Created in 2009, bitcoin reaches record heights every week, having hit $17,000 on 11 December 2017 - the first day a bitcoin futures contract traded at the CBOE - versus $1,000 in early 2017 and $1 in 2001. Yet there is still no consensus among economists whether bitcoin comprises a new decentralised currency free of central bank influence, or is a purely speculative instrument.
Bitcoin is the most popular virtual currency and has attracted extraordinary attention as a financial innovation. This attention results less from Bitcoin's role as a digital medium of payment, exchange and store of value, than from the decentralized nature of Bitcoin transactions.Bitcoins pose various risks, some of them being remote and others more immediate. If remote risks do not, presently, require any regulatory intervention, immediate risks should not remain beyond the reach of financial law. Regulators need to put in place frameworks that protect against these risks but in a way that does not restrain innovation. Theoretically, there are three aspects of the Bicoin ecosystem that may be subject to regulation: the Bitcoin system itself (Bitcoin protocol), the uses of Bitcoin and the members of the Bitcoin system. The regulation of the Bitcoin system itself proves extremely difficult as there is no central authority that administers and controls the system, which could be subject to regulation. On the contrary, regulation could apply to illegal uses that can be made of Bitcoins and to some of the members of the Bitcoin system, especially the exchange and wallet service providers.
Blockchain technology and the associated crypto currencies have the ability to transform industries including healthcare. We suggest the decentralized and programmable nature of the blockchain applications can be used to change health information technology to gain greater efficiency in public and private health care systems. Current public health information technology systems such as eligibility, enrolment and electronic health records have documented issues with interoperability and are slow to adapt to changing program and technology demands. We suggest that blockchain can potentially solve these issues. We argue that a public program such as the U.S. Medicaid program with $553 Billion in total program costs and over $25 Billion spent on health information technology and administration last fiscal year could benefit from the use of blockchain based distributed ledger and smart contracts. We finally argue that a decentralized benefits administration system can provide greater efficiency to enrolment, eligibility, claims payment and adjudication processes thus driving efficiency and reducing systemic fraud.
This article analyses the existing institutions and infrastructure for payments. Authoritative settlement based on central bank support is seen as being essential for both large value and retail payment systems; and, in the EU, UK, and US, the importance of regulating for the protection of consumers who use retail payment systems is recognised. In this institutional context, payment innovations (including Bitcoin and distributed ledger or autonomous organisation technologies) are assessed. It is suggested that, while competition at certain levels is likely to bring social benefits through commercial developments, the maintenance of public interest objectives necessarily delineates the scope of competition. While this might limit the disruptive impact of payment innovations, it is argued that, in the light of the public policy needs for a stable and efficient public infrastructure and the social needs of confidence and trust in a predictable and regulated payment system that meets commercial and social expectations such as in consumer protection, this is not necessarily undesirable.
Abstract This paper aims to propound a thorough and circumspect analysis of the implications of blockchain technology in the accounting profession and its broader industry. The analysis begins with a summary of early developments by first movers and how they are harnessing blockchain technology to improve business practices. Concomitantly, the paper will go on to discuss how this technology will streamline accounting processes, specifically as the technology approaches critical mass. Finally, a discussion of its longâterm implications will follow through a more philosophical and conceptual dialogue. Throughout the paper, criticisms will be raised to address concerns regarding blockchain's widespread use.
We present Strain, a new auction protocol running on top of blockchains and guaranteeing bid confidentiality against fully-malicious parties. As our goal is efficiency and low blockchain latency, we abstain from using traditional, highly interactive MPC primitives such as secret shares. We focus on a slightly weaker adversary model than MPC which allows Strain to achieve constant latency in both the number of parties and the bid length. The main idea behind Strain is a new maliciously-secure two-party comparison mechanism executed between any pair of bids in parallel. Using zero-knowledge proofs, Strain broadcasts the outcome of comparisons on the blockchain in a way that all parties can verify each outcome. Strainâs latency is not only asymptotically optimal, but also efficient in practice, requiring a total of just 4 blocks of the underlying blockchain. Strain provides typical auction security requirements such as non-retractable bids against fully-malicious adversaries.
