The proposal of this paper is to present a summary of ten years of research at the P2P Foundation, including by our own P2P Lab but also by our partners in common research programs, of what we know today about the emerging commons economy. It includes a basic account of why the ‘invention’ of the blockchain has been important, but stresses that the needed distributed ledgers may take other forms in the future. This section may not offer a lot of new elements for those that are already technologically savvy about the topic, but it does offer a critical engagement with the qualities and flaws of the current model, and suggests how it can be tweaked and transformed, to also serve as a basis for a post-capitalist, commons-centric economy.
The blockchain architecture is often envisioned as a potential mechanism for the automation microtransactions between interconnected IoT applications, as transactions could be directly enforced through the technical governance structure it provides. However, this chapter draws attention to the limitations of the blockchain architecture in providing tools for conflict management, which is here considered to be a vital for both governance and the legitimacy of the system. Although blockchain’s potential for conflict prevention is often emphasised, experiences from public blockchain networks such as Ethereum demonstrate that prevention is not sufficient but instead dispute resolution mechanisms are needed for addressing unpredictable events. To this end, alternative conflict management strategies have been developed for blockchain-related disputes. We assess these emergent redress mechanisms from the perspective of conflict management with specific attention to fairness of outcomes and due process rules. By making a distinction between systemic disputes and low intensity disputes we demonstrate how conflict management, governance and technological infrastructure converge on blockchain networks. This convergence, in turn, influences how fairness expectations and due process safeguards are formulated, causing concern for the fairness of emergent conflict management. The design of blockchain-based IoT applications should take into consideration the need for conflict management and particular attention should be paid to the fairness of such mechanisms, as these contribute to the fulfillment of fairness expectations, the legitimacy and predictability of governance structures and, in the end, feasibility of mainstream use.
We describe the design and implementation of GNU Taler, an electronic payment system based on an extension of Chaumian online e-cash with efficient change. In addition to anonymity for customers, it provides the novel notion of income transparency, which guarantees that merchants can reliably receive a payment from an untrusted payer only when their income from the payment is visible to tax authorities. Income transparency is achieved by the introduction of a refresh protocol, which gives anonymous change for a partially spent coin without introducing a tax evasion loophole. In addition to income transparency, the refresh protocol can be used to implement Camenisch-style atomic swaps, and to preserve anonymity in the presence of protocol aborts and crash faults with data loss by participants. Furthermore, we show the provable security of our income-transparent anonymous e-cash, which, in addition to the usual anonymity and unforgeability proper- ties of e-cash, also formally models conservation of funds and income transparency. Our implementation of GNU Taler is usable by non-expert users and integrates with the modern Web architecture. Our payment platform addresses a range of practical issues, such as tipping customers, providing refunds, integrating with banks and know-your-customer (KYC) checks, as well as Web platform security and reliability requirements. On a single machine, we achieve transaction rates that rival those of global, commercial credit card processors. We increase the robustness of the exchange—the component that keeps bank money in escrow in exchange for e-cash—by adding an auditor component, which verifies the correct operation of the system and allows to detect a compromise or misbehavior of the exchange early. Just like bank accounts have reason to exist besides bank notes, e-cash only serves as part of a whole payment system stack. Distributed ledgers have recently gained immense popularity as potential replacement for parts of the traditional financial industry. While cryptocurrencies based on proof-of-work such as Bitcoin have yet to scale to be useful as a replacement for established payment systems, other more efficient systems based on Blockchains with more classical consensus algorithms might still have promising applications in the financial industry. We design, implement and analyze the performance of Byzantine Set Union Consensus (BSC), a Byzantine consensus protocol that agrees on a (super-)set of elements at once, instead of sequentially agreeing on the individual elements of a set. While BSC is interesting in itself, it can also be used as a building block for permissioned Blockchains, where—just like in Nakamoto-style consensus—whole blocks of transactions are agreed upon at once, increasing the transaction rate.
