Abstract: This article investigates the legal dimension of smart contracts. In particular, it reviews their existing definitions in some of the main laws enacted and scholarly articles published to date, proposes its own version, to then move on to consider to what extent new legal categories are warranted to deal with this apparently totally new way of making legally binding agreements. It concludes by providing some final remarks with regard to relevant legal categories and attempts to advance a number of solutions to the legal questions raised by the application of smart contracts. Résume: Le présent article étudie la dimension juridique de contrats intelligents. En particulier, il passe en revue leurs définitions qui se trouvent dans certaines des lois essentielles promulguées et dans des articles académiques publiés jusqu’à présent, il propose sa version propre, et considère ensuite dans quelle mesure de nouvelles catégories juridiques sont justifiées pour traiter cette manière apparemment tout à fait nouvelle de passer des accords juridiquement obligatoires. Il conclut par quelques remarques finales concernant des catégories juridiques importantes et tente d’apporter certaines solutions aux questions juridiques soulevées par l’application de contrats intelligents.
Abstract As the Blockchain technology is gaining momentum in popular culture through Cryptocurrencies, its full implication and application to businesses, on a concrete and factual level, is still seen to be in its infancy stage. While the technology provides numerous advantages regarding stability, trust, speed and others, the robustness of the technology is not widely disseminated. This is further coupled by the common notion of resistance to change in business management processes. This paper explores the concept of Smart Contracts through the blockchain technology and its relevance to the business sector and further outlines the advantages and limitations of its applicability as of date.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer digital decentralized cryptocurrency created by an individual under pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. In fact, it is the first digital decentralized currency. The importance of digital cryptocurrency and the concept of blockchain have been explored by several developers and organizations. It is assumed to be one of the secure and easy payment methods that can be used in the coming days. In this paper, we survey various topics under Bitcoin such as blocks, blockchains, mining process and proof of work(PoW).
Today's commercial model for edge computing services consists in lightweight devices at the network edge connected through the Internet to remote cloud data centers. Microclouds are an alternative vision of edge computing, where the cloud infrastructure runs at the network edge leveraging decentralized resource contributions of a community. But current attempts to build such microclouds lack a collaborative governance system to operate successfully. In this paper we discuss the opportunity to implement with blockchain technologies key services to enable the decentralized collaborative governance of microclouds. A multiagent approach could further contribute to improve the efficiency in the decision making in the collaborative governance service.
Fatih Ceylan, Ramazan Eki̇nci̇, Osman Tüzün, Hakan Kahyaoğlu
Başta Bitcoin olmak üzere kripto paralar son dönemde çok sık kullanılmaya başlamıştır. “Para birimi” olarak ve “Değer birikim aracı” olarak kabul görmeye başlayan kripto paraların fiyat hareketlerinin analiz edilmesi ihtiyacı ortaya çıkmıştır. Bu piyasaların büyümesi ve küresel entegrasyonu ile birlikte fiyatlarda meydana gelen önemli değişimlerin temelinde spekülatif balonların olup olmadığı finansal istikrar konusunda açıklık ve güvence açısından önem arz etmektedir. Ayrıca kripto para piyasasında meydana gelen spekülatif hareketler piyasa katılımcılarının sürü psikolojisiyle hareket edip etmedikleri sorusunu ortaya çıkarmaktadır. Bu nedenle çalışmada Bitcoin ve Etherium para birimlerinde spekülatif balonların varlığı Philips vd. (2015) tarafından geliştirilen yöntem ile tespit edilmiş ve ne zaman oluştukları tahminlenmiştir. Piyasada balonların olması ve bu balonların süre olarak varlığı sürü psikolojisinin olduğu yönünde bilgi sağlarken, bu piyasada dengeleyici bir spekülasyonun olmadığı yönünde de bir bilgidir. Elde edilen bulgular doğrultusunda Bitcoin ve Etherium kripto para birimlerinde çok sayıda baloncuk olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Özellikle 2017-2018 yılları arasında büyük baloncukların ortaya çıkması bu para birimlerinin spekülatif hareketlere karşı eğilimli olduğunu gösterilmiştir.
Session Description: Over the past years many companies and pundits have discussed the adoption of distributed ledger technologies, aka blockchain for healthcare applications. This panel will discuss the juxtaposition of the so-called Health IT industry and the myriad of applications that would positively reduce friction between the provider and consumer. This improved interaction will also reduce costs and bring true transparency to all transactions in healthcare. Many believe that the Health IT industry is completely homeostatic for any type of true disruption. Why does the industry trumpet disruption when their actions speak louder than words? We address these concerns with leaders on the cutting edge of technology.
Heather Leigh Flannery, Avinash Burra, Combiz Richard Abdolrahimi, Jim Kyung-Soo Liew
Session Description: The session will address what and who the stakeholders are in healthcare, and how smart contracts can be deployed in decentralized payment system in healthcare, types of platforms that can be deployed, the structure of private blockchains, what the best public platforms for smart contracts with payments are, and if scalable, technological limitations. In addition, best case implementations ,where smart contracts are deployed , specifically, with healthcare payments and reimbursements.
