Blockchain Papers

Katherine L. Christ, Christine Helliar

No abstract is available for this record.

Miranda Imperial

This research sets out to analyze the message promoted by start-up enterprises that apply blockchain technologies for the purpose of e-voting [blockchain-powered e-voting (BPE)], and their perceived effects of this technological solution on democratic outcomes. Employing Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA), I examined the written output of seven BPE start-ups (Agora, DemocracyEarth, Follow My Vote, Polys, Voatz, Votem, and VoteWatcher), as displayed in their websites. The close attention of CDA to power relations brought out relevant topics of discussion for analysis. Notably, these included: voting as an expression of democracy; technological determinism; individual versus communitarian understandings of democracy; the prominence of neoliberalism and the economic sphere; and technological literacy. Findings from the literature suggest that the assumptions of BPE start-ups about a blockchain-powered democracy diverge from widely accepted understandings of democracy. BPE start-ups envision a democracy determined by positions and institutions of power, by the technologically able, and by economic interests. This research argues that this conception of democracy disempowers voters from any form of decision-making regarding how democracy is run beyond their expression in the form of a vote decided by these established powers. The widespread addresses to existing elites to enable BPE, as well as what is left unsaid about community, collective rights and the not so technologically literate population, imply that BPE developers display concern for one particular expression among the many diverse and heterogeneous understandings of democracy, while disregarding outstanding privacy, security and accountability concerns associated to implementations of the technology for BPE. This work is a contribution to much needed research on technology and democracy’s deepening intersections, at a time of rapid technological innovation and turbulent democratic scepticism.

Bryane Michael, Nataliya Korolevska

FinTech – along with the blockchain, other distributed ledger, smart contract, and tokenization usually assumed to accompany it – could change the way governments procure goods and services. Yet, both the academic and practitioner literature omits discussion of any policy-level analysis of the interaction between procurement rules and FinTech innovations. Procurement authorities and procurement law can play a vital role in the development of FinTech. They can help build the FinTech platforms and ecosystems that help them engage in public procurement. They should not try to procure such FinTech outright. Any FinTech applications facilitating public procurement should thus encourage compliance with the principles the international community has developed over decades.

Silvia Bartolucci, Stefania Fiorentino

The last financial downturn has imposed severe changes on the labour market leading to the disappearance of a number of traditional jobs and social securities. Among the diverse effects induced by those recent modifications to the socio-economic fabric, we have seen the emergence of the sharing economy. The sharing economy can be defined as an economic system where entities can share services and goods, for a fee or a payment via shared platforms or peer-to-peer networks (P2P). The idea behind the rise of the sharing economy is related to sustainability and social justice, and the promotion of the democratisation of goods and resources.

Fynnwin Prager, José N. Martínez, Chris Cagle

No abstract is available for this record.

Silvia Semenzin, Alessandro Gandini

This article discusses the cultural conceptions of trust underpinning the experimentation of blockchain startup applications beyond the financial sector. Based on qualitative research undertaken in the context of the so-called “Blockchain 2.0” scene, we show how a peculiar conception of trust, which blends the libertarian views of blockchain inventors with the neoliberal culture of competition and meritocracy that is typical of the startup world, underpins these implementations. As a result, we argue that “Blockchain 2.0” entrepreneurs ultimately fail to recognize the eminently social nature of the trust-building process. They emerge from our observation as unable to comprehend the extent to which the implementation of blockchain in a societal (i.e., not purely financial) context cannot do away with considerations about what kind of “social” the technology intervenes within, and find difficult to effectively conceive of how this technology embeds in existing social relations and power structures.

Inês Faria

Abstract This article presents a socio-anthropological analysis of the formation of a business ecosystem around blockchain technology in the Netherlands, within the broader context of the European Union and the digital single market. I argue that while reproducing widespread global models of business group and network formation, the relations created by these networks also reveal particularities of local business and governance cultures. Such particularities emerge from the pragmatics of collaboration and competitive market relationships, as well as legal heterogeneity and plans for legal harmonisation in digital innovation and governance in Europe. They also emerge from the challenges and transformations that current experimentation cultures for digital innovation bring to the interactions between market players, regulators, and government. These challenges and transformations materialise in increasingly informal connections and strategies for experimental legitimisation, which occur in parallel to more formal and traditional forms of regulatory and governmental interaction. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and in online terrains, including observation periods and 32 interviews with entrepreneurial project teams, as well as with individuals involved in financial incumbents’ innovation labs.

