Emilija Stojmenova Duh, Andrej Duh, Uroš Droftina, Tim Kos · 7 authors
Scholarly communication is today immersed in publish-or-perish culture that propels non-cooperative behavior in the sense of strategic games played by researchers. Here we introduce and describe a blockchain based platform for decentralized scholarly communication. The design of the platform rests on community driven publishing reviewing processes and implements cryptoeconomic incentives that promote cooperative user behavior. The key to achieve cooperation in blockchain based scholarly communication is to transform today’s static research paper into a modifiable research paper under continuous peer review process. We introduce and discuss the implementation of a modifiable research paper as a smart contract on the blockchain.
Blockchain is a disruptive new opportunity for businesses to unlock value through trusted and “smart” peer-to-peer transactions, wherein smart means business people can custom design processes for verification and transfer of assets. This paper presents a 7-scenario design for teaching blockchain technology to non-technical students. The design identifies key learning objectives as well as administrative and infrastructure component solutions that can be used by others seeking to teach such a course.
The dominant recent legal discourse concerning Bitcoin and later virtual currencies has been focused on regulatory issues such as anti-money laundering and financial and securities regulation. By contrast, scant attention has been given to the intersection between the uses of Bitcoin and commercial law even as its popularity has grown as both an asset class and as a means of payment for goods and services. In determining the commercial law consequences of transactions involving Bitcoin, the likely cross-border nature of Bitcoin-related transactions will give rise to choice of law issues which may have a determinative effect on a given dispute. Commercial disputes involving virtual currencies have already made their way into common law courts. This paper examines one of the most significant choice of law problems that arises – the law applicable to determine disputes concerning property in Bitcoins (and determining the situs of Bitcoins) through the lens of English conflict of laws.
Crowdsourcing is a distributed business service model brought by Internet. However, users always pursue the maximum benefits with the least effort, which may lead to the low quality of solutions submitted by receivers. In addition, each user is most concerned about their own benefits, and sometimes they do not objectively evaluate the solutions. Based on blockchain technology, this paper implements crowdsourcing process through smart contract, and proposes credit and arbitration mechanisms suitable for general online industrial services. To be specific, the credit mechanism defines the historical reputation of each user through credit score, which is beneficial for the sender to find a satisfactory receiver, and provides criteria for the selection of members of the arbitration institution. We also combine punishment and incentive measures to ensure the earnest implementation of the crowdsourcing business by users. Arbitration mechanism refers to the arbitration of task solutions submitted by receivers through the decentralized and credible arbitration institution rather than senders or the crowdsourcing platform, which ensures the fairness and impartiality of the solution evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed credit mechanism and arbitration mechanism.
May 1, 2019·2019 IEEE 5th Intl Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity), IEEE Intl Conference on High Performance and Smart Computing, (HPSC) and IEEE Intl Conference on Intelligent Data and Security (IDS)
With the development of big data and machine learning techniques, medical data sharing for the use of disease diagnosis has received considerable attention. Blockchain, as an emerging technology, has been widely used to resolve the efficiency and security issues in medical data sharing. However, the existing studies on blockchain-based medical data sharing have rarely concerned about the reasonable incentive mechanism. In this paper, we propose a cooperation model where medical data is shared via blockchain. We derive the topological relationships among the participants consisting of data owners, miners and third parties, and gradually develop the computational process of Shapley value revenue distribution. Specifically, we explore the revenue distribution under different consensuses of blockchain. Finally, we demonstrate the incentive effect and rationality of the proposed solution by analyzing the revenue distribution.
Sustainability is a topic of increasing interest. The United Nations has released a list of 17 goals for sustainable development for the global community. Blockchain is a recent technological innovation that shows great promise in changing industries. In this paper, we look specifically at smart grids and supply chain management systems as areas where sustainable technological innovation can happen. To identify software engineering aspects of blockchain in smart grids and supply chain management, we start upon online libraries focusing on engineering and information technology, and we opted for the methodology of systematic mapping studies in software engineering. The search strategy identified 535 papers, of which 60 were identified as main studies for our mapping. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no previous similar studies exist. Results of the study show that the research connecting blockchain technology to smart grids and supply chain management systems is still young. None of the techniques or systems have yet been implemented in a real life setting. As such, more work has to be done before we can look at the actual implications of putting such technologies into use. Software engineering practices could prove to be very useful in the process of development. We propose that future studies can focus on bringing the technologies closer to real life implementations, as well as how to involve the end users in the development of the blockchain-based systems.
