Khreshna Syuhada, Djoko Suprijanto, Arief Rachman Hakim
This paper aims to compare the safe-haven roles of gold and Bitcoin for energy commodities, including oils and petroleum, during COVID-19. Specifically, we examine the presence of reduction in downside risk after mixing gold/Bitcoin with such energy commodities. To do this, we account for dependence among energy commodities and gold/Bitcoin returns by applying a (vine) copula. The findings show that gold substantially reduces the downside risk of a portfolio containing any allocation to gold and energy commodities, indicating its safe-haven ability. In contrast, Bitcoin's safe-haven functionality is inconsistent since the downside risk reduction is achieved for Bitcoin's small allocation only.
The high power consumption of Bitcoin transactions has raised environmental and sustainable concerns of green investors and regulatory bodies. We utilize the time-varying optimal copula (TVOC) approach to showcase the dependence structure between bitcoin and green financial assets. We find multiple tail-dependence regimes characterize the extreme dependence between bitcoin and green financial assets, and the dependence structure is mainly asymmetric and time-varying. Finally, the hedging effectiveness of green financial assets for bitcoin revealed that all green assets, especially clean energy, are effective hedges for bitcoin.
At present, the world economy is in recession, especially under the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic, China's economy has also been greatly impacted. In this context, the disposable personal income of residents has also declined to varying degrees. More and more people choose economical life. If they can buy a used car in good condition at a good price, they are less likely to buy a brand new one. Under such a consumption concept, China's demand for second-hand cars is increasing. However, although China's second-hand car industry has developed for more than 30 years and the market scale has gradually expanded, there are still many problems behind the prosperity of the second-hand car market. These problems have existed for a long time, leading to a lot of disputes, unhappiness, disappointment, and even threats to the lives of consumers. These long-term problems also affect the virtuous circle of the second-hand car market, and hinder the healthy development of China's economy to a certain extent. In the past, research work mainly focused on the role of new policies, relevant laws and vehicle management and traffic management functions, this paper introduces the blockchain technology, which has the advantages of non tampering, transparency and traceability. This paper attempts to use blockchain technology as an auxiliary means to solve the long-standing problems in the used car market. This paper proposes a framework of used car trading based on blockchain in cloud service environment, and explains the working principle of the framework. Finally, the future research work is prospected.
The current energy transition from a fossil-fuel-based economy to a zero-carbon has significantly accelerated in recent years, as the largest emitters have committed to achieving carbon-neutral goals in the next 20-30 years. The energy industry transition is characterized by modernization through digital technologies, increased renewable energy generation, and environmental sustainability. Blockchain technology can play a significant role in providing secure digital distributed platforms facilitating digitization, decarbonization, and decentralization of the energy systems. Several promising blockchain applications in the energy sector are under research and development, including peer-to-peer energy trading; carbon monitoring, management, and trading; and IoT-enabled electric grid management. However, several challenges are slowing down the commercialization of these applications, including outdated legislation and regulations, slow pace of adaptation from the traditional energy industry, and risks associated with the new, untested technology.
Fei Teng, Qi Zhang, Ge Wang, Jiangfeng Liu · 5 authors
Summary The disruptive nature of blockchain technology has drawn considerable interest from different types of stakeholders. It is adopted in numerous sectors with the ability to openly and securely verify, track, and exchange data. The energy blockchain, a term used when blockchain technology is applied in the energy sector, is considered as having the potential to develop a decentralized, digitized, and decarbonized energy management system. The article presents an overview of the development progress from three perspectives, including academic research, the deployment of companies and pilot projects, and government support policies. Then a different taxonomy is developed to demonstrate and highlighted the different applications. Finally, the future trends and challenges hindering the effective implementation of energy blockchain are discussed. The results show that energy blockchain is an effective innovation technology to accelerate the transformation of global energy structure. Multinational cooperation and government‐leading are the basis of large‐scale deployment of energy blockchain. The improvement of regulatory mechanisms and standards is the key to the commercial application of energy blockchain. This study is a comprehensive analysis of energy blockchain applications, which is expected to support decision making for its future development.
