Blockchain Papers

Christian Jaag, Christian W. Bach

No abstract is available for this record.

Elli Karaindrou

No abstract is available for this record.

Soichiro Takagi

No abstract is available for this record.

Chris Khan, Antony Lewis, Emily Rutland, Clemens Wan · 6 authors

R3 has built a global consortium to focus on the application of distributed-ledger technology (DLT), which can help banks combat low return on equity and alleviate pressure on their operating costs. The authors explain the conditions that led to interest in DLT and introduce Corda, R3's shared ledger for recording and managing financial agreements.

Hossein Kakavand, Nicolette Kost De Sevres, Bart Chilton

No abstract is available for this record.

Stefan Seebacher, Ronny Schüritz

No abstract is available for this record.

John G. Riley

No abstract is available for this record.

Wessel Reijers, Fiachra Ó’Brolcháin, Paul Haynes

This paper is placed in the context of a growing number of social and political critiques of blockchain technologies. We focus on the supposed potential of blockchain technologies to transform political institutions that are central to contemporary human societies, such as money, property rights regimes, and systems of democratic governance. Our aim is to examine the way blockchain technologies canbring about - and justify - new models of governance. To do so, we draw on the philosophical works of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Rawls, analyzing blockchain governance in terms of contrasting social contract theories. We begin by comparing the justifications of blockchain governance offered by members of the blockchain developers’ community with the justifications of governance presented within social contract theories. We then examine the extent to which the model of governance offered by blockchain technologies reflects key governance themes and assumptions located within social contract theories, focusing on the notions of sovereignty, the initial situation, decentralization and distributive justice.

Jianjun Sun, Jiaqi Yan, Kem Z.K. Zhang

The notion of smart city has grown popular over the past few years. It embraces several dimensions depending on the meaning of the word “smart” and benefits from innovative applications of new kinds of information and communications technology to support communal sharing. By relying on prior literature, this paper proposes a conceptual framework with three dimensions: (1) human, (2) technology, and (3) organization, and explores a set of fundamental factors that make a city smart from a sharing economy perspective. Using this triangle framework, we discuss what emerging blockchain technology may contribute to these factors and how its elements can help smart cities develop sharing services. This study discusses how blockchain-based sharing services can contribute to smart cities based on a conceptual framework. We hope it can stimulate interest in theory and practice to foster discussions in this area.

Andreas Bogner, Mathieu Chanson, Arne Meeuw

The sharing economy, the business of collectively using pri- vately owned objects and services, has fuelled some of the fastest growing businesses of the past years. However, popular sharing platforms like Airbnb or Uber exhibit several draw- backs: a cumbersome sign up procedure, lack of participant privacy, overbearing terms and conditions, and significant fees for users. We demonstrate a Decentralised App (DAPP) for the sharing of everyday objects based on a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. This contract enables users to register and rent devices without involvement of a Trusted Third Party (TTP), disclosure of any personal information or prior sign up to the service. With increasing distribution of cryptocurrencies the use of smart contracts such as proposed in this paper has the potential to revolutionise the sharing economy.

Andreas Bogner, Mathieu Chanson, Arne Meeuw

The sharing economy, the business of collectively using privately owned objects and services, has fuelled some of the fastest growing businesses of the past years. However, popular sharing platforms like Airbnb or Uber exhibit several drawbacks: a cumbersome sign up procedure, lack of participant privacy, overbearing terms and conditions, and significant fees for users. We demonstrate a Decentralised App (DAPP) for the sharing of everyday objects based on a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. This contract enables users to register and rent devices without involvement of a Trusted Third Party (TTP), disclosure of any personal information or prior sign up to the service. With increasing distribution of cryptocurrencies the use of smart contracts such as proposed in this paper has the potential to revolutionise the sharing economy.

Michael Mainelli, Simon Mills

No abstract is available for this record.

Laura-Lucia Richter, Michael G. Pollitt

This paper analyses the heterogeneity of household consumer preferences for electricity service contracts in a smart grid context. Platform pricing strategies that could incentivise consumers to participate in a two-sided electricity platform market are discussed. The research is based on original data from a discrete choice experiment on electricity service contracts that was conducted with 1,892 electricity consumers in Great Britain in 2015. We estimate a flexible mixed logit model in willingness to pay space and exploit the results in posterior analysis. The findings suggest that while consumers are willing to pay for technical support services, they are likely to demand significant compensation to share their usage and personally identifying data and to participate in automated demand response programs involving remote monitoring and control of electricity usage. Cross-subsidisation of consumers combining appropriate participation payments with sharing of bill savings could incentivise participation of the number of consumers required to provide the optimal level of demand response. We also examine the preference heterogeneity to suggest how, by targeting customers with specific characteristics, smart electricity service providers could significantly reduce their customer acquisition costs.

