Blockchain Papers

Jeff Coghill

This article examines the potential uses for Bitcoin and Blockchain technology in libraries. This article will also explore legal aspects of smart contracts as a means for paying for electronic resources.

Christopher G. Harris

As a foundational technology, blockchains have demonstrated their ability to remove middlemen and streamline ledger-based transactions in everything from cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) to centralized voting. In many underdeveloped countries, blockchain-based technologies provide opportunities for transparent transactions between parties, reducing corruption and facilitating trust. Much research on blockchains to date has focused on its virtues, but far less attention has been paid to its inherent risks and dangers. In this paper, we examine the risks and dangers of relying on blockchains in underdeveloped countries. Despite its many promises, blockchain technologies face significant hurdles for adoption in underdeveloped countries; in this paper, we explore eight these risks and dangers.

Roman Matzutt, Martin Henze, Jan Henrik Ziegeldorf, Jens Hiller · 5 authors

Since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2008, blockchain systems have seen an enormous increase in adoption. By providing a persistent, distributed, and append-only ledger, blockchains enable numerous applications such as distributed consensus, robustness against equivocation, and smart contracts. However, recent studies show that blockchain systems such as Bitcoin can be (mis) used to store arbitrary content. This has already been used to store arguably objectionable content on Bitcoin's blockchain. Already single instances of clearly objectionable or even illegal content can put the whole system at risk by making its node operators culpable. To overcome this imminent risk, we survey and discuss the design space of countermeasures against the insertion of such objectionable content. Our analysis shows a wide spectrum of potential countermeasures, which are often combinable for increased efficiency. First, we investigate special-purpose content detectors as an ad hoc mitigation. As they turn out to be easily evadable, we also investigate content-agnostic countermeasures. We find that mandatory minimum fees as well as mitigation of transaction manipulability via identifier commitments significantly raise the bar for inserting harmful content into a blockchain.

Muhammad Mansab Uzair, Emadul Karim, Shair Sultan, Syed Sheeraz Ahmed

The block chain technology has been in the topic of much discussion due to its successful application in the crypto currency known as “Bitcoin" which has investment experts, economists, billion dollar financial institutes, big banks as well as governments taking sides on whether it should be legitimized and used as a currency or make it illegal to be used as a means of exchange. However, experts from different field like supply chain management and even from the medical field are more interested in how the block chain technology’s decentralized record keeping and numerous other benefits can be of use to them in their fields of work. This study concentrates on the block chain being used for real estate record keeping, since most geography’s have different procedures for record keeping, this study focuses on Defence Housing Authority in Karachi to check what the impact of applying the block chain technology to this area in Karachi would have on investors, real estate agents, residents and the government.

Cansu Şarkaya İçellioğlu, Merve Büşra Engin Öztürk

Güvenlik açısından kriptoloji (şifreleme) bilimini kullanan, dijital ve sanal bir para birimi anlamına gelen kriptopara, son yıllarda en çok tartışılan ekonomik kavramlardan biri olmuştur. Kriptopara, herhangi bir döviz kuruna ya değerli bir madene bağlı olmamakla birlikte, herhangi bir yasal otorite tarafından da kontrol edilememektedir. En başarılı kriptopara olarak değerlendirilen Bitcoin, ilk çıktığı yıldan bu yana çok yüksek bir oranda değerlenmesinden ötürü cazip bir yatırım aracı olarak görülmekte, ancak taşıdığı belirsizlik ve risklerden ötürü çeşitli endişeleri de beraberinde getirmektedir. Bu çalışmada Bitcoin’in özellikleri ve işleyişi ele alınarak, Bitcoin ile seçili döviz kurları arasındaki ilişki araştırılmaktadır. Araştırmada birim kök testleri uygulanmış, seriler arasındaki uzun dönemli ilişki Engel-Granger Eşbütünleşme testi ve Johansen Testi ile ve kısa dönemli ilişki Granger nedensellik testi ile sınanmıştır. Çalışmanın sonucunda Bitcoin ile Dolar, Euro, Sterlin, Yen ve Yuan arasında uzun ve kısa dönemli bir ilişkinin varlığına rastlanamamıştır.

