Blockchain Papers

Houssem Eddine Bedoui, Aroua Robbana

No abstract is available for this record.

Carlos Conesa

In October 2008 a mysterious article was published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto: “Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system”. Bitcoin’s entry into operation some months later in early 2009 barely caused a ripple. Since then, the scheme has accumulated more than half a million blocks in its blockchain and they include more than 300 million transactions. In view of the media impact of Bitcoin, it is worth explaining in some detail how Bitcoin works and what its limitations are. This article reviews the aims and basic functioning of Bitcoin, analyses its strengths and weaknesses, and discusses its usefulness as an exchange mechanism.

Matthias Lehmann

Blockchain, or “distributed ledger” technology, has been devised as an alternative to the law of finance. While it has become clear by now that regulation in the public interest is necessary, for example to avoid money laundering, drug dealing or tax evasion, the particularly thorny issues of private law have been less discussed. These include, for instance, the right to reverse an erroneous transfer, the ownership of stolen coins and the effects of succession or bankruptcy of a bitcoin holder. All of these questions require answers from a legal perspective because the technology ignores them. Particular difficulties arise when one tries to apply a property analysis to the blockchain. Surprisingly, it is far from clear how virtual currencies and other crypto assets are transferred and acquired. The traditional requirements posed by private law, such as an agreement between the parties and the transfer of possession, are incompatible with the technology. Moreover, the idea of a "void" or "null" transfer is hard to reconcile with the immutability that characterizes the blockchain. Before any such questions can be answered, it is necessary to determine the law governing blockchain transfers and assets. This is the point where conflict of laws, or “private international law”, comes into play. Conflicts lawyers are used to submitting legal relations to the law of the country with the most significant connection. But seemingly insurmountable problems occur because decentralized ledgers with no physical connecting factors do not lend themselves to this type of “localization” exercise. The issue of this paper therefore is: How can blockchain be squared with traditional categories of private law, including private international law? The proposal made herein avoids the recourse to a newly fashioned "lex digitalis" or "lex cryptographica". Rather, it is suggested that the problems can be solved by using existing national laws, supplemented by an international text. At the same time, the results produced by DLT should also be accepted as legally protected and corrected only where necessary under the applicable national rules. In this way, a symbiosis between private law and innovative technology can be created.

Nan Liu, Anthony Chapman, Bob Duncan

Distributed ledger technologies such blockchain, crypto-currencies, tokenization and smart contracts have recently received a lot of attention. Despite this increase in attention, industries and governments around the world are not using such technologies to their full potential. Real estate is one of such industries who could greatly benefit from adopting such distributed ledger technologies, mainly due to their automated confirmation and transaction transparency nature. In this paper, we explore some of the main distributed ledger technologies and evaluate their potential impact on the real estate market. Our aim is to show how they could improve current methods such as title deed transfer or property valuation as well as point out any issues which might arise from digitising real estate methods. We also review any reasons for why the technologies have not been adopted already and evaluate what impact they could have if they were to be implemented.

Thomas Hoffmann

No abstract is available for this record.

Manuel Utz, Simon Albrecht, Thorsten Zoerner, Jens Strüker

No abstract is available for this record.

Giovanni Ciatto, Alfredo Maffi, Stefano Mariani, Andrea Omicini

No abstract is available for this record.

Karl Wüst, Loris Diana, Kari Kostiainen, Ghassan Karame · 6 authors

In this paper, our main goal is to design a solution that adds expressive smart contract execution support as a subsystem to existing legacy blockchain systems. The primary usage of our solution is to enhance systems like Bitcoin that have no built-in smart contract capabilities. The secondary usage is to extend the contract execution capabilities of platforms like Ethereum that support contracts but have severe limitations on the complexity of allowed computations.

Mildred Chidinma Okoye, Jeremy Clark

No abstract is available for this record.

Sean Stein Smith, Rossen Petkov, Richard Lahijani

The rise and continued implementation of cryptocurrencies and other cryptoassets is having, and will continue to have, a disruptive impact on the accounting, federal income taxation, and broader financial services industries. Much has been written, researched, and discussed about both cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology, but uncertainty remains as it pertains to how these items should be reported for accounting and tax purposes. What this research attempts to accomplish, through both a review of the literature and publicly available guidance issued by tax and accounting authorities, is to document and analyze what current guidance represents for financial reporting. Additionally, this research proposes how future iterations of cryptoassets and cryptocurrencies might be reported, with recommendations applicable for both practitioners and academics seeking to expand on this work.