This paper provides an overview of historic and current organizational limitations emerging in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Building Owner / Operations (AECOO) Industry. It then provides an overview of new technologies that attempt to mitigate these limitations. However, these technologies, taken together, appear to be converging and creating entirely new organizational structures in the AEC industries. This may be characterized by the emergence of what is called the Network Effect and itâs related calculus. This paper culminates with an introduction to Blockchain Technology (BT) and itâs integration with the emergence of groundbreaking technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Financial / Insurance products. To illustrate this process, we use choose Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology as our model network database for the AECOO industry. Interaction with the BIM database is an activity that generates economic value which may be measured into existence by an electronic token that rewards disassociated parties for maintaining and improving the database for the benefit of all, thereby replacing the 3rd party intermediary characteristic of legacy hierarchies with a simple and efficient âdigital handshakeâ. Not unlike feudalism before it, hierarchical structures are being disrupted by emerging network platforms. In the age of the Internet, social network structure are now more efficient and massively scalable. As with all social revolutions, people naturally reorganize to the system that provides better security, greater fault tolerance, ease of regulation, and greater market efficiencies. There is evidence all around that we are witnessing a digital transformation in the AECOO industry. The technologies of this transformation are disruptive to the existing professions, project procurement and building operation processes. The underlying calculus that threatens the AECOO industry is related to the process of legacy organizational structure. Hierarchical structures are being replaced by network structures in many industries simply because networks are more efficient, enjoy higher market valuation, they are fault tolerant, and self regulating whereas hierarchy requires substantial managerial and administration overhead to secure individual nodes. This can be a good thing because the incentive to disrupt older processes will often spring forth new systems and methods that have the potential to be leaner, more efficient, less error prone, and more cost effective across the enterprise. However, there is one essential element that is still problematic. Everyone trusts the old system with its inherent faults and may even be deeply vested in mitigating those faults. The same or greater level of trust must be demonstrated and maintained in any new system in order to be adopted and lead to commercial success.
The blockchain has reached the tip of a global hype across a variety of industries. The potential of this technology, inter alia building the fundament of Bitcoin, is assumed to be immense and disruptive â particularly for the financial industry. FinTech start-ups as well as established players however are just about to explore the true potential of blockchain technology as the fundament of (financial) markets. Before this backdrop, Information Systems research is making valuable contributions to the field by integrating the technical view on blockchain with interdisciplinary research approaches. Our contribution to the growing body of Information Systems literature in the context of the blockchain is twofold: First, we conduct a comprehensive literature review of the most relevant and recent IS research on blockchain. Second, based on the findings of our review, we build on existing research and propose a Blockchain Market Engineering Framework, which can support researchers as well as practitioners in analyzing and designing the elements of blockchain-based markets on an individual and global level. In addition, we go beyond a purely analytical perspective and provide a toolbox to support the active construction of blockchain-based ecosystems and infrastructures. In doing so we pave the way for future research that will help to break down the blockchain hype.