Sina Rafati Niya, Florian Shupfer, Thomas Bocek, Burkhard Stiller

Smart Contracts (SC) extend the applicability of Blockchains (BC) in various decentralized use cases. This work demonstrates the design and implementation of a trading application which, employs SC and Ethereum BC. This Decentralized Application (Dapp) provides flexibility in requesting user Identity (ID) directly by seller/hirer and buyers/renter. To provide trust, deposits are paid by two sides while setting up contracts. WiFi- Direct is the chosen Device to Device (D2D) communication protocol which provides high data rates and secure data transmission. Light-Weight SC are introduced in this work which, use D2D communications for sending sold or rented object's or each party's images, and ID data directly to other party instead of storing them in the public BC to reduce the costs. Evaluations in terms of D2D deployment, transaction costs, and privacy, indicate that this system is time-efficient and manages the process in a cost-efficient fashion without the need to store and publish all of the user's ID information in BC.

Nida Khan, Abdelkader Lahmadi, Jérôme François, Radu State

Blockchain is an emerging foundational technology with the potential to create a novel economic and social system. The complexity of the technology poses many challenges and foremost amongst these are monitoring and management of blockchain-based decentralized applications. In this paper, we design, implement and evaluate a novel system to enable management operations in smart contracts. A key aspect of our system is that it facilitates the integration of these operations through dedicated 'managing' smart contracts to provide data filtering as per the role of the smart contract-based application user. We evaluate the overhead costs of such data filtering operations after post-deployment analyses of five categories of smart contracts on the Ethereum public testnet, Rinkeby. We also build a monitoring tool to display public blockchain data using a dashboard coupled with a notification mechanism of any changes in private data to the administrator of the monitored decentralized application.

Yi-Hui Chen, Shih-Hsin Chen, Iuon‐Chang Lin

Because of the popularity of the Internet, the integration services have gradually changed people daily life, such as e-commerce activities on transactions, transportation and so on. The E-auction, one of the popular e-commerce activities, allows bidders to directly bid the products over the Internet. As for sealed bid, the extra transaction cost is required for the intermediaries because the third-party is the important role between the buyers and the sellers help to trade both during the auction. In addition, it never guarantees whether the third-party is trust. To resolve the problems, the blockchain technology with low transaction cost is used to develop the smart contract of public bid and sealed bid. The smart contract, proposed in 1990 and implements via Ethereum platform, can ensure the bill secure, private, non-reputability and inalterability owing to all the transactions are recorded in the same but decentralized ledgers. The smart contract is composed of the address of Auctioneer, the start auction time, deadline, the address of current winner, the current highest price. In the experiments, the accounts are created through Ethereum wallet. In miner stage, the MinerGate is used in miner stage for obtaining money to pay the transaction fee. At recorder stage, the nodes of blockchain are synchronized to generate smart contract.

Jiang, Jiaying

No abstract is available for this record.

Paul Corten

Blockchain, the rapid developing technology behind Bitcoin, is increasingly becoming popular. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that distributes digital transactions peer-to-peer to a decentralized network of nodes that verify the transactions and keep a cryptographic secured copy of the entire history of transactions. The network automatically reaches consensus about the correct history of records, which makes the database transparent and immutable. This consensus role makes it possible to take away the third party in certain processes, such as the bank or the notary. Blockchain also enables digital payments and smart contracts. Smart contracts are digital contracts that can be executed automatically by the blockchain. This enables digital registration of for example identity, birth certificates and votes. But smart contracts have many more automation applications that can be coded in computer code, which has the potential of making many processes in both the public as the private sector more efficient and less costly. Governmental services are especially applicable for blockchain, as they could become more efficient and can even be made obsolete in some cases. <br/><br/>Project teams that develop blockchain powered smart contract applications have to work with nascent tools and technology, and a lack of real life use cases. This leads to a lack of empirical knowledge on how to implement smart contracts in governmental services. An overview of guidelines that assist developing project teams is non-existent, which slows down the implementation process. Blockchain technology is not well-researched and smart contract implementation research is even more scarce. A comprehensive overview that shows design phases, design principles and design dilemmas is non-existent, but could greatly assist project teams that implement smart contract applications. Such an overview would speed up the implementation process and can lead to an acceleration of use cases. Therefore, this research focused on answering the main research question: “How can blockchain powered smart contracts be implemented in governmental services?”. <br/><br/>We used the design science approach in order to answer the main research question. The design science approach allowed us for using several sub methods. We started with a literature review and desk research to understand and analyze blockchain technology and smart contracts, followed by a literature review in order to draft the first version of design principles. These were improved by conducting four case studies. With the second version of the design principles, we built the first version of the design framework. These were assessed by six experts, which allowed us to refine the design principles and design framework into a final version. <br/><br/>The 36 design principles are guidelines to aid project teams that implement smart contracts in governmental services. We incorporated these design principles in a framework, that shows which design principles are applicable in the following five phases of smart contract implementation: exploration, conceptualization, testing, implementation and expansion. Each of these phases has its own results and applicable design principles, which is comprehensively indicated in the framework. However, various pairs of principles affect each other, which we call design dilemmas.

