hash chain. This requirement of storing the entire ledger incurs a high storage cost that grows undesirably large for high transaction rates and large networks. In this work we use the ideas of secret key sharing, private key encryption, and distributed storage to design a coding scheme such that each node stores only a part of the entire transaction thereby reducing the storage cost to a fraction of its original cost. When further using dynamic zone allocation, we show the coding scheme can also improve the integrity of the transaction data in the network over current schemes. Further, block validation (bitcoin mining) consumes a significant amount of energy as it is necessary to determine a hash value satisfying a specific set of constraints; we show that using dynamic distributed storage reduces these energy costs.