Bitcoin is the most popular virtual currency and has attracted extraordinary attention as a financial innovation. This attention results less from Bitcoin's role as a digital medium of payment, exchange and store of value, than from the decentralized nature of Bitcoin transactions.Bitcoins pose various risks, some of them being remote and others more immediate. If remote risks do not, presently, require any regulatory intervention, immediate risks should not remain beyond the reach of financial law. Regulators need to put in place frameworks that protect against these risks but in a way that does not restrain innovation. Theoretically, there are three aspects of the Bicoin ecosystem that may be subject to regulation: the Bitcoin system itself (Bitcoin protocol), the uses of Bitcoin and the members of the Bitcoin system. The regulation of the Bitcoin system itself proves extremely difficult as there is no central authority that administers and controls the system, which could be subject to regulation. On the contrary, regulation could apply to illegal uses that can be made of Bitcoins and to some of the members of the Bitcoin system, especially the exchange and wallet service providers.
This article analyses the existing institutions and infrastructure for payments. Authoritative settlement based on central bank support is seen as being essential for both large value and retail payment systems; and, in the EU, UK, and US, the importance of regulating for the protection of consumers who use retail payment systems is recognised. In this institutional context, payment innovations (including Bitcoin and distributed ledger or autonomous organisation technologies) are assessed. It is suggested that, while competition at certain levels is likely to bring social benefits through commercial developments, the maintenance of public interest objectives necessarily delineates the scope of competition. While this might limit the disruptive impact of payment innovations, it is argued that, in the light of the public policy needs for a stable and efficient public infrastructure and the social needs of confidence and trust in a predictable and regulated payment system that meets commercial and social expectations such as in consumer protection, this is not necessarily undesirable.
Abstract This paper aims to propound a thorough and circumspect analysis of the implications of blockchain technology in the accounting profession and its broader industry. The analysis begins with a summary of early developments by first movers and how they are harnessing blockchain technology to improve business practices. Concomitantly, the paper will go on to discuss how this technology will streamline accounting processes, specifically as the technology approaches critical mass. Finally, a discussion of its long‐term implications will follow through a more philosophical and conceptual dialogue. Throughout the paper, criticisms will be raised to address concerns regarding blockchain's widespread use.
Abstract Smart contracts on a blockchain behave exactly as specified by their code. To be sure that a smart contract behaves as expected, the end-user has to either analyze its code or trust a potentially anonymous developer or auditor to do so. This approach proposes a smart contract deployment and management platform that can execute development tools and code quality tools in a trusted way and uses this to reduce the trust required into the smart contract developer or auditor. Additionally, such a platform can provide new capabilities for developers aiding them in the creation of smart contracts.
Shayan Eskandari, Jeremy Clark, Vignesh Sundaresan, Moe Adham
In this paper, we present Velocity, a decentralized market deployed on Ethereum for trading a custom type of derivative option. To enable the smart contract to work, we also implement a price fetching tool called PriceGeth. We present this as a case study, noting challenges in development of the system that might be of independent interest to whose working on smart contract implementations. We also apply recent academic results on the security of the Solidity smart contract language in validating our codes security. Finally, we discuss more generally the use of smart contracts in modelling financial derivatives.
An appealing feature of blockchain technology is smart contracts. A smart contract is executable code that runs on top of the blockchain to facilitate, execute and enforce an agreement between untrusted parties without the involvement of a trusted third party. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective. The aim of doing so is to identify current research topics and open challenges for future studies in smart contract research. We extract 24 papers from different scientific databases. The results show that about two thirds of the papers focus on identifying and tackling smart contract issues. Four key issues are identified, namely, codifying, security, privacy and performance issues. The rest of the papers focuses on smart contract applications or other smart contract related topics. Research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies are provided. http://aircconline.com/ijcsit/V9N5/9517ijcsit11.pdf
Cryptocurrency, most notably Bitcoin, has continued to attract attention and consequently substantial investment from businesses, consumers, and the media. Understanding what drives consumer adoption of the technology, however, is not understood. This study uses the UTAUT2 technology adoption theory in order to fill this research gap. A conceptual model is built through a review of the technical aspects of cryptocurrency, an analysis of the technology as currency, and finally a review of technology adoption theory to date. UTAUT2 is found to be the most appropriate adoption theory directly dealing with consumer context. The model conceptualised is tested using multiple linear regression analyses on primary survey data. The findings indicate that facilitating conditions have the highest explanatory effect on actual usage ahead of behavioural intention to use cryptocurrency. Behavioural intention was predicted most strongly by hedonic motivation, followed by perceived trust, and social influence. Interestingly, effort expectancy and performance expectancy were found to be non-significant, contrary to much of the studies in related fields. The study also aimed to identify the primary use-case finding that investment was the primary consumer use. Due to characteristics of the sample collected, the studyÕs findings are limited to the South African context.
Questo studio si propone di analizzare il complesso delle novità introdotte al sistema dei pagamenti e al trasferimento di diritti da Distributed Ledger e Blockchain, in una prospettiva che tenga conto delle applicazioni di mercato di queste innovazioni tecnologiche e della tutela giuridica degli interessi economici e delle posizioni soggettive che ne derivano. In particolar modo, l’opera vuole stimolare la discussione volta alla definizione di un quadro normativo socialmente adeguato che sostenga l’efficienza di questi strumenti in un’ottica di scambio economico globalizzato.
Blockchain technology as a whole is experiencing a dramatic rise in adoption, in no small part due to the developer-friendly Ethereum network. While the number of smart-contract powered distributed applications (Dapps) continues to rise, they face many of the same challenges all new technologies face as they are introduced to a market. By modeling the consumer adoption of blockchain technology and analyzing scholarly literature on supply-side factors affecting the diffusion of technology, we seek to prove the growth of a Dapp can be accelerated using abstraction, whole product planning, and complementaries.