Michele Marchesi

In the past few years, cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications has been one of the most rapidly emerging fields of computer science, leading to a strong demand of software applications. Several new projects have been emerging almost daily, with an impetus that was not seen since the days of the dawn of the Internet. However, the need of being timely on the market and the lack of experience in a brand new field led to epic disasters, such as those of DAO in 2016 and of Parity Ethereum wallet in 2017. Also, there have been several hacks successfully performed on cryptocurrency exchanges, the biggest being those of MtGox in 2014 (350 million US$), Bitfinex in 2016 (72 million US$), and Coincheck in 2017 (400 million US$). The application of sound SE practices to Blockchain software development, both for Smart Contract and generic Blockchain software, might be crucial to the success of this new field. Here the issues are the need for specific analysis and design methods, quality control through testing and metrics, security assessment and overall development process. At the same time, Blockchain development offers new opportunities, such as the certification of empirical data used for experiment; the ability to design processes where developers are paid upon completion of their tasks through Blockchain tokens, after acceptance tests performed using Smart Contracts; and more sound techniques enabling pay-per-use software, again using tokens.

Florian Hawlitschek, Benedikt Notheisen, Timm Teubner

No abstract is available for this record.

Amélie Favreau

International audience

Abhinayan Basu Bal

In this article, the author discusses several developments in the virtual currency sector (Ethereum, smart contracts, initial coin offerings), investigates potential applications of blockchain technology and summarizes some of the recently issued opinions of tax and regulatory bodies on virtual currency.

Sukmawati Sukamulja, Cornelia Olivia Sikora

Financial innovation has entered a new era in which a digitalized system and cryptocurrency have been created. This paper examines the factors that influence the price movement of bitcoin. This is not a legal currency in Indonesia; the Indonesian government has not made any regulations legalizing bitcoin’s use, but it has also not issued any new laws to prohibit the trade in bitcoins and other digital currencies. The demand for, and price growth of, bitcoin are interesting matters to study, especially for Indonesians who still have questions about the progress of Bitcoin transactions and the factors that influent them. In Indonesia itself, without any protection from the government, the bitcoin price on December 14, 2017 had already reached more than IDR224.5 million, compare to IDR60 million in October 2017. Bitcoin is the first peer-to-peer currency, and was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Since its inception, bitcoin has served more than 17 million users, including Indonesians. Bitcoin behaves in a different manner, compared to traditional currencies and the one that affects bitcoin’s price is its attractiveness for investors. The Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) is applied to analyze the short-term and long-term influences. VECM is used in this research because the data is stationary in the first difference and has a cointegration relationship. To make the interpretation clearer, the impulse response function and variance decomposition also are included in this research. The result indicates that the macroeconomic indicator, represented by the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), the demand for bitcoins and the gold price influence bitcoin’s price fluctuations in the short-run and long-run. Bitcoin’s supply does not influence its price fluctuation in the long-run but does influence it in the short-run. The implication of this research is bitcoin could compete as an alternative investment compared to the capital markets and gold.

Ruzanna Chitchyan, Jordan Murkin

This article suggests that the worldwide relevance of blockchain technology is motivated by the changes that it is expected to cause in: (i) the way that business is organised and (ii) regulated, as well as (iii) by the way that it changes the role of individuals within a society. The article presents an overview of the features of blockchain technology. It then takes a closer look into the developments within the energy sector across the world to gain a preliminary indication of whether the stated expectations are coming to reality. As a result of this review, we remain cautiously optimistic that blockchain technology could deliver the expected impact.