With 49% of the world’s gross domestic product under net zero goals, the global community is changing in how it treats emissions and carbon releases, with shareholders, stakeholders and investors demanding transparency on current performance and strategies to reduce or offset emissions. High frequency, reliable data empowers an organisation to strategically optimise and track emissions to reach committed goals from the asset level to the board room and across direct, indirect and supply chain sources (Scope 1, 2 and 3). A carbon footprinting solution, which provides a holistic view of total greenhouse gas emissions, requires a combination of carbon accounting, control system integration, emissions monitoring and greenhouse gas reporting software, to deliver an automated, reliable and verifiable real-time emissions/carbon reporting solution. This solution is also critical in providing managed data which can be utilised in the carbon economy and when combined with a blockchain platform, results in a holistic data transfer chain for emissions reporting which is secure, transparent and trusted throughout industry and government. The role of comprehensive, connected environmental monitoring will be explored in the role of effective emissions offset and carbon trading economies with blockchain supported technologies being presented as an enabling aspect of the overall solution. Smart contracts embedded within a blockchain solution could automate trading mechanisms however require quality emissions monitoring data as a foundation for successful implementation. The role of quality emissions monitoring and governance in this process will be presented together with implications for industry and government for the carbon economy.
Smart cities must adopt innovative technologies and strategies to boost existing sustainability solutions in order to fight climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We provide an overview of the existing work on the application of blockchain technologies in conjunction with other digital technologies such as IoT for incentivizing individuals and organizations to engage in more sustainable behaviors. We focus on three main areas in which these digital technologies can encourage actions aimed at reducing environmental impact: low-carbon transportation, energy efficiency, and waste diversion. Some notable examples are The Plastic Bank, ECO-Coin and SolarCoin. By analyzing case studies in which monetary and nonmonetary incentives have successfully demonstrated behavior change, we seek to understand the key elements for implementing blockchain-based solutions. We also identify key directions for future research in this area.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on the spillovers across economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and cryptocurrency uncertainty indices. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses cross-country economic policy uncertainty indices and the novel data measuring the cryptocurrency price uncertainties over the period 2013–2021 to construct a sample of 946 observations and applies the time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) model to do an empirical study. Findings The findings suggest that there are cross-country spillovers of economic policy uncertainty. In addition, the total uncertainty spillover between economic policies and cryptocurrency peaked in 2015 before gradually decreasing in the following periods. Concomitantly, the cryptocurrency uncertainty has acted as the “receiver.” More importantly, the authors found the predictive power of economic policy uncertainty to predict the cryptocurrency uncertainty index. This paper’s results hold robust when using alternative measurement of cryptocurrency policy uncertainty. Originality/value This study is the first research that deeply investigates the association between two uncertainty indicators, namely economic policy uncertainty and the cryptocurrency uncertainty index. We provide fresh evidence about the dynamic connectedness between country-level economic policy uncertainty and the cryptocurrency index. Our work contributes a new channel driving the variants of uncertainties in the cryptocurrency market.
Christopher S. Henry, Kim P. Huynh, Gradon Nicholls, Mitchell Nicholson
The Bank of Canada continues to use the Bitcoin Omnibus Survey (BTCOS) to monitor trends in Canadians’ awareness, ownership and use of Bitcoin. The most recent iteration was conducted in late 2018, following an 85 percent decline in the price of Bitcoin throughout the year.
Sanaz Chamanara, S. Arman Ghaffarizadeh, Kaveh Madani
The cryptocurrency sector is increasingly integrated into the global financial system. The world’s transition to a digital economy, facilitated by major technological breakthroughs, has several benefits. But as the demand for exchanging and investing in digital currencies is growing , the world must pay careful attention to the hidden and overlooked environmental impacts of this growth. The dramatic increase in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) over the last year and the resulting global race for BTC mining is turning the cryptocurrency market turning into one of the world’s leading polluting sectors. Yet, our knowledge about the environmental footprints of mining BTC is very limited. To address this hap, this study provides the first estimates of the carbon, water and land footprints of BTC mining around the world.
This study uses hourly data to analyse the return and volatility transmission of oil-gold and oil-Bitcoin pairs during the pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 periods. The results show that the return transmissions vary across the two periods for both pairs. There is a unidirectional volatility spill-over from gold to oil in the pre-COVID-19 period, and from oil to gold during the COVID-19 period. There is a significant volatility spill-over from Bitcoin to oil during the pre-COVID-19 period, whereas no evidence of volatility spill-over between oil and Bitcoin is shown during the COVID-19 period. Based on optimal weights, investors should increase their investments in, (a) gold for a portfolio of oil-gold, and (b) Bitcoin for a portfolio of oil-Bitcoin during the COVID-19 period. All hedge ratios are higher during the COVID-19 period, implying a higher hedging cost compared to the pre-COVID-19 period. The results of hedging effectiveness reveal that the risk-adjusted returns can be improved by constructing a portfolio of oil-gold and oil-Bitcoin during both sample periods. Further results reveal that gold is a strong safe haven and a hedge for the oil market, while Bitcoin serves as a diversifier for the oil market during the COVID-19 period.
