Platforms are important actors in contemporary cultural economic processes. They include social network sites, online content management systems, streaming media platforms, mobile communication infrastructures, supply chain logistics solutions, and cryptocurrencies. Analysis of platforms and their capitalization should take into account the ways they structure social practice as assets and the constitutive opacity of platforms as configured realities. It explores capitalization by focusing on the problems of counting people and things on platforms. Via a case study of the software repository platform [Github.com] (https://github.com), it analyzes how 'platform numbers’ participate in capitalization. It describes attempts to enumerate the elements of the platform by counting, mapping or listing them. The paper shows how attempts to enumerate people and things encounter forms of association, duplication, combination, imitation and configuration that are crucial to the ensemble but remain refractory to capitalization. It proposes configurative enumeration of the platform numbers as a way of conceptualizing these un-enacted excesses. In a configurative enumeration, the composition, the rhythms of imitation, variation and commutation, and constant relating, repairing and adjusting of configurations crucial to the ongoing formation of platforms come into view. Configurative enumerations engage the inventive realities of platformization, realities that precede and sometimes overflow their capitalization.
Zehui Xiong, Yang Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Ping Wang · 5 authors
Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized data management framework. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications (e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics), its application in mobile services is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new data (i.e., a block) to the blockchain. Solving the proof of work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious solution to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.
Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht, inwiefern Kryptowahrungen zur Liberierung des Aktienkapitals zulassig sind. Das Handelsregisteramt des Kantons Zug hat bereits eine Sacheinlagegrundung mit der derzeit bekanntesten Kryptowahrung – Bitcoin – zugelassen. Im Handelsregister
des Kantons Schwyz wurde eine beabsichtigte Sachubernahme fur einen vereinbarten Erwerb eines Portfolios verschiedener Kryptowahrungen eingetragen. Weitere Handelsregisteranmeldungen sind dem Vernehmen nach pendent. Es stellt sich die Frage, ob Kryptowahrungen generell zur Liberierung des Aktienkapitals zugelassen werden konnen. Die Praxis beurteilt hierbei die Bewertbarkeit und die Verwertbarkeit von Kryptowahrungen als schwierig. Als weitere Schwierigkeit kommen regulatorische Unsicherheiten hinzu, da die Regulierung von Kryptowahrungen ein «Moving Target» darstellt. Diese Unsicherheiten konnen sich auf die Bewertbarkeit und die Verwertbarkeit der liberierten Einlage auswirken.
Healthcare complexity and costs can be decreased through the application of blockchain technology to medical records and insurance companies. Estonia has taken a leadership role in blockchain based services both in the commercial sector and in government. The Estonian government’s innovation strategy was to create GovTech partnerships to implement blockchain based technologies throughout the country, and become a global leader in the technology. Starting in 2011, just 3 years after Satoshi Nakamoto published the first description of distributed ledgers and blockchain technology, the Estonian Government started partnering with the private technology startup company Guardtime to use blockchains to secure public and internal records. Then in 2016, Estonia once again reinforced its global leadership in blockchain technology when it announced it would use blockchain technology to secure the health records of over a million citizens. Estonia’s systematic method of applying blockchain technologies through GovTech partnerships demnostrates how innovation is a process. Estonia also identified early the value of the blockchain as a disruptive platform innovation. The application of blockchain technology to healthcare is a radical innovation given that nearly all previous applications have been in the financial and legal sectors.
Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) – a term intentionally mirroring Initial Public Offerings (IPO) – seem to be the new hype of the virtual currency community leading to an all-time high of the bitcoin of almost 5,000$ this year1. There is indeed a frenzy developing around ICOs reaching a record high of $1.7 billion in 20172 sparking an increasing interest from regulators on the American and Asian continents. Thus, ICOs have become a venture capital-raising tool for start-ups developing projects and applications on the blockchain and trying to escape the constraints of regulation.
