Blockchain Papers

Joshua Ellul, Gordon J. Pace

No abstract is available for this record.

Hao Wu, Xiaoli Qin, Yuqing Kou

No abstract is available for this record.

Jan Jürjens, Simon Scheider, Furkan Yıldırım, Michael Henke

Abstract A significant challenge in bootstrapping a jointly used infrastructure such as Data Spaces is to incentivize the participants to invest in setting up the infrastructure. In this chapter, we investigate this challenge and possible solutions, focusing on an approach called “Tokenomics.” The incentivization scheme should be utilized by governance frameworks, in which the participants of Data Spaces remain capable of action and independent through automated, effective, and fair decision-making processes. Also, potential participants should be motivated to participate in the establishment and further development of the system, while on the other hand, undesirable behavior should be penalized. In combination with distributed ledger technology (DLT) and machine-readable, legally compliant smart contracts, participant behavior can be affected in such a way that both data quality and quantity are improved for the whole Data Space. To derive possible design options for Tokenomics approaches, we examine different token frameworks and their impact on participants. The investigation of the frameworks is carried out taking into account five significant domains: technical, behavior, inherent value, coordination, and pseudo-archetypes. Furthermore, we investigate which token designs provide smaller or larger incentives in order to join or maintain a DLT-based ecosystem.

Amy J. Schmitz

No abstract is available for this record.

May Alhajri, Carsten Rudolph, Ahmad Salehi Shahraki

Wearable fitness devices are widely used to track an individual’s health and physical activities to improve the quality of health services. These devices sense a considerable amount of sensitive data processed by a centralized third party. While many researchers have thoroughly evaluated privacy issues surrounding wearable fitness trackers, no study has addressed privacy issues in trackers by giving control of the data to the user. Blockchain is an emerging technology with outstanding advantages in resolving consent management privacy concerns. As there are no fully transparent, legally compliant solutions for sharing personal fitness data, this study introduces an architecture for a human-centric, legally compliant, decentralized and dynamic consent system based on blockchain and smart contracts. Algorithms and sequence diagrams of the proposed system’s activities show consent-related data flow among various agents, which are used later to prove the system’s trustworthiness by formalizing the security requirements. The security properties of the proposed system were evaluated using the formal security modeling framework SeMF, which demonstrates the feasibility of the solution at an abstract level based on formal language theory. As a result, we have shown that blockchain technology is suitable for mitigating the privacy issues of fitness providers by recording individuals’ consent using blockchain and smart contracts.

Aditya Ajgaonkar, Anuj Raghani, Bhavya K. Sheth, Dyuwan Shukla · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

CASABURO, Donatella

No abstract is available for this record.

Areej Alshorman, Khair Eddin Sabri, Mohammad A. M. Abushariah

No abstract is available for this record.

Seth Oranburg

No abstract is available for this record.

Ke Zhou, Jieren Cheng, Le Liu, Victor S. Sheng

No abstract is available for this record.

Cvetkovski, Oliver, Field, Carlo, Trinchi, Davide, Marti, Christof · 5 authors

Domain-specific Microservice Reference Architectures (MSRA) have become relevant study objects in software technology. They facilitate the technical evaluation of service designs, compositions patterns and deployment configurations in realistic operational practice. Current knowledge about MSRA is predominantly confined to business domains with modest numbers of users per application. Due to the ongoing massive digital transformation of society, people-related online services in e-government, e-health and similar domains must be designed to be highly scalable at entire nation level at affordable infrastructure cost. With ZVAX, we present such a service in the e-health domain. Specifically, the ZVAX implementation adheres to an MSRA for pandemic-related processes such as vaccination registration and passenger locator form submission, with emphasis on selectable levels of privacy. We argue that ZVAX is valuable as study object for the training of software engineers and for the debate on arbitrary government-to-people services at scale.

Kelsie Nabben

The term ‘Web3’ refers to the practices of participating in digital infrastructures through the ability to read, write and coordinate digital assets. Web3 is hailed as an alternative to the failings of big tech, offering a participatory mode of digital self-organizing and shared ownership of digital infrastructure through software-encoded governance rules and participatory practices. Yet, very few analytical frameworks have been presented in academic literature by which to approach Web3. This piece draws on the theoretical lens of infrastructure studies to offer an analytical framework to approach the emergent field of Web3 as an exploration in ‘how to infrastructure’ through prefigurative self-infrastructuring. Drawing on qualitative examples from digital ethnographic methods, I demonstrate how the origins of Web3 reveal the intentions of its creators as a political tool of prefiguration, yet its practices reveal the inherent tension of expressing these ideals in coherent technical and institutional infrastructure. Thus, I argue that one of the fundamental challenges Web3 is negotiating through technical and governance experiments is ‘how to self-infrastructure?’.