Daniel Traian Pele, Miruna Mazurencu-Marinescu-Pele
In this paper, the authors investigate the statistical properties of some cryptocurrencies by using three layers of analysis: alpha-stable distributions, Metcalfe’s law and the bubble behaviour through the LPPL modelling. The results show, in the medium to long-run, the validity of Metcalfe's law (the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system) for the evaluation of cryptocurrencies; however, in the short-run, the validity of Metcalfe’s law for Bitcoin is questionable. As the results showed a potential for herding behaviour, the authors then used LPPL models to capture the behaviour of cryptocurrencies exchange rates during an endogenous bubble and to predict the most probable time of the regime switching. The main conclusion is that Metcalfe’s law may be valid in the long-run, however in the short-run, on various data regimes, its validity is highly debatable.
High-tech enables payment evolution and global competition. The ambiguities surrounding of the digital currency still leave enough space for the analysis of its unreserved acceptance, trust and anticipation, which are the main driver for the spread of the network. Banks should carefully consider the technology underlying these cryptocurrencies as a potential generic new way of transferring ownership of the value over the long term. The chapter provides an analysis of the use of cryptocurrencies in general, especially Bitcoin as the technology adoption in the presence of network externalities. The objective attitude is the future of the digital currency in the moment is still unsolved issue due to the existence of “critical mass”. Further, the chapter explores financial privacy which is very sensitive issue in using digital currency (or cryptocurrency) and discuss about private choices versus political rules. The research has shown that the future of cryptocurrencies can be bright if some institutional-formal conditions are met due to the fact that success evolution of e-money requires building safety payments through three criteria–standardization, compatibility and innovation.
Decentralization is heralded as the most important technological design aspect of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). In this chapter we’ll analyze the concept of decentralization, with the goal to understand the social, legal, and economic forces that produce more or less decentralized techno-social systems. We first give an overview of decentralization as a political ideology and as an ideal and natural endpoint in the development of digital technologies. We then move beyond this discourse and treat decentralization, its extent, its mode, and the systems which it can refer to as the products of particular economic, political, and social dynamics around and within these techno-social systems. We then point at the concrete forces that shape the actual degree of (de)centralization. Through this, we show that the extent to which a techno-social system is (de)centralized at any given moment should not be measured by its distance from an ideological ideal of total decentralization but should be seen as the sum of all the social, economic, political, and legal forces that impact a techno-social system.
Integrating triple bottom line (TBL) goals into supply chains (SCs) is a challenging task which necessitates the careful coordination of numerous stakeholders’ individual interests. Recent technological advancements can impact TBL sustainability by changing the design, structure, and management of modern SCs. Blockchain technology enables immutable data records and facilitates a shared data view along the supply chain. The Physical Internet (PI) is an overarching framework that can be applied to create a layered and comprehensive view of the SC. In this conceptual paper, I define and combine these technologies and derive several high-level research areas and research questions (RQ) to investigate adoption and management as well as structural SC issues. I suggest a theory-based research agenda for the years to come that exploits the strengths of rigorous academic research, while remaining relevant for industry. Furthermore, I suggest various well-established theories to tackle the respective research questions and provide specific directions for future research.
Conventional railway operations employ specialized software and hardware to ensure safe and secure train operations. Track occupation and signaling are governed by central control offices, while trains (and their drivers) receive instructions. To make this setup more dynamic, the train operations can be decentralized by enabling the trains to find routes and make decisions which are safeguarded and protocolled in an auditable manner. In this paper, we present the case study findings of a first-of-its-kind blockchain-based prototype implementation for railway control, based on decentralization but also ensuring that the overall system state remains conflict-free and safe. We also show how a blockchain-based approach simplifies usage billing and enables a train-to-train/machine-to-machine economy. Finally, first ideas addressing the use of blockchain technology as a life-cycle approach for condition-based monitoring and predictive maintenance in train operations are outlined.