This article departs from the post 2008 financial crisis context, from its intersection with technological developments, and from the socio-technical arrangements configured by this conjuncture. It explores plans and actions – of mainstream financial institutions, and of a community seeking for alternatives to centralised economy and governance – for the use of digital platforms supported by blockchain infrastructure. In particular, it explores how such plans and actions relate to conceptions of public and peer trust and how they appear to produce, or reinforce, reputational imaginaries and quantification practices within added value philosophies. By illuminating a tension between the two identified case examples, I seek to render alternative communities’ and financial institutions’ conceptions, imaginaries and practices (more) visible and to analyse their organisational marketing strategies – where there is a pragmatic and discursive operationalisation of technology as well as of trust as means to gain more self-sovereignty in action, while navigating markets and regulated actual world contexts.
Can securities be settled on a blockchain, and, if so, what are the gains relative to existing settlement systems? The main benefit of a blockchain is faster and more flexible settlement, whereas settlement fails need to be ruled out where participants fork the chain to cancel trading losses. With a proof-of-work protocol, the blockchain needs to restrict settlement speed through block size and time in order to generate transaction fees, which finance costly mining. Despite mining being a deadweight cost, our estimates for the U.S. corporate debt market yield net gains from a blockchain in the range of 1–4 bps. Received May 31, 2017; editorial decision May 29, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.
Abstract Whilst blockchain technology has attracted substantial attention within the scholarly literature of a number of disciplines, including economics, finance, law and technology, it has been subject to minimal discussion and scrutiny within the scholarly accounting literature. This article argues that this is a missed opportunity and that the maturation of blockchain technology may represent as profound a shift in accounting as the emergence and adoption of double‐entry accounting.
Abstract The emerging blockchain technology is expected to contribute to the transformation of ownership, government services and global supply chains. By analysing a crisis that occurred with one of its frontrunners, Ethereum, in this article I explore the discrepancies between the purported governance of blockchains and the de facto control of them through expertise and reputation. Ethereum is also thought to exemplify libertarian techno‐utopianism. When ‘The DAO’, a highly publicized but faulty crowd‐funded venture fund was deployed on the Ethereum blockchain, the techno‐utopianism was suspended, and developers fell back on strong network ties. Now that the blockchain technology is seeing an increasing uptake, I shall also seek to unearth broader implications of the blockchain for the proliferation or blockage of global finance and beyond. Contrasting claims about the disruptive nature of the technology, in this article I show that, by redeeming the positive utopia of ontic, individualized debt, blockchains reinforce our belief in a crisis‐ridden, financialized capitalism.
Abstract This special section shifts analytical attention onto efforts undertaken by dispersed sets of actors operating in online communities to mobilize a novel internet‐based technology that mysteriously appeared at the height of market volatility in 2008. Applications of blockchain technologies and the challenges presented to longstanding patterns of financial globalization are analysed by a group of scholars with backgrounds in anthropology, political science and sociology. This introductory article first elaborates what blockchain technologies consist of before foreshadowing the insights that the following interdisciplinary investigations yield for comprehending the implications that technological changes pose for global finance specifically and globalization more generally.
Almost a decade on from the launch of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies continue to generate headlines and intense debate. What started as an underground experiment by a rag tag group of programmers armed with a Libertarian manifesto has now resulted in a thriving $230 billion ecosystem, with constant on-going innovation. Scholars and researchers alike are realizing that cryptocurrencies are far more than mere technical innovation; they represent a distinct and revolutionary new economic paradigm tending towards decentralization. Unfortunately, this bold new universe is little explored from the perspective of Islamic economics and finance. Our work aims to address these deficiencies. Our paper makes the following distinct contributions We significantly expand the discussion on whether cryptocurrencies qualify as "money" from an Islamic perspective and we argue that this debate necessitates rethinking certain fundamental definitions. We conclude that the cryptocurrency phenomenon, with its radical new capabilities, may hold considerable opportunity which merits deeper investigation.