Eugene Rhee

Employment contracts recorded on blockchain have the strength to make it impossible to falsify or modify the agreements between employers and employees. The fact is that the work input through the application remains on the blockchain, and the manager shares it, which is expected to significantly improve the disadvantaged position of part-time workers. As a way to recognise and solve recent problems with employment contracts and wage problems, this paper proposes to store employment contracts in blocks using blockchain technology, enable accurate wage payments using smart contracts, and also store wage information in blocks. In addition, it can be proved by using the contents stored in the block when problems occur later.

Kelsie Nabben

This piece explores algorithmic governance as a strength and a vulnerability in the experience of building participatory communities known as "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations". The Cypherpunks were terrified of surveillance. They envisaged the combination of cryptography and computer technology fundamentally altering the nature of trust and reputation and built cryptographically secure blockchain-based infrastructure to counter this threat. Now, not just on chain transactions are being tracked but every move of participants in blockchain communities. Reputation in blockchain systems could become the new algorithmic authoritarianism if mis-used for social control. This piece analyzes the ways in which decentralization efforts can be a threat to themselves by exploring the question, 'Are "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" (DAOs) the next panopticon of algorithmic governance or a different panacea, and what does this mean for human autonomy in "autonomous" systems?'. By employing ethnographic methods and case study analysis, this piece provides an important qualitative contribution to the early dynamics of the aspirations and problems of decentralized, autonomous organizations.

Olivier Jutel

The rise of blockchain as a techno-solution in the development sector underscores the critical imbalances of data power under ‘computational capitalism’ ( Beller, 2018 ). This article will consider the political economy of techno-solutionist and blockchain discourses in the developing world, using as its object of study blockchain projects in Pacific Island nations. Backed by US State Department soft power initiatives such as Tech Camp, these projects inculcate tech-driven notions of economic and political development, or ICT4D, while opening up new terrains for data accumulation and platform control. Blockchain developers in search of proof of concept have found the development sector a fecund space for tech experimentation as they leverage a desire for tech-development and exploit regulatory weakness. The material implications of blockchain projects and discourse have been to create governance solutions which bypass the developing world state as a largely corrupting intermediary. In the Pacific, this has meant blockchain supply-chain management systems, proprietary financial innovation in humanitarian relief and an Asian Development Bank project to manage indigenous Fijian lands exclusively on the blockchain. In all these instances, discourses of solutionism, innovation and data empowerment have been deployed in aid of blockchain cartographies of control.

Paul J. Ennis, Donncha Kavanagh, Luis Araujo

This paper inquires into how token economies come to be, or how they are constituted. In examining this question, we draw on the market-making literature in economic sociology and the literature on social imaginaries. Our point of departure is that instead of a market emerging from a bureaucracy, we investigate a market emerging from a blockocracy, which is a form of organising based on public, permissionless, decentralised, coin-based blockchains. We argue that Ethereum is a blockocracy out of which a token economy comes to be and that the particular form of that token economy is best understood through the notion of an imaginary. We describe the Ethereum imaginary on six dimensions with an associated image for each: technical (the world computer), financial (functional money), political (cypherpunk mutualists), ethical (public goods commonists), organisational (decentralist engineers) and aesthetic (playful creators).

Inte Gloerich, Martijn de Waal, Gabriele Ferri, Nazlı Cila · 5 authors

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain have in recent years been presented as a new general-purpose technology that could underlie many aspects of social and economic life, including civics and urban governance. In an urban context, over the past few years, a number of actors have started to explore the application of distributed ledgers in amongst others smart city services as well as in blockchain for good and urban commons-projects. DLTs could become the administrative backbones of such projects, as the technology can be set-up as an administration, management and allocation tool for urban resources. With the addition of smart contracts, DLTs can further automate the processing of data and execution of decisions in urban resource management through algorithmic governance. This means that the technological set-up and design of such DLT based systems could have large implications for the ways urban resources are governed. Positive contributions are expected to be made toward (local) democracy, transparent governance, decentralization, and citizen empowerment. We argue that to fully scrutinize the implications for urban governance, a critical analysis of distributed ledger technologies is necessary. In this contribution, we explore the lens of “the city as a license” for such a critical analysis. Through this lens, the city is framed as a “rights-management-system,” operated through DLT technology. Building upon Lefebvrian a right to the city-discourses, such an approach allows to ask important questions about the implications of DLTs for the democratic governance of cities in an open, inclusive urban culture. Through a technological exploration combined with a speculative approach, and guided by our interest in the rights management and agency that blockchains have been claimed to provide to their users, we trace six important issues: quantification; blockchain as a normative apparatus; the complicated relationship between transparency and accountability; the centralizing forces that act on blockchains; the degrees to which algorithmic rules can embed democratic law-making and enforcing; and finally, the limits of blockchain's trustlessness.