Conventional railway operations employ specialized software and hardware to\nensure safe and secure train operations. Track occupation and signaling are\ngoverned by central control offices, while trains (and their drivers) receive\ninstructions. To make this setup more dynamic, the train operations can be\ndecentralized by enabling the trains to find routes and make decisions which\nare safeguarded and protocolled in an auditable manner. In this paper, we\npresent the findings of a first-of-its-kind blockchain-based prototype\nimplementation for railway control, based on decentralization but also ensuring\nthat the overall system state remains conflict-free and safe. We also show how\na blockchain-based approach simplifies usage billing and enables a\ntrain-to-train/machine-to-machine economy. Finally, first ideas addressing the\nuse of blockchain as a life-cycle approach for condition based monitoring and\npredictive maintenance in train operations are outlined.\n
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinato-rially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have different profitabilities in Ethereum. The attacker can either broadcast his fork one block by one, or keep them secret as long as possible and publish them all at once at the end of an attack cycle. The first strategy is damaging for substantial hashrates, and we show that the second strategy is even worse. This confirms what we already proved for Bitcoin: Selfish mining is most of all an attack on the difficulty adjustment formula. We show that the current reward for signaling uncle blocks is a weak incentive for the attacker to signal blocks. We compute the profitabilities of different strategies and find out that for a large parameter space values, strategies that do not signal blocks are the best ones. We compute closed-form formulas for the apparent hashrates for these strategies and compare them. We use a direct combinatorics analysis with Dyck words to find these closed-form formulas.
Günümüzde teknolojinin hızla gelişmesi hayatımıza birçok alanda yenilik getirmeye başlamıştır. Özellikle finansal açıdan yenilikler hayatımızı direkt olarak etkilemektedir. Yapılan mal veya hizmet harcamaları internet üzerinden yapılmaya başlanmış olması geleneksel ödeme yöntemlerini değişikliğe uğratmış ve elektronik ödeme yöntemlerini hayatımıza sokmuştur. Bununla beraber geleneksel paralar evrimleşerek sanal paralara dönüşmüştür. Sanal para olgusu 2009 yılında Nakamoto isimli kimliği henüz belli olmayan kişi ya da kuruluş tarafından çıkarılmış bitcoin isimli bir para birimi ile hayatımıza girmiş olup günümüzde popülerliğini arttırarak devam etmektedir. Blok zinciri teknolojisine sahip olan bu para birimi tamamen sanal olarak ve herhangi bir kuruluşa bağlı olmaksızın tarafların birbirine para transferleri yapmalarına imkân tanımaktadır. Bu para birimi devletlerce çıkarılmadığından dolayı para arzı, madencilik denilen bir süreç ile çıkmakta olup bir kişi ya da kuruluş fark etmeksizin gerekli donanım ve yazılım ile isteyen herkes bu para biriminin arzını sağlamaktadır. Herhangi bir kuruluşa bağlı olmadığı için de devletler bu paralar ile alakalı düzenlemeler getirmeye ve bazı ülkeler kontrolleri dışı geliştiğinden dolayı bu para birimini kullanımı yasaklamaya çalışmaktadır. Bu bağlamda, bu çalışmada finansal yenilikler ele alınmış özellikle elektronik ödeme yöntemleri ve sanal para olarak bitcoin üzerinde durulmuştur. Çalışmada konu ile ilgili literatür taranmış olup, sanal para kavramı açıklanmış, bu paranın kullandığı günümüzün en yeni teknolojisi olan blok zinciri ele alınmış, sanal para madenciliği ve bu paraya getirilen eleştiriler açıklanmıştır. Sonuç olarak hızla gelişen teknolojiye karşı koyulamayacağı için finansal açıdan değişikliklere hızlı cevap verilmesi ve bu yeniliklerden doğan avantaj ve dezavantajlar iyi belirlenmelidir.