John Taskinsoy

No abstract is available for this record.

David Allessie, Maciej Sobolewski, Lorenzino Vaccari

In less than ten years from its advent in 2008, the concept of distributed ledgers has entered into mainstream research and policy agendas. Enthusiastic reception, fuelled by the success of Bitcoin and the explosion of potential use cases created high, if not hyped, expectations with respect to the transformative role of blockchain for the industry and the public sector. Growing experimentation with distributed ledgers and the emergence of the first operational implementations provide an opportunity to go beyond hype and speculation based on theoretical use cases. This report looks at the ongoing exploration of blockchain technology by governments. The analysis of a group of pioneering developments of public services shows that blockchain technology can reduce bureaucracy, increase the efficiency of administrative processes and increase the level of trust in public recordkeeping. Based on the state-of-art developments, blockchain has not yet demonstrated to be either transformative or even disruptive an innovation for governments as it is sometimes portrayed. Ongoing projects bring incremental rather than fundamental changes to the operational capacities of governments. Nevertheless some of them offer clear value for citizens. Technological and ecosystem maturity of distributed ledgers have to increase in order to unlock the transformative power of blockchain. Policy agenda should focus on non-technological barriers, such as incompatibility between blockchain-based solutions and existing legal and organizational frameworks. This principal policy goal cannot be achieved by adapting technology to legacy systems. It requires using the transformative power of blockchain to be used to create new processes, organizations, structures and standards. Hence, policy support should stimulate more experimentation with both the technology and new administrative processes that can be re-engineered for blockchain.

María Nieves Pacheco Jiménez

The aim of this research is to bring the reader closer to several concepts that are becoming more common day by day, and which find themselves in unstoppable development, such as blockchain technology, tokens, ICO (Initial Coin Offerings) or DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). Thus, the process of «tokenization», based on abstractly representing a value through the blockchain, is a transcendental innovation in areas such as the financial or the corporate spheres, where ICO —introducing a new business financing channel through the online sale of cryptographic assets— or DAO —entities managed in a decentralized way through smart contracts by tokens holders— come onto the scene. Likewise, their undeniable utilities will be enhanced, but the practical problems faced by these technological developments will also be analyzed, being the main one the regulatory uncertainty.

Vimal Dwivedi, Vipin Deval, Abhishek Dixit, Alex Norta

No abstract is available for this record.

Peng Qian, Zhenguang Liu, Xun Wang, Chen Jianhai · 6 authors

The protection of digital resource copyrights has drawn extensive public concern in the past decade. Traditional methods, however, fail to satisfy the requirements due to their poor timeliness, frequent infringement, and cumbersome in rights confirmation, etc. In this paper, we investigate and design a novel approach for cross-platform digital resource rights confirmation and infringement tracking based on smart contracts. We utilize smart contracts to realize rights transactions and protection. As another contribution, we propose to establish fine-grained digital resource rights, which are divided into ownership and usufruct. For tracking infringement acts, we invoke smart contracts to extract the rights transfer chain for resources. Furthermore, we reveal the source of resource leakage by embedding digital watermarks when distributing the resources. By combining resource rights transfer chain and digital watermarking, we can effectively achieve digital resource rights confirmation and infringement tracking. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method.

John Taskinsoy

No abstract is available for this record.

Ronald Doku, Danda B. Rawat

Blockchain startups are basing their business models on disrupting the centralized way of data storage by highlighting the value of data to the public. A distributed approach to storing data is the safer way to prevent attacks is what is being evangelized. GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) have monopolized data, therefore bringing in the most revenue whilst depriving the data generators of any form of compensation. In our work, we propose a platform where a user can store his/her own personal data. Here, we present to the user the right to decide what happens to their data. These decisions include selling, renting, and deleting data. The deletion of data undermines the fundamentals the blockchain is built on (data immutability). We address the issues of personal data sharing and how a user's right to delete his/her data can be enforced in a blockchain based network such as ours.