Rijnard van Tonder, Asher Trockman, Claire Le Goues
Cryptocurrencies are a significant development in recent years, featuring in global news, the financial sector, and academic research. They also hold a significant presence in open source development, comprising some of the most popular repositories on GitHub. Their openly developed software artifacts thus present a unique and exclusive avenue to quantitatively observe human activity, effort, and software growth for cryptocurrencies. Our data set marks the first concentrated effort toward high-fidelity panel data of cryptocurrency development for a wide range of metrics. The data set is foremost a quantitative measure of developer activity for budding open source cryptocurrency development. We collect metrics like daily commits, contributors, lines of code changes, stars, forks, and subscribers. We also include financial data for each cryptocurrency: the daily price and market capitalization. The data set includes data for 236 cryptocurrencies for 380 days (roughly January 2018 to January 2019). We discuss particularly interesting research opportunities for this combination of data, and release new tooling to enable continuing data collection for future research opportunities as development and application of cryptocurrencies mature.
Among different concepts associated with the term blockchain, smart contracts have been a prominent one, especially popularized by the Ethereum platform. In this study, we unpack this concept within the framework of Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). This institutional economics theory emphasizes the role of distinctive (private and public) contract law regimes in shaping firm boundaries. We propose that widespread adoption of the smart contract concept creates a new option in public contracting, which may give rise to a smart-contract-augmented contract law regime. We discuss tradeoffs involved in the attractiveness of the smart contract concept for firms and the resulting potential for change in firm boundaries. Based on our new conceptualization, we discuss potential roles the three branches of government – judicial, executive, and legislative – in enabling and using this new contract law regime. We conclude the paper by pointing out limitations of the TCE perspective and suggesting future research directions.
Felix Franz, Tobias Fertig, Andreas E. Schütz, Henry Vu
In the late 90s the author Ian Grigg defined that smart contracts have to be human-readable like paper contracts while remaining processible by computer programs. The Ethereum Foundation has created a new programming language Solidity that can be used to implement smart contracts. However, the contracts are neither easy to implement nor easy-to-use by the common user. In order to enable users without programming skills to take advantage of the new technology, we propose a generator for smart contracts. Our prototype uses a configuration wizard to determine the requirements of the generated contract. Based on the official ERC Standards of the Ethereum community we will implement a prototype that can configure and generate customized contracts. Moreover, we are covering the challenges that we have to face in order to support automated test case generation and automated deployment processes.
Recently there have been many emerging innovated Blockchain applications in various sectors including healthcare. In this paper, we propose a role-based access control system, namely, RBAC-HDE, which harnesses the powerful features of Blockchain such as immutability and decentralization, in order to facilitate secure data exchange for healthcare. We design and implement an Ethereum-based testbed to demonstrate the basic idea. Our preliminary results have shown the feasibility and potential of this approach.
Asher Trockman, Rijnard van Tonder, Bogdan Vasilescu
Cryptocurrencies have a significant open source development presence on GitHub. This presents a unique opportunity to observe their related developer effort and software growth. Individual cryptocurrency prices are partly driven by attractiveness, and we hypothesize that high-quality, actively-developed software is one of its influences. Thus, we report on a study of a panel data set containing nearly a year of daily observations of development activity, popularity, and market capitalization for over two hundred open source cryptocurrencies. We find that open source project popularity is associated with higher market capitalization, though development activity and quality assurance practices are insignificant variables in our models. Using Granger causality tests, we find no compelling evidence for a dynamic relation between market capitalization and metrics such as daily stars, forks, watchers, commits, contributors, and lines of code changed.