Canghai Wu, Jie Xiong, Huanliang Xiong, Yingding Zhao · 5 authors

A smart contract, in form, is represented as a piece of computer program code involving related commercial transactions and algorithms. Essentially, this is the computerization of the pre-agreed contract between the participants. This special contract agreement is automatically verified and executed once preset conditions are triggered. Smart contracts are not only used in the field of financial transactions, but also include many aspects of social life. Although smart contract technology has unique advantages, it is still in the early stages of development, and many problems remain to be solved. First, this article briefly summarizes the development process of blockchain, and then focuses on the research progress of blockchain 2.0-smart contracts. Second, the related concepts of smart contracts are presented, and the working mechanism of smart contracts and the difficulties faced by smart contracts are elaborated. Finally, in response to these problems and dilemmas, the corresponding solutions and ideas are summarized, and the future challenges and development trends of smart contracts are analyzed and judged.

Vittorio Capocasale, Guido Perboli

In the evolving context of distributed ledger technologies, the standardization of smart contracts is necessary. Smart contracts are tamper-proof computer programs. Due to their security and flexibility, it is possible to exploit smart contracts in a wide variety of use cases. In particular, it could be possible to automate legally recognized contracts by leveraging smart contracts. To this extent, some standards regarding the proper management of smart contracts are surging. However, there are still many technological misconceptions regarding smart contracts. This study describes smart contracts from multiple perspectives and identifies and clarifies some of the most common misconceptions regarding smart contracts. This study also provides some guidelines and insights on the proper management of smart contracts. This study can be a valuable resource for future standards on smart contracts.

Salome Tezelashvili

The article discusses about the smart contract, its concept and legal nature, as well as the place of smart contracts in the Technology Law, which means a discussion on the important issues covered by this topic. At the same time, smart contracts are com- pared to the usual standard contract, where their pros and cons are discussed. The importance and necessity of both types of contracts in relation to the current reality will also be discussed. At the same time, the article discusses about the revolutions – from where they begin and how long the world has passed before today's reality, why blockchain is considered as the fourth-generation revolution and how important it is to develop and implement it. The article also discusses about the types of contracts, which means how a standard contract can be divided, in the other words, we talk about consensual and real contracts. The definitions of each of them and their need related to the smart contracts are analyzed in the article. Therefore, we use the relevant chapters and articles of civil law to be able to explain what is meant and to what extent it is possible to follow the same norms in the case of the smart contract.

Nora Schreier, Robin Renwick, Tina Ehrke-Rabel

In order to comply with specific regulations (eIDAS, Payment Services Directive, Anti-Money Laundering Directive) and reduce risk profiles, financial service providers increasingly collect large amounts of information from their customers. The increasing opportunities and technical means for data collection afforded from digitalisation raise legal concerns related to proportionality, necessity, and data minimization. However, the concerns go beyond just GDPR compliance and legislative balance, as distinct architectures and technological deployments potentially impact rights, freedoms, and ethics. This paper will address the issue by examining aspects of digital identity, especially those that have proposed the use of a permissioned distributed ledger or blockchain as architecture for know your customer and onboarding evidential frameworks, using specific hashing schemes that derive unique identifiers from the combination of specific personal data points. Evidence is appended to a data structure, for the purpose of auditing and/or record keeping, potentially ensuring an immutable record of events is maintained. After elaborating on the notion of identity in the digital sphere and the applicability of the GDPR to such a data structure, the discussion will be developed to critically assess the current trend towards using the financial institutions’ customers’ mobile devices as interfaces to the distributed data structure and the legal and sociological implications of this technological development. The potential impact of the analysis goes beyond digital identity within the finance sector, positioning the discussion towards approaches for e-governance and the regulation of digital identity in a way that human dignity is preserved and the risks of creating a ubiquitous “digital avatar” are adequately addressed by the law.

S. Kate Devitt, Jason Scholz, Timo Schless, L Lewis

Abstract Artificial intelligences (AI) will increasingly participate digitally and physically in conflicts yet there is a lack of trusted communications with humans for humanitarian purposes. For example, in disasters and conflicts messaging and social media are used to share information, however, international humanitarian relief organisations treat this information as unverifiable and untrustworthy. Furthermore, current AI implementations can be brittle, with a narrow scope of application and wide scope of ethical risks. Meanwhile, human error can cause significant civilian harms even by combatants committed to compliance with international humanitarian law. AI offers an opportunity to help reduce the tragedy of war and better deliver humanitarian aid to those who need it. However, to be successful, these systems must be trusted by humans and their information systems, overcoming flawed information flows in conflict and disaster zones that continue to be marked by intermittent communications, poor situation awareness, mistrust and human errors. In this paper, we consider the integration of a communications protocol (the ‘Whiteflag protocol’), distributed ledger ‘blockchain’ technology, and information fusion with artificial intelligence (AI), to improve conflict communications called “Protected Assurance Understanding Situation & Entities” (PAUSE). Such a trusted human-AI communication network could provide accountable information exchange regarding protected entities, critical infrastructure, humanitarian signals and status updates for humans and machines in conflicts. Trust-based information fusion provides resource-efficient use of diverse data sources to increase the reliability of reports. AI can catch human mistakes and complement human decision making, while human judgment can direct and override AI recommendations. We examine several realistic potential case studies for the integration of these technologies into a trusted human-AI network for humanitarian benefit including mapping a conflict zone with civilians and combatants in real time, preparation to avoid incidents and using the network to manage misinformation. We finish with a real-world example of a PAUSE-like network, the Human Security Information System (HSIS), being developed by USAID, that uses blockchain technology to provide a secure means to better understand the civilian environment.