Jack Parkin

Abstract The final chapter dives deeper into the territory of spin-off blockchains offered as technological modes of organisation for decentralising a host of socioeconomic practices. Recent discussions of platform capitalism are used to critique claims that blockchains are an incorruptible mode of democratic governance. Instead, blockchain capitalism is offered as a more accurate transaction model where profit necessitates certain points of centralisation through dominant distributed ledger technologies. A close examination of blockchain typologies reveals the co-option of these architectures by the very centralised banking firms and governments they were initially designed to bypass. As financial giants and central banks design their own distributed ledgers to increase the efficiency of business practices and monetary policy, innovation from the disruptive edges is once again absorbed into “the centre” by the corporate/state powers that be.

Friedemann Bieber, Jakob Moggia

Over the last decade, the term ‘gig economy’ has risen to prominence in public discourse, but has failed to attract sustained attention from political philosophers. The gig economy is a subsection of the overall economy that predominantly relies on ‘on-demand work’:11 Prassl 2018, p. 11. workers22 Throughout this article, we deliberately speak of ‘workers’ in a broad sense: not only those permanently employed count as workers of a firm, but all those who actually work for it. receive short-term and freelance contracts rather than permanent jobs. Firms treat them as independent sellers of services and only hire them to perform a particular ‘gig’, that is, to complete a specified task or project. Gig work thereby increases the granularity of work contracts: work is sold in ever smaller quantities and, in extremis, firms only buy the exact amount of labour they need, at the particular moment they need it. On a social level, the higher granularity of labour market transactions leads to an expansion of the reach of markets. Not only a one-off hiring decision, but the conditions of every single micro-labour contract become subject to the market forces of supply and demand. From an economic perspective, the ability to hire and dispense with workers at will is often seen as a measure for ‘removing friction’ in labour markets, and unlocking efficiency gains as ‘unproductive human capital’ is ‘set free’.33 On the flexibilization of labour markets in the 1990s, see Davies and Freedland 2007. Major expositions of this policy programme include European Commission 1994; OECD 1994. Whenever a firm can do without a worker’s additional unit of labour, she re-enters the labour market, which can then, in theory, allocate her work to the most productive use. The business practices of ride-service providers like Uber and Lyft in the US best embody this trend, paying drivers by the ride and only if there are rides. But, beyond such extreme and well-publicized cases, many firms are gradually moving away from the paradigmatic form of employment in the industrial age—a job with a fixed number of hours, worked in set shifts, in one place, and for a predetermined salary (call this ‘standard employment’)—towards work that is contracted at short notice on the basis of current demand (call this ‘gig work’).44 Some other forms of work, like fixed-term employment with a longer duration or employment at temporary work agencies, lie somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. They often display many of the normatively problematic features of gig work, but to a lesser extent. While various statistics employ different criteria for determining whether or not someone counts as a contract worker, the number of people affected by this shift has dramatically increased over the past decades and is projected to rise further. According to a recent study, those in alternative work arrangements—like on-call workers, contract workers, and freelancers—made up 15.8 per cent of the US workforce in 2015, up from 10.7 per cent a decade before.55 Katz and Krueger 2019, p. 382. At Google, contract workers are now reported to outnumber permanent staff.66 Wakabayashi 2019. The trend towards gig work poses a challenge to the paradigm of standard employment, which is modelled on the industrial worker and has dominated debates in political philosophy and labour economics.77 See also Vallas and Schor (2020), who focus on the specific context of the platform economy, where firms obtain a near-monopoly position in connecting buyers and sellers of labour. 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Jaya Klara Brekke

Research by political economists typically highlights policymakers, regulators, economists and consultants as the makers of economies. This paper foregrounds a different actor entirely, what I call the ‘hacker-engineer’ as an important protagonist in the making of decentralised digital network economies that are forged through the emerging field of ‘cryptoeconomics’ and blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies. Responding to critical literature stating that blockchain and ‘cryptoeconomics’ merely extend neoliberal processes of economisation, the paper recovers the neglected hacker culture of cypherpunk and histories of peer-to-peer decentralised networks in order to foreground concerns that depart from the continuation of economics and economies as usual. Hacker-engineers are dedicated to decentralisation as a ‘disruptive’ response to network control and surveillance, and share a pragmatist sensibility that seeks to make decentralised networks ‘work’ in order to provide informational security and privacy. While further broadening the range of agents that provide the focus for political economy research into the production of economies, the paper also draws attention to the technical decisions of hacker-engineers that attempt to reconfigure the material infrastructures of digital economies.