Zehua Chen, Cheng Li

In recent years, sponge city construction has aroused widespread concern; the financing mode of the sponge city also has the discussion value due to its important safeguard function to smoothly carry on the construction of sponge city. The financing mode of the sponge city is divided into two parts in this paper, including the financing mode in Japan and America with the developed capital market, and the financing mode & experience in Germany whose capital market is less developed but has the complete market economy system, and introduces significance to our country brought by the successful experiences of the financing mode of the overseas -the decentralization of the local government bond issuance right, the establishment of the effective supervision mechanism; the flexible use of bank loans, supported by the preferential fiscal policy; the establishment of the government credit rating system, perfect the credit information publicity system; charge to the residents of the installation fee of the sponge city, relief the cost to who build the devices by themselves.

Lael Brainard

No abstract is available for this record.

Lael Brainard

No abstract is available for this record.

José Parra-Moyano

No abstract is available for this record.

Dion Blummont

Distributed ledgers, and in particular blockchain technologies, promise to be revolutionary to financial markets, and the uptake of Bitcoin shows that it can also influence wider society. This paper examines the suggested uses of the technology, as well as the possible regulatory concerns that the technology raises. It looks at various regulatory measures that have been developed by jurisdictions to combat it, as well as possible applications of current regulatory frameworks. The paper then frames the issues in a regulatory lens, and looks at what lessons can be learned for regulation going forward.

Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Andrew Shact

At the World Economic Forum more than 800 executive and technology experts were asked when they thought a particular “tipping point” would be reached – when would we see a government collect tax with blockchain? The agreed date was 2023 (on average). A full 73% of the respondents however, expected the tipping point to have been reached by 2025. This paper argues that the EU VAT will be an early adopter, if not the earliest adopter of blockchain. There are a number of reasons why. Blockchain will bring substantial efficiencies to VAT collection. It will reduce costs, and build critical inter-governmental trust relationships. Most importantly, blockchain will immediately end revenue losses well in excess of €50 to €60 billion per year in missing trader intra-community fraud (MTIC). Blockchain will also be essential for making the EU Commission’s April 2016 Action Plan on VAT work. Blockchain should be a critical part of the detailed legislative proposal (expected in 2017). This plan will bring in a “definitive VAT system” dealing with intra-EU cross-border trade, which will be based on taxation in the country of destination. This paper predicts that the EU will bring in the “definitive system” on the back of blockchain technology. Blockchain is a revolutionary improvement on any centralized data system. Tax administrations are inherently based upon centralized repositories of taxpayer data. They are prime candidates for the kinds of efficiency improvements that come through blockchain. This is particularly the case for transaction taxes, and even more so for a VAT fraud prevention application, like the Digital Invoice Customs Exchange (DICE), which relies on a real-time exchange of encrypted data.

Sinclair Davidson, Primavera De Filippi, Jason Potts

Distributed ledger technology, invented for cryptocurrencies, is increasingly understood as a new general-purpose technology for a broad range of economic activities that rely on consensus of a database of transactions or records. However, blockchains are more than just a disruptive new ICT. Rather, they are a new institutional technology of governance that competes with other economic institutions of capitalism, namely firms, markets, networks, and even governments. We present this view of blockchains through a case study of Backfeed, an Ethereum-based platform for creating new types of commons-based collaborative economies.

Konstantinos Christidis, Michael Devetsikiotis

ABSTRACT: Motivated by the recent explosion of interest around Blockchains, we examine whether they make a good t for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Blockchains allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-trusting members can interact with each other without a trusted intermediary, in  a variable manner. We review how this  mechanism works and also look into smart contracts scripts that reside on the Blockchain that allow for the automation of multi-step processes. We then move into the IoT domain, and describe how a Blockchain-IoT  combination: 1) facilitates the sharing of services and resources leading to the creation of a marketplace of services between devices and 2) allows us to automate in a cryptographically variable manner several existing, time- consuming work owns. We also point out certain issues that should be considered before the deployment of a Blockchain network in an IoT setting: from transactional privacy to the expected value of the digitized assets traded on the network. Wherever applicable, we identify solutions and workarounds. Our conclusion is that the Blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause sign cant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.

Authors unavailable

No abstract is available for this record.

Alyse Killeen

No abstract is available for this record.

Gareth W. Peters, Efstathios Panayi

In this chapter we provide an overview of the concept of blockchain technology and its potential to disrupt the world of banking through facilitating global money remittance, smart contracts, automated banking ledgers and digital assets. In this regard, we first provide a brief overview of the core aspects of this technology, as well as the second-generation contract-based developments. From there we discuss key issues that must be considered in developing such ledger based technologies in a banking context.