Zon‐Yin Shae, Jeffrey J. P. Tsai

This paper outlines a visionary approach for building a distributed federated medical data lake and ecosystem with commercial incentive across hospitals and personal health data generated from wearable medical devices at home. This article creates the ownership enforcement guideline as the basis for building the blockchain based ecosystem platform by reviewing various aspects of studies of data ownership rights. This blockchain based platform can enforce the data ownership, patient privacy, and provide a controlled and secure access to the medical data. It can also perform owner centric medical data exchange and effectively aggregate various related medical data sets from various distributed data sets from various hospitals. Moreover, this blockchain platform unlocks the academic and business value of the medical data by modeling medical data as Non-Fungible Token (NFT) which can provide incentives for all data driven value chain entities to make a medical data ecosystem possible.

Yan Zhu, Qian Guo, Hongjian Yin, Kaitai Liang · 5 authors

We review the background, classification, specifications, and related aspects of using smart contracts in blockchain services and introduce a framework for generating a general software architecture in the context of contract-oriented programming.

Priyanka, Bright Keswani, Rashid Hussain

As a computer programmer, a smart contract encapsulates the contractual features of the parties’ transactions through code. Some blockchain technology platforms, such as Hyperledger Fabric, IBM Blockchain and Ethereum, currently allow smart contracts. Smart contracts on these platforms are kept on the blockchain and are not under the control of any party involved. They can’t be tampered with after they’ve been digitally signed and placed on the blockchain. The use of smart contracts in blockchains is critical. It is the authors’ primary goal with this research to provide an alternative to standard contracts by allowing users to modify data stored in the chain. Methodology for designing smart contracts is presented in this article, along with an example of how it has used modifications to the data stored in the chain. In this article, we present a methodology for the design of smart contracts and we also illustrate its application with a case study.

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.

Marina Luiza Lardizabal Vieira, Patrícia Vilain

Smart contracts have gained popularity with the emergence of blockchain technology, although the concept behind them has been studied since the 1990s. The automation of contracts signed in real life is an interdisciplinary subject and draws attention not only in the scope of technology but also in areas like business area and legal area. With the aim of providing clear understanding, accuracy and security of information in the process of creating a smart contract, many tools have been developed, either to avoid vulnerabilities or to allow anyone to contribute in writing a contract. In view of this scenario and seeking to further facilitate the general understanding of a smart contract, this paper aims to study the representation of smart contracts as state diagrams. It summarizes, through a systematic mapping, the many ways to visually represent smart contracts as state diagrams, emphasizing their states and transitions. An experiment was also carried out in order to show how state diagrams can facilitate the understanding of a contract. The results show that state diagrams do help understanding smart contracts.

Jane Thomason

The rapidly growing field of Blockchain and Decentralised Finance (DeFi) has the potential to transform many aspects of the financial world. It offers an abundance of opportunities to reduce costs, increase transparency and reduce the need for middlemen in financial services. While this promise of automation and decentralization is attractive, it is important to consider the potential for inadvertent or deliberate automation of unethical conduct at scale. Ethical questions involve the consideration of conflicting moral choices and dilemmas. Blockchain creates ethical dilemmas for developers, investors, consumers, and regulators at the technology, application, and societal levels. This chapter provides a perspective on the emerging field of DeFi and Blockchain in financial services, a reflection on the ethical questions that arise, how they are being addressed, the key issues, and further research needed in this growing field of Blockchain ethics. The objective of the chapter is for students, developers, CEO's and governments to appreciate the moral and ethical issues being uncovered in the course of the development and deployment of Blockchain technology. Blockchain, as with all technology, is a tool and is as beneficial and useful as the care that is taken to make it. There remains a need to ensure that Blockchains are built and deployed with due concern for ethics.

Andrew M. Bailey, Bradley Rettler, Craig Warmke

Abstract In this article, we identify three key design dimensions along which cryptocurrencies differ – privacy, censorship‐resistance, and consensus procedure. Each raises important normative issues. Our discussion uncovers new ways to approach the question of whether Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies should be used as money, and new avenues for developing a positive answer to that question. A guiding theme is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results of disciplines like computer science and economics.