Sohee Kim, Sejun Yoon, Nagarajan Raghavan, Nguyen-Truong Le · 5 authors
The blockchain is a technology with high growth potential that increases social benefits by streamlining procedures, reducing costs, and innovating the way we work. Considering the growth potential of blockchain technologies, countries around the world are attempting to graft into various fields such as finance, logistics, and healthcare, and actively promoting technology development. Tracing and analyzing the developmental trajectories of blockchain technology can give great insight for R&D direction and strategies. We developed an improved knowledge persistence-based main path approach to identify technological trajectories of the blockchain technology. In addition, future technological directions for each sub-technology under blockchain technology were identified by the knowledge unconventionality metric. The results show that the blockchain technology can be divided into five sub-technologies, and each sub-technology has evolved with high technological interactions among other sub-technologies. Based on the last knowledge streams of the main paths, this paper suggests potential future directions for each sub-technology in the blockchain technology.
Investing in cryptoassets can be tricky. At the moment, there are many different cryptocurrencies operating on different blockchains with different ecosystems. The use of cryptoassets requires defining a goal in relation to the type of cryptoassets and the degree to which their properties affect their functioning and development. In this article, the author analyzes two of the most popular and significant cryptocurrencies for the cryptoindustry Bitcoin and Ethereum on two different blockchains. The author specifically took two cryptocurrencies that are completely different in their meaning and purpose. In view of the fact that the author does not see an ideal solution to several problems, he described the need for diversification of assets by purpose of use. The author describes each cryptocurrency as a separate ecosystem with its own properties, which requires playing by the rules. The author cites socio-economic factors due to which he chose these two blockchains for analysis, tries to analyze the dependence of the properties of each cryptocurrency on the level of popularization, and gives empirical data stating the consequences in a historical context.The author also considers technical properties as a factor of scalability and attractiveness of each of the blockchains, how cryptocurrencies interact with each other, influencing the financial mood of users. The author of the article also tries to determine the technical and social factors that led to the adaptation of these cryptocurrencies to the traditional financial sector and how they depend on each other. The author describes Bitcoin as a system for saving and multiplying funds, while Ethereum sees it as an ecosystem, an intermediary protocol between already formed market sectors and decentralized applications within the network. After analyzing the results of the study, the author provides general criteria for the formation of a methodology for choosing a cryptocurrency and blockchain for conducting effective operational activities, as well as the formation of its own mechanism for managing the efficiency of cryptocurrency operations.
Both cryptocurrencies and gold are scarce, expensive for extraction, and less affected by money supply. We focus on these similarities and investigate whether cryptocurrency network affects impact on expected return on gold. Our results show that the number of cryptocurrency wallet users is positively related to the expected return on gold. Moreover, we employed a machine-learning approach and considered the interactions among predictors. We reveal that network factors have a greater impact on gold than returns on Bitcoin and other macroeconomic and financial variables.
Oksana G. Sorokina, Egor Dudukalov, Liudmila Guzikova, Denis Ushakov
Research develops the modern theory and methodology of cryptocurrency functioning as an integral part of modern money circulation, and the main directions of cryptocurrency progress as means of legal payment in the Republic of Indonesia. Based on the econometric model of the cryptocurrency main indicators influence the relationship between “bitcoin” attributes was assessed; the probable scenarios for the financial regulation system of the Republic of Indonesia (RI) effectivization based on the National Bank or special financial institutions competences were highlighted; the practical recommendations aimed at combating money laundering in cryptocurrency-based transactions have been developed from the position of priority for Indonesian payment system modernization.
The study explores whether blockchain technology can change the paradigm of the current financial structure and the balance of power in the international financial system. Accordingly, this study reviews the development of blockchain technology by analyzing China and Venezuela, both of which struggle to harness their technological advancement and to enhance their power in the international realm. We found that Venezuela invests in blockchain technology to create an alternative payment structure for survivability, while China’s desire is to become a global leader in global blockchain technology.