Regulation however seems to chatch up with ICOs. This paper analyzes ICOs from a legal perspective with a particular focus on European and French law.
Blockchain is here to stay. Some affirm that it is the next big thing after the Internet. Blockchain is a network-based technology that rewards participants to assemble transactions which will next configure blocks and later be part of a chain. Blockchain guarantees immutability and integrity of data without the need of a third surveilling party. It is therefore a revolution in current systems of trust. It also brings automation and self-execution of processes thanks to its embedded smart contracts functionality. Current standards drafting and development processes can definitively benefit from blockchain technology, and perhaps see the standardization domain revolutionize, like it already happened in the fintech and insurtech arenas [1]. In this paper, we explain what these advantages are. And, before new standard drafting models emerge from the disruptive blockchain community, challenging traditional standard development models-with this paper-, we want to inspire and give tools to established standardization bodies for them to take the lead and initiate a transformation towards `Blockchained Standards' so that they can keep their authority and leadership in the field going forward.
The discussions of how blockchain technologies (blocktech) will disintermediate or transform the payments business continue. To date, the discussion has largely focused on the possibility that, in the near future, the technology could enable a nominally priced, frictionless value transfer process. An examination of the benefits and costs indicates that, at the current level of maturity of technology and legal frameworks, blocktech is not superior to existing mechanisms, except in certain niche circumstances. This, coupled with the lack of viral adoption characterising recent successful adaptations (eg Facebook), indicate that major breakthroughs are required before there is wide adoption of this new paradigm in payment systems.
Ao longo dos ltimos anos, a tecnologia da informao contribuiu significativamente para a evoluo dos mercados financeiros, sem, no entanto, revolucionar a forma como as instituies financeiras interagem uma com as outras. Isso pode comear a mudar, uma vez que alguns participantes do mercado financeito esto prevendo que as novas tecnologias de armazenamento de dados, como o blockchain e outras tecnologias de registros distribudos ( distributed ledger technologies ), podero ser a fonte de uma revoluo iminente. Este trabalho analisa as principais caractersticas das chamadas DLTs ( distributed ledger technologies ), a sua relevncia para a Internet of Things, os indicativos do seu potencial de adoo pelas instituies financeiras e como o uso dessas tecnologias podem afetar alguns servios do mercado financeiro.
Abstract In the context of current energy Internet, the emergence of a large number of energy productive consumers will create a new business model. In the decentralized electricity market, the cost of traditional centralized solution construction, management and maintenance is too high, and it is difficult to support the collection, transmission, reception, storage and analysis of massive data. To provide a solution to this phenomenon, we apply the blockchain technology to this distributed electricity market to achieve peer to peer transactions in the power systems. The blockchain technology which is very popular nowadays will be used in power system to establish a credible direct transaction between devices. At first, this article analyzes the future direction of the development of power systems, studies the characteristics of decentralized power systems and summarizes the main issues in the development process. Then, we analyze the basic characteristics of blockchain and put forward a new transaction framework in consideration of problems existing in current energy market. The transaction framework is based on the blockchain technology in the distributed electricity market and includes the pricing method, the power transaction system architecture, various modules of the trading system and the details of the whole transaction system runtime. This framework provides a viable solution for increasingly complex energy transactions.
Analogous to the emergence of the internet, the introduction of blockchain technology augurs disruptive change to the music industry. Though in its infancy, the technology presents interesting policy issues related to registering and monetizing intellectual property, policing piracy, and creating and executing more flexible contracts between and among members in the music supply chain, among others. This paper assesses the ability of the distributed ledger technology to steer the industry toward a distributed model and its potential to drastically alter the entire music supply chain. It initiates a conversation about policy implications and how policymakers might address the issues related to adopting blockchain technology, including designing policies that support an environment that enables the well-deserved compensation of artists.
This project was commissioned by DasCoin in the summer of 2017. Z/Yen’s Long Finance project team reviewed the limited literature on the topic to produce four discussion papers that described the issues and explored some potential ways of addressing them.