In der Dissertation wird die Eignung der Distributed Ledger oder Blockchain-Technologie als Infrastruktur für dezentrale Marktplattformen untersucht. Dies beinhaltet die Schaffung eines konzeptionellen Rahmens, die technische Umsetzung durch Prototypen und die Analyse ökonomischer Auswirkungen. Im ersten Schritt kombiniert die vorliegende Arbeit die Ergebnisse einer strukturierten Literaturrecherche mit dem Market Engineering-Ansatz von Weinhardt und Gimpel (2007). Das resultierende „Blockchain Engineering Framework“ beschreibt den Aufbau und die Kernelemente blockchainbasierter Marktplattformen, zeigt Grenzen der Technologie auf und bietet einen Rahmen zur Strukturierung und Kommunikation von Forschungsvorhaben und -ergebnissen. Aus technologischer Sicht veranschaulichen zwei Prototypen die Implementierung und den Betrieb dezentraler Märkte. Der erste Prototyp betrachtet die Anwendung in Märkten mit Qualitätsunterschieden und Informationsasymmetrien anhand des Gebrauchtwagenmarktes. Der zweite Prototyp konzentriert sich auf Mikrostrukturaspekte und stellt einen Ansatz zum Handel von Aktien vor. Durch die Prototypen wird deutlich, wie die verteilte Datenbank Transparenz schafft und wie die diskrete Funktionsweise des Konsensmechanismus Interaktionen beeinflusst. Der dritte Teil greift diese Erkenntnisse auf und untersucht ökonomische Auswirkungen. In einem zweiperiodigen Spiel mit unvollständiger Information wird gezeigt, dass die öffentliche Verfügbarkeit von Qualitätsinformation zu opportunistischem Verhalten einzelner Marktteilnehmer und Marktversagen führen kann. Um den Einfluss der Kapazität und Frequenz neuer Datenblöcke auf die Qualität dezentraler Märkte zu analysieren, werden die entsprechenden Marktergebnisse mit Hilfe von Orderdaten der Börse Stuttgart nachgebildet. Die Auswertung der resultierenden Datengrundlage legt nahe, dass größere und schnellere Blöcke die Aktivität und Liquidität steigern. Gleichzeitig begrenzt eine Zunahme von Preisschwankungen die Skalierbarkeit dezentraler Märkte. Insgesamt stellt diese Dissertation einen ersten Schritt in der Analyse und Gestaltung dezentraler Marktplattformen dar. Sie skizziert wesentliche Elemente, demonstriert die technische Machbarkeit, beleuchtet ökonomische Konsequenzen und hebt zukünftigen Forschungsbedarf hervor.
Attaining consensus with no constraints on the consensus participation is a fundamental feature of decentralized blockchain solutions such as Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008) and Ethereum (Buterin et al., 2013). Unrestricted consensus participation removes the possibility of censorship and a potential single point of failure, but this design has led to a new concern: that of centralization. Centralization in decentralized blockchain refers to the concentration of a large portion of computing resources to a select few participants. In this paper, we identify the restriction on new participation as a critical contributor to the centralization of consensus power towards commercial and large-scale entities. We also examine the cause of the indirect restriction on participation and propose a metric to identify the degree of these indirect restrictions. This new metric may be used as a threat indicator to identify the centralization of decentralized blockchain caused by indirect participation restrictions.
While global sourcing arrangements are highly complex and usually represent large value to the partners, little is known of the use of e-contracts or smart contracts and contract management systems to enhance the contract management process. In this paper we assess the potential of emerging technologies for global sourcing. We review current sourcing contract issues and evaluate three technologies that have been applied to enhance contracting processes. These are (1) semantic standardisation, (2) cognitive technologies and (3) smart contracts and blockchain. We discuss that each of these seem to have their merit for contract management and potentially can contribute to contract management in more complex and dynamic sourcing arrangements. The combination and configuration in which these three technologies will provide value to sourcing should be on the agenda for future research in sourcing contract management.
Smart contracts are a new form of contracts that handle transactions of economical value between users on a network, without the need for a middle man. This is possible as the integrity of the transactions are ensured using Blockchain technology. However, safe transactions are not always a guarantee as secure smart contracts can be difficult to write. Security vulnerabilities in smart contracts can be exploited and result in great financial losses for contract users. In this report we examine how interference can be counteracted in transactions involving smart contracts. This is to ensure that assets of economical value do not run the risk of disappearing and that the flow of information between smart contracts remains truthful. The term "interference" is coined precisely in relation to smart contracts. Moreover, two different solutions for two interference problems are examined, which mainly involve locking the access to certain functions for specific contracts so that no modification of the state of one contract can take place until a transaction is finished. The methods for counteracting interference in the transactions work, but the solutions are adapted to the specific pr blems and do not serve as a "general" solution to the problem of interference.