The paper focuses on the analysis of the cryptocurrency open innovation market to predict sustainable growth in the future. The nature of cryptocurrencies ‘development leads to the rapid increase in their popularity and spread of trading at this new market. The high volatility of these assets is encouraging to understand and predict their price in ever changing market environment. The paper proposed the pool complexity approach to choose optimal technology using social activity in the internet, trading parameters, technical indicators and other cryptocurrency data. According to the results of the analysis, the most effective and promising cryptocurrency is EOS cryptocurrency, which has the lowest complexity and commission level among the analyzed digital currencies and allows you to implement third-party applications in the system.
Blockchain, IoT, and AI are key technologies driving the next wave of the digital transformation. We argue that these technologies will converge and will allow for new business models: Autonomous agents (i.e., sensors, cars, machines, trucks, cameras, and other IoT devices) will in the future act as own profit centers that (1) have a digital twin leveraging IoT, (2) send and receive money leveraging blockchain technology on their own and (3) autonomously make decisions as independent economic agents leveraging AI and data analytics. We further argue that this convergence will drive the development of such autonomous business models and, with it, the digital transformation of industrial corporations.
In contrast with robust systems that resist noise or fragile systems that break with noise, antifragility is defined as a property of complex systems that benefit from noise or disorder. Here we define and test a simple measure of antifragility for complex dynamical systems. In this work we use our antifragility measure to analyze real data from return prices in the stock and cryptocurrency markets. Our definition of antifragility is the product of the return price and a perturbation. We explore different types of perturbations that typically arise from within the system. Our results suggest that for both the stock market and the cryptocurrency market, the tendency among the 'top performers' is to be robust rather than antifragile. It would be important to explore other possible definitions of antifragility to understand its role in financial markets and in complex dynamical systems in general.
Blockchain technology can play a vital role in the space industry and exploration. This magic technology can provide decentralized and secure techniques for processing and manipulating space resources as space digital tokens. Tokenizing space resources such as orbits, satellites, spacecraft, orbital debris, asteroids, and other space objects in the form of blockchain-based digital tokens will reflect plenty of various applications in the space mining industry. Moreover, Blockchain algorithms based on smart contracts can be utilized for tracking all space transactions and communications in a transparent, verifiable, and secure manner. This paper is one of the first attempts towards conceptually investigating adopting blockchain theory in the space industry based on space digital token concept. A new conceptual blockchain in space industry framework is proposed, and new models are created for introducing proposed solutions for some major challenges in the space industry and exploration. Finally, the paper is ended with discussing SpaceChain, the first open-source blockchain-based satellite network in the world as a case study of applying blockchain theory in designing and implementing satellite systems.
Crises frequently weaken subnational governments but in some cases they lead to greater decentralization. Does this decentralization, however, support the search for optimal crisis response strategies? Generally speaking there are several arguments, which suggest that decentralized systems will manage crises better than centralized ones. This article, however, considers two scenarios (decentralization of weakness and decentralization of responsibility) where the apparently increasing autonomy of subnational governments leads to important problems. Decentralization of weakness emerges when the central government for certain reasons refuses to actively implement an anti-crisis policy. Under these conditions, regional measures, while to some extent compensating the inactivity of the central government, create a number of other problems -that of external effects, possible ideologization of politics and insufficient use of expert knowledge. Decentralization of responsibility emerges when regions accept responsibility for implementing anti-crisis measures, but the center keeps control over resources -thus, regions have to focus on competing for central financing. For the modern Russia, the risks of these two scenarios are substantial.
The global economy can be regarded as a complex global adaptive system, which adapts and evolves according to the environment and the behavior of the agents existing on the market. A topic that is topical and can even affect the welfare of a country is the field of cryptocurrencies. Today, the most well-known phenomenon by people in this field is the emergence of bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies or virtual currencies are an emanation of the financial crisis that started in 2008, a crisis that had led to a decline in confidence of traditional bank. In this paper, we discussed the creation of possible speculative bubbles, we presented the virtual currencies, we applied techniques of multidimensional analysis of the data for their analysis, and we evaluated the effects that the appearance of the cryptocurrencies had on the cybernetic economic system in Romania. Also, the paper deals with a section on identifying risks in the field of cryptocurrencies. In the last part of this paper, we focus our attention on the viability of these coins and their future prospects.