Alain Yee‐Loong Chong, Eric T.K. Lim, Xiuping Hua, Shuning Zheng · 5 authors

Blockchain technology, despite its origins as the underlying infrastructure for value transfer in the era of cryptocurrency, has been touted as the main disruptive force in modern businesses. Blockchain has the capacity to chronologically capture and store transactional data in a standardized and tamper-proof format that is transparent to all stakeholders involved in the transaction. This, in turn, has prompted companies to rethink preexisting business practices, thereby yielding a myriad of fascinating business models anchored in blockchain technology. In this study, we advance contemporary knowledge of business applications of blockchain by drawing on the theoretical lens of the digital business model and value configuration to decipher how pioneers in this space are leveraging blockchain to create and capture value. Through a comparative, multiple case study approach, we analyzed five companies in mainland China that have rolled out blockchain initiatives. From our case analyses, we derived a typology of five blockchain-inspired business models, each of which embodies a distinctive logic for market differentiation. For each business model, we offer insights into its value creation logic, its value capturing mechanism, and the challenges that could threaten its longer-term viability. Grounded in our findings, we discuss key implications for theory and practice.

Joshua Ellul, Gordon J. Pace

Blockchain, Smart Contracts and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) are being touted to revolutionise digital services - through decentralisation. Cryptocurrencies, self-sovereign identities, decentralised certificate registries, and transparent voting systems are but a few applications which promise to empower endusers and provide assurances that neither data nor the associated computational logic have been tampered with. Decentralisation, disintermediation, transparency, verifiability, auditability, openness, inclusion, tamper-proof, immutability are just some of the buzz words that continue to be swung around in the promotion of the benefits brought about by Blockchain-based systems to the users. The rhetoric used creates parallels between the features brought about through blockchains and values that many try to uphold, for example honesty, openness, transparency, teamwork and unchanging truth. In this paper a number of blockchain applications aimed at supporting initiatives for common good are highlighted. This is followed by a discussion on technology de/centralisation and a thought experiment used to raise questions regarding the use of decentralised technology in terms of social implications.

Wulf A. Kaal

No abstract is available for this record.

Andrés Guadamuz

No abstract is available for this record.

Carl Worley, Anthony Skjellum

No abstract is available for this record.

Seungmin Lee, Soojin Park, Young B. Park

The block chain technology is changing rapidly. The block chain guarantees the integrity of the book through a specific consensus of the participants. In the past, the block chain technology had a limited range of applications. However, the use of block chain technology is gradually expanding as smart contracts that can formulate general business logic are mentioned. Already studied the components of smart contracts in other studies and proposed the possibility of extending them on the basis of ontology. And research on securing traceability of smart contract based on ontology has been carried out. However, research on various transactions constituting smart contracts is lacking. In this paper, the constituent elements of smart contract are analyzed and expressed by ontology. And the process of negotiating the components is represented by each transaction. Finally, we construct the component represented by the ontology as XML by including the state information in the transaction. In this way, the smart contract is represented in a formal language that contains state information. It also laid the foundation for a smart contract that can be reused and verified.

Stephen H. Fuller, Ariel Markelevich

Abstract The use of blockchain technology has increased tremendously over the last decade. Blockchain continues to evolve and new features and capabilities are developed continuously. Although the use of the technology started in cryptocurrency (specifically, Bitcoin), it has expanded to other areas that can benefit from a shared, secure, ledger. This article investigates the potential impact of blockchain technology on the accounting profession. This article analyzes data security and privacy considerations, technology, adoption, and implementation considerations, and some considerations that relate specifically to accounting and auditing. We find that the unique needs of an accounting information system may not be a good match for blockchain as it currently exists. While we explain that blockchain may deliver many benefits, particularly in the areas of data reliability and the financial statement audit, we identify several factors, which raise significant questions about whether blockchain will ever be significantly integrated in the accounting function. Chief among those concerns is the scalability of the technology at an acceptable cost. While significant investment has and will be made for further development of blockchain business applications, it is our assessment that proponents of blockchain integration in accounting have not yet made the economic case for it. We also have significant concerns about whether blockchain technology can adequately address risks associated with data security and privacy. Addressing all these issues will be a minimum requirement for gaining widespread acceptance by firms and their accountants.