Nakul Chawla, Hans Walter Behrens, Darren Tapp, Dragan Boscovic · 5 authors
Blockchain technology and other distributed ledger systems fill an important role in resilient data storage and publication. However, their normally-decentralized methods also bring unique challenges distinct from more traditional approaches. One lies in the replication of data between participating nodes; since no individual node is more trusted than any other, each node maintains its own copy of the entire ledger for the purposes of validating new transactions. Improving how this information is stored and more importantly, how it propagates across the network, are open research questions. In this work, we propose Velocity, a novel block propagation approach based on fountain codes, allowing for better decentralized delivery of blocks and reduced network bottlenecks without sacrificing the security guarantees of the blockchain ledger itself. We also provide an assessment of economic incentives and their impact on participant behavior, showing that the proposed approach is financially beneficial to rational actors. We conclude by showing experimentally that this approach permits for the mining of even larger blocks, thereby increasing transaction throughput of the system compared to existing state of the art methods.
Elva Leka, Luis Lamani, Besnik Selimi, Elio Decolli
In this paper, we propose to use the blockchain technology as a mechanism to store and share geospatial projects. Blockchain helps to improve efficiency and security. Smart contracts provide a secure, distributed and shared decentralized ledger of all assets and transactions. We will discuss a way to implement a platform on which scientists can share their studies. We propose a design methodology for the mentioned smart contracts, which enables the development of different use cases using blockchain technology. A detailed design of the smart contracts, functions and processes is presented. We will provide an outline of advantages and limitations of blockchain in general, and for the proposed platform.
Wesley Dingman, Aviel Cohen, Nick Ferrara, Adam Lynch · 7 authors
Blockchain technology has recently emerged as the primary platform for the transfer of digital currency. This technology, which has been heralded as a revolutionary tool to facilitate the transfer of funds between participating parties, is still in its infancy and should be subjected to thorough scrutiny. In recent years, researchers have attempted to uncover a litany of bugs embedded within these distributed systems; however, there does not yet exist a formal and standardized method for their classification. In this paper, we present the first formal classifications of known bugs in smart contract systems using NIST's Bugs Framework and propose two new classes: Distributed System Protocol (DSP) and Distributed System Resource Management (DRM).
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Permissionless blockchain-enabled smart contracts execute code in a distributed peer-to-peer network system and thereby overcome undesirable effects of system centralization. Smart contracts that use proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithms for the validation of transactions have advantages over proof-of-work (PoW) in that they use less electricity and perform faster. The disadvantage of PoS algorithms is the issue of nothing to stake and the emergence of staking oligopolies. Thus, significant stakeholders might be able to create an oligopoly as miners with significant stakes have the chance to validate the transaction in a dominant position. In current smart contracts, the adoption of mobile devices is another emerging trend to manage mobile smart contracts. The advantage is spreading of a democratization effect as a large number of stakers participate in transaction validation and thereby reduce the risk of oligopolies. In our work, we aim to improve the PoS algorithm to reduce oligopoly formation in smart contracts by addressing the need for creating mobile smart contracts that are governed by a mobile lifecycle management. Additionally, we enhance the scalability and performance of smart contracts by focusing specifically on ways to incentivize PoS algorithms.
Eric Wagner, Achim Volker, Frederik Fuhrmann, Roman Matzutt · 5 authors
Blockchain systems promise to mediate interactions of mutually distrusting parties without a trusted third party. However, protocols with full smart contract-based security are either limited in functionality or complex, with high costs for secured interactions. This observation leads to the development of protocol-specific schemes to avoid costly dispute resolution in case all participants remain honest. In this paper, we introduce SmartJudge, an extensible generalization of this trend for smart contract-based two-party protocols. SmartJudge relies on a protocol-independent mediator smart contract that moderates two-party interactions and only consults protocol-specific verifier smart contracts in case of a dispute. This way, SmartJudge avoids verification costs in absence of disputes and sustains interaction confidentiality among honest parties. We implement verifier smart contracts for cross-blockchain trades and exchanging digital goods and show that SmartJudge can reduce costs by 46-50% and 22% over current state of the art, respectively.
Nowadays, the authenticating procedure for transactions is still complicated, and the current Value-Added Tax (VAT) administration system works as centralized server, which consists of high-risk attacks from hackers. Therefore, only a few countries use digital technologies to calculate and manage the VAT payment despite of their benefits. In this paper, by combining decentralized storage network (DSN) with the smart contract (SC), we propose a new model based on Blockchain technology to authenticate the transaction, calculate Value-Added Tax and approve VAT payment. This system runs in a host computer (host PC) for encrypting and decrypting data. The smart contract is implemented in Remix Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on the Ethereum platform. Experiential results show that the new model not only saves the cost for authenticating transactions but also protects the data from hacker’s attacks due to consensus property of the Blockchain technology.