Doris Wydra, Лариса Санникова, Yulia S. Kharitonova

No abstract is available for this record.

Zeynep Gürgüç, Robert Learney

The transparency and visibility engendered in Distributed Ledger Technology allows, for the first time, disparate stakeholders to agree on common resource existence, ownership, and rules of exchange, while keeping the coordination costs comparatively low with respect to earlier methods. This infrastructure can finally facilitate a self-organising market mechanism, where people can decide upon the market rules themselves and potentially self-select into any particular marketplace dependent upon their personal beliefs and preferences. Reinventing the apparatus of the economy upon shared distributed infrastructure may finally allow the emergence of actual shared ownership, unlike the existing systems where short-term rentals or access-based consumption are often confused with sharing and social exchange.

Mattis Jacobs

Abstract The role that trust plays in blockchain-based systems is understood and portrayed in various manners. The blockchain technology is said to enable and establish trust as well as to redirect it, to substitute for it, and to make it obsolete. Furthermore, there is disagreement on whom or what users have to trust when using the blockchain technology: (only) code, math, algorithms, and machines, or still (also) human actors. This paper hypothesizes that the divergences of the depictions largely rest on implicitly adhering to different accounts of trust. Thus, the goal of this paper is to outline how the current lack of a shared understanding of the term “trust” leads to diverging interpretations of the blockchain technology’s core features. Furthermore, it shows how this lack of common understanding obstructs scholars from referring to one another meaningfully in the discourse on blockchain technology. To do so, this paper outlines the most prominent depictions of the setup of relevant trust relationships within blockchain-based systems and traces their roots to different underlying assumptions on the nature of trust.

Kean Birch

The core contradiction in neoliberalism (studies) is that markets are organised and require significant bureaucratic coordination and governance. In light of the increasingly technoscientific nature of contemporary capitalism, it is important to examine exactly how markets are organised and their governance configured by digital processes. In this article, I argue that the entanglement of digital technoscience and capitalism has led to an 'automated neoliberalism' in which markets are configured by digital platforms, personal lives are transformed through the accumulation of personal data, and social relations are automated through algorithms, distributed electronic ledgers, and rating systems. Two issues arise as a result of these changes: first, are markets being automated away, in that market exchange no longer underpins social organisation? And second, does individual and social reflexivity problematise techno-economic automation, in that new platforms, data assets, ranking algorithms, etc. are all dependent on individuals telling the 'truth'? My aim in this article is to answer these questions and to consider the political implications of automated neoliberalism and our reflexive enrolment in it.

Robbie Morrison, Natasha C. H. L. Mazey, Stephen C. Wingreen

This paper reviews the recent case of The DAO “hack” in June 2016 and analyzes The DAO's response in its time of crisis, and its implications for corporate and IT governance. There was no human-led governance in The DAO. Instead, The DAO placed its trust in the smart contract they had built together on the blockchain, which became its governance mechanism. The events that follow allow us to see hitherto unobservable organizational behaviors that are unique to trustless organizations, and hence The DAO gives us a glimpse at a new species of corporate governance. This paper explores the implications of these ideas: we propose the emergence of a spectrum of organizations based on the alienation of trust, we consider the economic impact and legality of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), smart contracts, work and job design, and what happens when corporate governance is managed solely by IT governance.

Stefan Höhne, Victor Tiberius

Purpose The purpose of this study is to formulate the most probable future scenario for the use of blockchain technology within the next 5–10 years in the electricity sector based on today’s experts’ views. Design/methodology/approach An international, two-stage Delphi study with 20 projections is used. Findings According to the experts, blockchain applications will be primarily based on permissioned or consortium blockchains. Blockchain-based applications will integrate Internet of Things devices in the power grid, manage the e-mobility infrastructure, automate billing and direct payment and issue certificates regarding the origin of electricity. Blockchain solutions are expected to play an important big role in fostering peer-to-peer trading in microgrids, further democratizing and decentralizing the energy sector. New regulatory frameworks become necessary. Research limitations/implications The Delphi study’s scope is rather broad than narrow and detailed. Further studies should focus on partial scenarios. Practical implications Electricity market participants should build blockchain-based competences and collaborate in current pilot projects. Social implications Blockchain technology will further decentralize the energy sector and probably reduce transaction costs. Originality/value Despite the assumed importance of blockchain technology, no coherent foresight study on its use and implications exists yet. This study closes this research gap.