Ivo V. Stoepker, Rowel Gündlach, Stella Kapodistria
Bitcoin payments require a random amount of time to get confirmed (i.e. to be grouped by the miners into a block and to be added to the Bitcoin blockchain). In [8, 11], the authors propose the modelling of the Bitcoin confirmation time by the so-called time to ruin of the Cramer-Lundberg (CL) model. This provides off-the-shelf results directly aimed at predicting the confirmation time. However, analyses suggest that the data may not fully conform with the CL model assumptions. In this manuscript, we show by means of a robustness analysis that the time to ruin of a CL model is near insensitive to small changes in the model assumptions and illustrate that the proposed heuristic model can be used to accurately predict the confirmation times even when the data deviate (to a small degree) from the model assumptions.
Cryptocurrency symbolizes of a new development in the financial sector since it is the world's first entirely decentralized digital payment system. The cryptocurrency known as virtual money is one of the most important innovations brought on by digitalization. The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between the cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Monero, and Stellar) with macroeconomics variables known as stock price index (Dow Jones dan Nikkei), oil price (Brent Oil dan WTI), and exchange rates (Australian Dollar, Euro, and Pound Sterling). The data was obtained from investing.com on monthly basis for the period between January 2016 untuil December 2020. The analysis were conducted based on unit root test, co-integration and vector error correction model (VECM) in order to identify the relationship between the three selected cryptocurrencis with macroeconomic variables. The findings of this paper showed that there is cointegration between the variables. The Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) indicates that the Bitcoin model and Stellar model did not have a long-run relationship. While for the second model, Monero found to have a long-run relationship with the variables. This research contributes to the growing study on cryptocurrency while extend and complement the literature by sourcing the latest research paper on this related field.
Marco Galici, Mario Mureddu, Emilio Ghiani, Gianni Celli · 7 authors
This paper suggests an application of blockchain as an energy open data ledger, designed to save and track data regarding the energy footprint of public buildings and public energy communities. The developed platform permits writing energy production and consumption of public buildings using blockchain-enabled smart meters. Once authenticated on the blockchain, this data can be made available to the public domain for techno-economic analyses for either research studies and internal or third parties audits, increasing, in this way, the perceived transparency of the public institutions. A further feature of the platform, starting on the previously disclosed raw data, allows calculating, validating, and sharing sustainability indicators of public buildings and facilities, allowing the tracking of their improvements in sustainability goals. The paper also provides the preliminary results of a field-test experimentation of the proposed platform on a group of public buildings, highlighting the possible benefits of its widespread exploitation.
Khaled Mokni, Elie Bouri, Ahdi Noomen Ajmi, Xuan Vinh Vo
This paper examines the hedge and safe-haven abilities of Bitcoin against U.S. aggregate and categorical economic policy uncertainty (EPU) via the application of quantile regression model augmented with a dummy and some control variables. Using monthly data from September 2011 to December 2019, empirical results indicate that Bitcoin does not act as a strong hedge against the aggregate U.S. EPU. However, it acts as a strong safe-haven for this aggregate measure of uncertainty when the Bitcoin market is bearish. Looking deeper into the disaggregated level of the U.S. EPU data, the analyses involving categorical EPU data indicate the ability of Bitcoin to act as a strong hedge and safe-haven against specific uncertainties related to fiscal policy, taxes, national security, and trade policy.
Bitcoin, 2009 yılında ortaya çıkmasıyla devrim niteliğinde bir altyapı sunan kripto para türüdür. Bitcoinin temel teknolojisi olan blokzincir, güvenilir bir üçüncü tarafa ihtiyaç duymayan, merkezi olmayan bir sistem olarak tasarlanmış; geniş uygulama potansiyeli ile kamu ve iş dünyasında hızla kabul görmüştür. Bu çalışmada, Ocak 2012 – Mart 2020 tarihleri arasında cumhuriyet altını, altın ons fiyatı, ham petrol fiyatı, amerikan doları ve euro para birimleri ile bitcoin arasındaki korelasyon ilişkisi incelenmiştir. Araştırma kapsamında Spearman korelasyon analizinden faydalanılmıştır. Analizlerin sonucuna göre, piyasalara girdiği ilk dönem olan 2012’de bitcoinin diğer göstergelerle arasında istatistiksel olarak anlamlı bir ilişkisi saptanmamıştır (p>0.05). Bitcoinin dolar karşılığının bir önceki yıla göre üç katından fazla arttığı 2017 yılı ise bitcoinin zirve yılı olup; euro ile arasında pozitif yönlü kuvvetli bir ilişki vardır (r=0.873; p