The possibility of constructing dynamic measures of complexity as quantum econophysical behaving in a proper way during actual pre-crash periods has been shown. This fact is used to build predictors of crashes and critical events phenomena on the examples of all the patterns recorded in the time series of the key cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the effectiveness of the proposed indicatorsprecursors of these falls has been identified. From positions, attained by modern theoretical physics the concept of economic Plank's constant has been proposed.
The article analyzes the main reasons for the slow adoption of blockchain technology, in particular, in the financial sector. The authors critically analyzed the main declared properties of blockchain technologies: trust, security, decentralization, immutable data storage, lack of intermediaries, hardware protection against attacks, and openness. The aim of the study are to show that these blockchain properties are overestimated, the expectations of its adoption are inflated, and the delays in its adaptation outside of cryptocurrencies, in particular, in the financial sector, are natural. The article is based on a methodology for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of scientific publications and statistical sources on the blockchain adaptation from the perspective of the theory of diffusion of innovations, the conditions and the specifics of economic and sociological approaches for consensus-building. The study resulted in the following new systemic findings. Blockchain and distributed ledgers are not fundamentally new technologies. In general, they do not have the properties of the immutable data storage, trust, anonymity, low transaction and adoption costs. All current consensus technologies have fundamental faults. Cryptocurrency technology is original, but it was a private experimental solution to a specific ideological problem of the libertarian political agenda. Consensus does not provide trust. Delayed blockchain adoption, in particular in traditional financial institutions, is natural, since the technology does not show better results than current digital solutions, and traditional economic institutions have greater public trust. The practical implications of the findings are that they may be used by investors.
Andreas Vlachos, Klitos Christodoulou, Elias Iosif
This paper presents the design of a Blockchain Readiness Index (BRI) to be used as a tool for assisting nations to monitor the level of Blockchain maturity according to their suitability on hosting blockchain-based activities, and successfully adopting a blockchain regulatory framework. BRI is a composite index that combines a variety of indicators from a range of sources to a single score. The proposed methodology attempts to fill a knowledge gap by evaluating the relatively unexplored area of blockchain adoption per nation. The index presented in this paper aims to distinguish between the most promising and non-hostile countries, acting as the basis for professional work, decision making and operations of organizations, investors, academics, and other stakeholders within the blockchain space. As the index is updated regularly, all new developments on the fast-changing landscape of blockchain and cryptocurrencies are reflected. In addition, this research aims to go beyond the regulatory environment towards examining several other factors such as local engagement, expertise, investments, and the need for a decentralized provision of services. This paper presents an overview of the landscape of similar attempts on designing such indexes by reviewing and identifying potential gaps and opportunities for improving their methodological design that can lead to more accurate and relevant conclusions. In addition, with this paper we contribute a systematic methodology for building a BRI using techniques from the information retrieval domain to normalize the non-normalized values, and a cosine similarity measure to derive an index ranking consisting of various nations. More specifically the proposed BRI covers a wide range of blockchain readiness indicators which can be organized into the following “pillars”: (1) Government Regulation, (2) Research, (3) Technology, (4) Industry, and (5) User Engagement. An empirical evaluation reports preliminary but promising results of the algorithmic design methodology showing evidence that, the identified indicators are sufficient for developing our index when compared to judgements made by human experts.
The paper contains theoretical considerations on cryptocurrencies in the context of innovation and specifically focuses on the most popular cryptocurrency – bitcoin (BTC). Based on critical analysis of domestic and foreign writings, bitcoin was classified as a modular innovation despite some of its features suggesting the continuous and breakthrough nature of the solution. The conclusion helped positively validate the research hypothesis proposed in this paper according to which cryptocurrencies, despite their characteristics of an incremental and breakthrough innovation, can be treated as modular innovations.
The main research objective is to identify and analyse significant economic sectors subject to potential disruption from the distributed ledger technology (DLT) within the economy of Latvia. The tasks are 1) to identify sectors subject to disruption from DLT in line with global technological developments, business readiness trends and distributed ledger use cases, 2) to identify sectors generating the most significant output within the economy of Latvia, 3) to analyse interconnections of global trends related to DLT and the areas of potential disruptions to the identified sectors within the economy of Latvia. The research concluded that economic sectors with the most significant output within the economy of Latvia are all subject to disruption from distributed ledger use cases and global DLT trends in the short, medium or long term.