Smart contracts are designed to facilitate the performance of trackable and irreversible transactions without the need for third party involvement. Therefore, as a result of this lack of oversight, it is essential that these smart contracts are written and properly tested. In this paper, we examine some of the prominent risks and challenges involved with writing and implementing smart contracts and discuss how each of these challenges can be overcome. We focus on contracts executed on Ethereum, the most prominent smart contract platform.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors have become cheaper and more ubiquitous than ever [1]. From smart thermometers to home assistants and smartphones, massive amounts of data are being streamed in real-time by sensors that are continuously connected to the web. However, these data tend to be amassed in private silos that are difficult to access. Many private companies and public institutions could build valuable services with these data but so far few solutions have been proposed on how to bridge this gap. In this paper we introduce Hermes, a platform for trading sensor data using distributed ledgers as intermediaries to add safeguards against malicious behavior.
Denisa Kera, Petr Šourek, Mateusz Kraiński, Yair Reshef · 6 authors
Lithopia is a prototype of a blockchain-managed fictional village that uses satellite and drone data to trigger smart contracts on the open source blockchain platform, Hyperledger. The project is testing the possibility of anticipatory governance of emerging blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) by involving stakeholders in the design process over templates. The goal is to question the promises of blockchain governance happening over automation and smart contracts and to offer an alternative to the misuses of emerging technologies in the so-called predictive and anticipatory design. The prototype consists of a functional Node-RED dashboard used as an interface for the Hyperledger smart contracts and a design fiction movie about the lives of the Lithopians.
Chris Elsden, Tom Feltwell, Shaun Lawson, John Vines
This paper presents a qualitative study of the recent integration of a UK-based, digital-first mobile banking app - Monzo - with the web automation service IFTTT (If This Then That). Through analysis of 113 unique IFTTT 'recipes' shared by Monzo users on public community forums, we illustrate the potentially diverse functions of these recipes, and how they are achieved through different kinds of automation. Beyond achieving more convenient and efficient financial management, we note many playful and expressive applications of conditionality and automation that far extend traditional functions of banking applications and infrastructure. We use these findings to map opportunities, challenges and areas of future research in the development of 'programmable money' and related financial technologies. Specifically, we present design implications for the extension of native digital banking applications; novel uses of banking data; the applicability of blockchains and smart contracts; and future forms of financial autonomy.
Blockchains are at the source of numerous innovations, be it in the insurance, the financial or the distribution sector, many of which are very promising. However, from the moment innovative technologies appear the issue of the stimulation of their development arises. Most of the time, blockchain-related innovations are developed in an open-source or free software framework. Nevertheless, more and more patents have been filed on blockchain applications. Hence, how are the philosophies driving blockchain communities and intellectual property compatible? Are there any risks that arise from the filing of patents on the developments of blockchain-based technologies and business methods? And finally, are blockhains going to revolutionalize the intellectual property system itself? These are the issues that the present chapter attempts to deal with.
Blockchain-technology promises to have far-reaching economic and social implications, which are not yet foreseeable in its extent. It threatens to disintermediate many well-established sectors of the economy, and incumbent businesses might be overtaken by ambitious newcomers. The financial services industry is particularly ‘ripe for disintermediation’ since blockchain-technology has with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies its first real-world use case. Incumbent businesses have to react if they do not wish to perish. However, technological evolution also affects the State and other governmental bodies: institutional frameworks or territorial arrangements can become obsolete or detrimental to business activity and may need to be amended. This chapter aimed to examine ongoing technology-induced reconfigurations in the financial services industry through a four lenses framework. The technology, actors and their discourses, as well as the regulatory environment and affected territories, need to be considered all at once. We have applied this framework to the case of Switzerland: a country with an influential financial services industry that has seen better days. We have found that (1) the Swiss Confederation has swiftly adapted its institutional framework to the new reality in order to foster competition and innovation; (2) there are some raucous controversies between challengers and incumbent businesses. However, a tacit compromise allows them to co-exist; (3) four ‘crypto-clusters’ are emerging. These are located in traditional banking centers (Zurich, Zug, Lake Geneva region, Chiasso) that are seeking to strengthen their international visibility and improve their competitiveness.