Alexandre Pólvora, Susana Nascimento, Joana S. Lourenço, Fabiana Scapolo

No abstract is available for this record.

Candy So Suk Yi Candice, Eric Yung, Samuel Lee, Christopher Fong · 5 authors

A Deloitte (2016) survey report states that blockchain technology can have an impact on the telecommunications industry in preventing fraud, identifying as-a-service and data management, 5G enabling, and IoT connectivity. For example, fraud costs more than USD 38 billion a year. In a panel of industry experts, Carrier Industry is looking for ways to cut costs, boost revenues, and market segments through blockchain technology (Total Telecom, 2018). Blockchain is treated as a breakthrough technology for managing the operation of telecommunications such as identity management, smart contracts, payments and transactions, reporting and analysis, network management, billing / OSS, etc. A statistical analysis shows that blockchain in telecommunications and postal services in 2017 amounted to more than USD 39 million and is expected to achieve an estimate of more than USD 641 million by 2023-end, suggesting powerful market growth over the next few years (Market Research Future Report, 2018). Since carriers apply telecom standards to run its business and operations, and thus blockchain technology, a high secure of distributed ledger and trust processes to solve the high traffics. According to a survey by IBM Institute for Business Value (2018), it states that 36 percent of Communication Service Providers (CSP) are already considering or actively engaged with blockchain, 41 percent of CSP may support their strategy by assuring data management, and 46 percent of CSP are already exploring or engaging with blockchain and already invested in it to develop new business models. Carriers in telecommunications Industry Hong Kong are mainly private-owned, and thus they must follow the Telecommunication Ordinance (Cap. 106) governed by Office of the Communications Authority (OFCA) of HKSAR. Telecommunications services such as fixed-line, internet broadband and mobile service support business and residential customers. Hong Kong Telecom (HKT), Hutchison Telecommunications Hong Kong Holdings Ltd (HTHK) and Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited (HKBN) are selected by this study as a number of operators (fixed-line and broadband, mobile, or a mix of both fixed-line, broadband and mobile). HKT (Stock Code: SEHK: 6823), is the major operator to meet the needs of public, local and international businesses with a wide range of services such as local telephony, local data and broadband, international communications, mobile service and enterprise solutions. HKT employs approximately 17,400 staff, the headquarters are located in Hong Kong, and telecommunications network covers more than 3,000 cities and 140 countries (HKT, 2019) Hutchison Telecommunications Holdings Hong Kong Limited (Stock Code: SEHK215), conglomerate of CK Hutchison Holdings, is the leading operator provides mobile service in Hong Kong and Macau. HTHK employs 1,180 staff and the headquarters are located in Hong Kong (HTHK, 2019). Hong Kong Broadband Network, Stock Code: SEHK: 1310), is the foremost operator provides broadband service to commerce and residential customers. HKBN is an aggressive operator with merger and acquisition with New World Telecommunications in February 2016 and WTT Holding Ltd in February 2019. HKBN employs approximately 3,000 staff, and the headquarters are located in Hong Kong (HKBN, 2019). An example of two dominating carrier representatives, Marc Halbfinger, Chief Executive Officer of PCCW Global (subsidiary of HKT) and the Chairman of the GLF, and Andrew Kwok, CEO of Hutchison Global Telecommunications (ex-mega conglomerate of CK Hutchison Holdings sold to Asia Cube Global in Jul 2017) partnering with Colt Technologies Service to conduct trial blockchain technology to re-shape business practices (Colt Technology News, 2018). Other example of blockchain, HKT and PCCW obtained a virtual banking license in early 2019 to expand finance business (South China Morning Post, 2019). Given examples of operators actively study on blockchain technology to its core business and the role of blockchain plays a tremendous role in telecommunications landscape. The research paper is focussed on blockchain/blockchain technology impact to Human Resources hiring and off-boarding practices in telecommunications sector in Hong Kong.

Syed Omer Husain, Alex Franklin, D. Roep

Abstract There is a wealth of information, hype around, and research into blockchain’s ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’ potential concerning every industry. However, there is an absence of scholarly attention given to identifying and analyzing the political premises and consequences of blockchain projects. Through digital ethnography and participatory action research, this article shows how blockchain experiments personify ‘prefigurative politics’ by design: they embody the politics and power structures which they want to enable in society. By showing how these prefigurative embodiments are informed and determined by the underlying political imaginaries, the article proposes a basic typology of blockchain projects. Furthermore, it outlines a frame to question, cluster, and analyze the expressions of political imaginaries intrinsic to the design and operationalization of blockchain projects on three analytic levels: users, intermediaries, and institutions.