The G7 should address new, unprecedented and highly disruptive issues that characterise our complex world, rather than well‐understood international problems that fit into existing categories. We argue that the G7 can do this by playing to its strengths – informality and like‐mindedness in particular – in addressing emerging and transversal issues such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrencies.
The emergence of blockchain technology has created a debate regarding technologies’ socio-cultural symbolism. Prevailing as alternative or complementary to internet technology, blockchain’s decentralized radical architecture reflects organizational change, enhancement of degrees of freedom, for individual identities and communities, new schemes of distributed trust and privacy, transformation of power relations and social reality perception. The current paper aims to contribute to the ongoing debate, from an organizational and socio-psychological perspective, discussing the key elements of a socially grounded technology, like any other technological product within the history of humanity. Through an evolutionary lens, blockchain technology is examined as a decentralized grassroots organizational movement at birth, influencing and, at the same time, be influenced, by science, culture, as well as by other aspects of individual and collective networked life, apart from the economy. Social sciences and cyber sciences are in a crossroad where society and technology integrate creating a mixed socio-technological or techno-social reality. Therefore, it is of high importance for them, to address the new epistemological challenges by developing new methodologies and tools, independently from any utopian or dystopian predictions.
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) have become a topic that is being more and more discussed in political, economic and scientific discourses. , also within economic sciences. Their potential to redefine many processes in the economy is growing, and there is a consensus in the scientific community about their revolutionary character. Blockchain is one of the DLTs and one of the breakthrough technologies distinctive for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The aim of the paper is to draw attention to the potential of blockchain technology for developing countries and how it can contribute to the improvement of quality of life and fighting poverty. Following Schwab's thesis, "the extent to which society embraces technological innovation is a major determinant of progress". Therefore, developing countries should not disregard the potential of blockchain technology that can solve a lot of current problems and provide access to previously unreachable services with a relatively low cost (both implementation and subsequent maintenance cost).
Belen Suarez Lopez, David Issó García, Antonio Vargas Alcaide
This paper has the main purpose to make a critical and balanced analysis about the potential of blockchain technology to face some of the great current socioeconomic challenges, being focus on impact assessment point of view, analyzing the disruptive potential of blockchain to provide solutions at level of different challenges as example, climate change, migrant movements, gender equality, financial inclusion or the cost opportunity of the management of data science. The term blockchain summary a numerous different type of system of distributed ledger, essentially, it is just a record distributed, a ledger of digital events that is distributed or shared among many different parts within an ecosystem (nodes), and chronological in a network. The technology is at an early stage and can be implemented in many ways depending on the objective. The methodological tool for the research is strategic and qualitative SWOT analysis identifying the critical success factors such internal factors (Strengthens and Weakness), and external factors (Opportunities and Threats), summarizes the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion. From the bibliographic review carried out on the finding and disclosure provided by empirical research about business case studies, the research results summarized in the paper confirm that although looks difficulty of give a closed definition to variety of system under the umbrella of blockchain, among the main strengths of technology are its intrinsic characteristics, such as, its ability to store data immutably without relying on a central authority. As weakness, highlight the fact of the need of solve some non-minor inefficiencies as energy consumption and, as result, the difficulty to be scaled. It has the potential to replace the intermediary and central entities or change the way they works, allowing disintermediation and potentially empower people in trade, democratic participation, social interaction and financial inclusion, which represent great opportunities. Although, on the side of threats there is lack of knowledge about the technology, which generates resistance from regulators who are beginning to assess risks and are concerned about how new participants could cannibalize their income models. In addition, it seems clear the importance of assume the fact that the technological changes take time to develop and often require the adaptation of entire ecosystems. Keywords: blockchain, decentralization, democratization, financial inclusion, socioeconomic challenges, tokem traceability, transparency, trust.
The common signs of development and its financing of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and basic income were determined. The main tendencies and problems of the development of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence from their appearance to the present time were considered. The combination of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and basic income in a unified system of innovative tools for the creation of a new global financial and technological system was substantiated. These three technologies have the features of combining into one innovative system of interaction at different levels from hardware and software to the level of ultimate practical implementation and application in the future. The perception and consideration of these technologies as a single system makes it possible to significantly simplify the approach to their study, design and implementation.
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.