On 4 October 2017, Long Finance held a symposium to explore the discussion papers in the ornate Main Reception Room at Chartered Accountants’ Hall in London. The 28 participants had wide ranging backgrounds and interests. They included representatives from regulators, professional associations, external audit firms, technology companies, and academia.
This report includes the background information chapters on Auditing Distributed Ledgers, Auditing Distributed Data, Auditing Distributed 'Smarts', and Auditing Consortium Blockchain Systems, along with a brief summary of the symposium discussions. The final chapter makes suggestions for the audit profession to address.
Frank Hofmann, Simone Wurster, Eyal D. Ron, Moritz Böhmecke‐Schwafert
The blockchain technology can be regarded as a groundbreaking invention with the potential to bring the digital revolution to the next stage by helping to realize peer economy solutions. The blockchain technology and the concept of blockchain immutability is discussed. The benefits of early standardization of the blockchain technology are argued based on the literature and the analysis of the central blockchain immutability characteristic. From this, a framework is proposed aimed at understanding the dimensions and boundaries of blockchain immutability. The resulting framework is suggested as a good practice standard for the implementation of blockchain systems. Based on these efforts, the article supports initiatives to better exploit the blockchain technology's full potential by standardization.
Over the past few years, Bitcoin has emerged as the first decentralized, global currency. The rise of Bitcoin has brought attention not only to digital currencies but also to the underlying technology empowering digital currencies: blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed ledger that records and secures transactions in a peer-to-peer network. Besides empowering digital currencies, blockchain technology has given innovators the capability of creating digital tokens to represent scarce assets, potentially reshaping the landscape of entrepreneurship and innovation. Blockchain tokens may democratize (1) entrepreneurship by giving entrepreneurs new ways to raise funds and engage stakeholders, and (2) innovation by giving innovators a new way to develop, deploy, and diffuse decentralized applications. Blockchain technology and tokens have sparked a new wave of innovation, which may start to revolutionize entrepreneurship and innovation.
This report documents a blockchain application developed for the real estate sector. The application enables distributed workflow management in a complicated transaction process: the selling of a share of stocks in a housing corporation. As its core element, the application utilizes Ethereum-based smart contracts to facilitate the interaction of various parties involved, as well as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to combine data from a number of separate information pools. The motive for this application has been to understand the process of developing blockchain applications with industrial partners. Moreover, the purpose of this exercise has been to examine whether Ethereum-based smart contracts could be effectively utilized for applications in industry and finance. The application and the discussions during its development indicate that similar, market-driven workflow structures may appear in value chains where the number of parties is high and where the sources of information are numerous yet disconnected.
A recurring theme in the science-fiction series iBlack Mirror/i is the consequence for society of an over-focus on social networking. The episode iNosedive/i imagines a future in which every public interaction a person has is rated by the other parties, and every aspect of ones life depends on the overall rating computed from these. In this paper, we show how such a scenario is already technically possible using existing technologies such as idistributed ledgers/i, and discuss means by which the negative possibilities may be ameliorated using semantic approaches.
A recente expansão global do uso de moedas virtuais passou a ser objeto de debate nos três últimos Fóruns das Nações Unidas sobre Governança da Internet (IGF), de 2014, 2015 e 2016. A capitalização e a rápida expansão geográfica do uso de criptomoedas chamaram a atenção de pesquisadores e mobilizaram representantes da sociedade civil e empresários em várias partes do mundo, que demonstraram interesse no desenvolvimento de inovações impulsionadas pela expansão do uso globalizado desse novo tipo de atividade econômica. Os principais objetivos deste trabalho são: analisar como a recente crise financeira do capitalismo influiu no surgimento e na expansão geográfica do uso de criptomoedas; refletir sobre serviços e atividades que usam criptomoedas, bitcoin e blockchain; e debater os desafios colocados pelo crescimento desse uso.