Leadership deficit has been Pakistanâs most pressing issue for decades, and this problem is even more pervasive in public organizations than private sector. Tackling the leadership crisis is now increasingly a question of what constitutes an appropriate leadership style to augment motivation of employees. Thus the purpose of the study is to explore the intriguing question of the most pragmatic leadership style and its potential impact on employeesâ motivation. For this purpose, autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire styles are considered as independent variables, while employeesâ motivation is the dependent variable. Data is collected via survey questionnaire, based on closed-ended Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), from a sample of 110 senior level and middle level managers working at WAPDA, an autonomous organization of Pakistan working under the administrative control of federal government for the development of energy resources. Descriptive statistics, reliability statistics, multiple regression model and analysis of variance are deployed to test hypotheses of the study and derive practical implications. Autocratic leadership style is found to be more dominant and exhibits significant negative relationship with employeesâ motivation, whereas democratic and laissez-faire leadership styles are shown to positively predict motivation of employees. However, the positive relationship between democratic leadership and employeesâ motivation comes out to be insignificant, which depicts the bureaucratic and decentralized nature of the organization. The research findings are in line with the theoretical assumptions for autocratic and laissez-faire style, but inconsistent with democratic leadership style. The paper proposes the preference for democratic and laissez-faire leadership style in the face of deleterious bureaucratic environment. Though few researchers investigated the relationship between leadership styles and employeesâ performance, there is hardly any study that focuses on bureaucratic environment of an emerging economy. The study offers broader policy implications to strengthen institutions by establishing democratic leadership style. In a context marked by bureaucracy and sluggishness, top management needs to focus on leadership development programs and pursuance of democratic leadership style.
Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior
Belt and Road Initiative
Organizational Leadership and Management Strategies
Christoph Kinkeldey, JeanâDaniel Fekete, Petra Isenberg
BitConduite is a system we are developing for the visual exploration of financial activity on the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin is the largest digital pseudo-currency worldwide and its study is of increasing interest and importance to economists, bankers, policymakers, and law enforcement authorities. All financial transactions in Bitcoin are available in an openly accessible online ledger-the (Bitcoin) blockchain. Yet, the open data does not lend itself easily to an analysis of how different individuals and institutions-or entities on the network-actually use Bitcoin. Our system BitConduite offers a data transformation back end that gives us an entity-based access to the blockchain data and a visualization front end that supports a novel high-level view on transactions over time. In particular, it facilitates the exploration of activity through filtering and clustering interactions. We are developing our system with experts in economics and will conduct a formal user study to assess our approach of Bitcoin activity analysis.
Bharanidharan Shanmugam, Sami Azam, Kheng Cher Yeo, Jithin Jose ¡ 5 authors
Bitcoin is a new form of global digital currency based on peer-to-peer network, enabling a new payment system, and also a completely decentralised cryptocurrency. The P2P network consists of a digital file listing transactions like a ledger, a copy of which is also maintained on every computer on the network, and the transactions are also broadcasted in the public ledger of the Bitcoin network. Anonymity is the core feature that makes Bitcoin popular among people around the world. This feature is attained through the Bitcoin addresses in the public ledger, which represents the users in the Bitcoin network. Because of the illicit use of Bitcoins, the level of anonymity has reduced even though the users are still using the anonymizers like TOR to keep the anonymity stronger to connect to the Bitcoin network. In this paper, we analyse the complete process of transaction of Bitcoins and the anonymity thatlies in that process. The study also focuses on finding the forensic artefacts and the investigative way of approach towards the Bitcoin using forensic tools. The forensic tools are used to analyse the web browser activities, local drive, hard disk image, cookies, downloads and session data related to Bitcoins. The attacker can relate the transaction of the users and can control the Bitcoin blocks by even delaying the transactions. This research will focus on the methods in which the memory and even mobile devices involved in the transaction could be captured and analysed.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
A blockchain is a distributed ledger for recording transactions, maintained by many nodes without central authority through a distributed cryptographic protocol. All nodes validate the information to be appended to the blockchain, and a consensus protocol ensures that the nodes agree on a unique order in which entries are appended. Consensus protocols for tolerating Byzantine faults have received renewed attention because they also address blockchain systems. This work discusses the process of assessing and gaining confidence in the resilience of a consensus protocols exposed to faults and adversarial nodes. We advocate to follow the established practice in cryptography and computer security, relying on public reviews, detailed models, and formal proofs; the designers of several practical systems appear to be unaware of this. Moreover, we review the consensus protocols in some prominent permissioned blockchain platforms with respect to their fault models and resilience against attacks.