Liudmila Zavolokina, Florian Spychiger, Claudio J. Tessone, Gerhard Schwabe
Recent research reports the need for consistent incentives in blockchain-based systems. In this study, we investigate how incentives for a blockchain-based inter-organizational network should be designed to ensure a high quality of data, exchanged and stored within the network. For this, we use two complementary methodological approaches: an Action Design Research approach in combination with agent-based modelling, and demonstrate, through the example of a real-world blockchain project, how such an incentive system may be modelled. The proposed incentive system features a rating mechanism influenced by measures of data correction. We evaluate the incentive system in a simulation to show how effective the system is in terms of sustaining a high quality of data. Thus, the paper contributes to our understanding of incentives in inter- organizational settings and, more broadly, to our understanding of incentive mechanisms in blockchain economy.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors impacting the student satisfaction with the public and private universities of Malaysia and Pakistan, which are countries representing South/South-East Asia in cross-culture perspective.The study has applied a quantitative survey design guided by five hypotheses.A questionnaire was distributed among the students of private and public universities.A conceptual framework has been developed based on the modification of Student Satisfaction Index (SSI) model to measure the satisfaction of students from different aspects, such as university image, university location, quality of academic staff, university facilities, student expectation, overall student satisfaction.The research method used was a survey-based questionnaire that consisted of a total of 396 responses from the university students.The data were analyzed with SPSS and SmartPLS 3; the results indicate that when the comparison was made separately between private and public universities of Malaysia and Pakistan.The comparative statistical score was obtained using independent sample t-Test, the university facilities of Malaysian universities resulted higher than universities in Pakistan.Therefore, the independent sample ttest results conclude that the university facilities have a significant evidence (p=0.00) to support our research findings that university facilities do affect the student satisfaction more in Malaysia (mean=4.1788)than Pakistan (mean =3.7212) and the research hypothesis is significant that there is a significant difference in student satisfaction towards university facilities in Malaysia and Pakistan.Similarly, the quality of academic staff (p=0.035) has a significant effect on student satisfaction in Malaysia (mean=3.8283) and Pakistan (mean=3.6641).Furthermore, this leads the student expectation and overall student satisfaction level of Malaysia students are higher than students in Pakistan.However, student satisfaction level on university image and university location in Malaysia and Pakistan do not differ.The study is useful for university management to improve university students satisfaction.The future researchers are recommended further explore demographic and cultural variables impact on student satisfaction.
Luís Picciochi Oliveira, Liudmila Zavolokina, Ingrid Bauer, Gerhard Schwabe
The growing usage of tokens in real-world blockchain projects – mostly visible in ICOs – has unveiled the need to understand what blockchain tokens in fact represent and how they relate to their underlying business model. Previous research has contributed to this gap but often lacks a comprehensive understanding of tokens and their design as well as of the growing and rapidly-changing complexity in token landscape. This has crucial implications for assessing tokens' value and utility. Applying a structured, scientific approach towards blockchain tokens, we provide a comprehensive token classification and a decision-aid on token design. This is based on a literature review and an empirical study to cover this research gap. Our work offers a novel contribution in an emerging field within the Blockchain research domain and proposes structured analytical tools which can be used by both practitioners and researchers.
Andrey A. Gusev, 49 Leningradsky Prospect, Moscow, 125993, Russia
Many fintech start-ups participant companies and cryptocurrencies have experienced phenomenal growth in value during the past several years.Many specialists would like to know the reasons for such success.In this article we investigate the predictive power of public opinions.This is one of the few works that using quantitative analysis connects social media and internet users' activities with cryptocurrency valuations.
The blockchain technology has potential applications in various areas such as smart-contracts, Internet of Things (IoT), land registry, supply chain management, storing medical data, and identity management. Although the Github currently hosts more than six thousand active Blockchain software (BCS) projects, few software engineering research has investigated these projects and its' contributors. Although the number of BCS projects is growing rapidly, the motivations, challenges, and needs of BCS developers remain a puzzle. Therefore, the primary objective of this study is to understand the motivations, challenges, and needs of BCS developers and analyze the differences between BCS and non-BCS development. On this goal, we sent an online survey to 1,604 active BCS developers identified via mining the Github repositories of 145 popular BCS projects. The survey received 156 responses that met our criteria for analysis. The results suggest that the majority of the BCS developers are experienced in non-BCS development and are primarily motivated by the ideology of creating a decentralized financial system. Although most of the BCS projects are Open Source Software (OSS) projects by nature, more than 93% of our respondents found BCS development somewhat different from a non-BCS development as BCS projects have higher emphasis on security and reliability than most of the non-BCS projects. Other differences include: higher costs of defects, decentralized and hostile environment, technological complexity, and difficulty in upgrading the software after release. Software development tools that are tuned for non-BCS development are inadequate for BCS and the ecosystem needs an array of new or improved tools, such as: customized IDE for BCS development tasks, debuggers for smart-contracts, testing support, easily deployable simulators, and BCS domain specific design notations.
Innovation in smart contract systems helps to create decentralized payment systems. These developing concepts will be a new perspective to solve transparency issues. Smart contracts can prove all transactions and flow of funds and money between parties. Business deals and financial payment methods are expected to be a hybrid approach in both traditional and smart contracts in the future. Empirical analysis of smart agreements among their emerged platforms, different applications, and design views will enlighten future needs of trade payment methods. This chapter investigates the concept of smart contracts and critical issues for developing on financial payments environment. This research also aims to examine possible advantages of the application of smart contracts as innovation, legal, and technical aspects of the emerging business environment. The analysis will compare new mechanisms securing a block-chain applied to financial payments. This chapter also reviews the mechanisms of smart contracts and block-chain and focus on predicted future areas on the financial system.