Shuqing Bian, Zhenpeng Deng, Fei Li, Will Monroe · 12 authors

Cryptocurrencies (or digital tokens, digital currencies, e.g., BTC, ETH, XRP, NEO) have been rapidly gaining ground in use, value, and understanding among the public, bringing astonishing profits to investors. Unlike other money and banking systems, most digital tokens do not require central authorities. Being decentralized poses significant challenges for credit rating. Most ICOs are currently not subject to government regulations, which makes a reliable credit rating system for ICO projects necessary and urgent. In this paper, we introduce IcoRating, the first learning--based cryptocurrency rating system. We exploit natural-language processing techniques to analyze various aspects of 2,251 digital currencies to date, such as white paper content, founding teams, Github repositories, websites, etc. Supervised learning models are used to correlate the life span and the price change of cryptocurrencies with these features. For the best setting, the proposed system is able to identify scam ICO projects with 0.83 precision. We hope this work will help investors identify scam ICOs and attract more efforts in automatically evaluating and analyzing ICO projects.

Jiang-lei GUI, Xiao Zhang, Faguo Wu, Yao Wang

Blockchain serving as an unalterable ledger, has received widespread attentions recently, which allows carrying out transactions with a decentralized matter. Applications with blockchain technology are springing up. However, financial applications especially in bank liquidation system are still facing big challenges. This paper first presents a consensus combined delegated-proof-of-stake protocol and BFT algorithm together. At the same time, using parallel idea and redesigned blockchain structure make the system more efficiency.

Guido Governatori, Florian Idelberger, Zoran Milošević, Régis Riveret · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Gianni Fenu, Lodovica Marchesi, Michele Marchesi, Roberto Tonelli

Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) are public offers of new cryptocurrencies in\nexchange of existing ones, aimed to finance projects in the blockchain\ndevelopment arena. In the last 8 months of 2017, the total amount gathered by\nICOs exceeded 4 billion US$, and overcame the venture capital funnelled toward\nhigh tech initiatives in the same period. A high percentage of ICOS is managed\nthrough Smart Contracts running on Ethereum blockchain, and in particular to\nERC-20 Token Standard Contract. In this work we examine 1388 ICOs, published on\nDecember 31, 2017 on icobench.com Web site, gathering information relevant to\nthe assessment of their quality and software development management, including\ndata on their development teams. We also study, at the same date, the financial\ndata of 450 ICO tokens available on coinmarketcap.com Web site, among which 355\ntokens are managed on Ethereum blochain. We define success criteria for the\nICOs, based on the funds actually gathered, and on the behavior of the price of\nthe related tokens, finding the factors that most likely influence the ICO\nsuccess likeliness.\n

Koji Takahashi

After comparing and contrasting with computer codes running in a central server, this paper notes that smart contracts are not in the legal sense and considers their implications for contract management and dispute prevention. It alerts that the features of are prone to generate disputes which often involve novel legal issues. The paper concludes with a brief comment on the potential use of in dispute resolution.

Asress Adimi Gikay

Several years after the inception of the most dominant cryptocurrency, bitcoin, the European Central Bank in 2015 indicated the need for establishing legal clarity by relevant authorities through explaining how the current legal framework applies to cryptocurrencies. Three years later, no meaningful step has been taken by any of the European Union (EU) institutions including the parliament. By examining the EU’s legal framework governing payments services, including the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) Regulation, the Electronic Money Directive, the Payment Services Directive and the proposed AML/CTF Directive, this article concludes that (a) because the existing payment services laws apply to payments effected in currencies (legal tenders) and cryptocurrencies are not defined as currencies under the EU law or the laws of member states, they do not cover cryptocurrencies. It also argues that it is impossible to design sui generis payments services law for cryptocurrencies without curbing their essential features, especially decentralization. Lastly, the article proposes centralization and the creation of state cryptocurrency as possible solutions moving forward and examines their strengths and challenges.

Nir Kshetri, Jeffrey Voas

A large proportion of the population in the developing world can benefit from blockchain. In this article, the authors discuss key concerns that have been raised regarding institutions in the developing world and evaluate the potential role of blockchain to address them.

Dejan Vujičić, Dijana Jagodić, Siniša Ranđić

The blockchain technology is a relatively new approach in the field of information technologies. As one of its first implementations, bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has gained a lot of attention. Together with Ethereum, blockchain implementation with focus on smart contracts, they represent the very core of modern cryptocurrency development. This paper is meant to give a brief introduction to these topics.