Blockchain Papers

Kariappa Bheemaiah

No abstract is available for this record.

Lam Pak Nian, David Lee Kuo Chuen

No abstract is available for this record.

Larissa Lee

Bitcoin is the first and most successful digital currency in the world. It polarizes the news almost daily, with either glowing reviews of the many benefits of an alternative and international currency, or doomsday predictions of anarchy, deflation, and another tulip bubble.\nThis article focuses on the truly innovative aspect of Bitcoin - and that which has gone mostly unnoticed since its inception - the technological platform used to transfer Bitcoin from one party to another. This technology is called the Blockchain. The Blockchain eschews a bank or other intermediary and allows parties to transfer funds directly to one another, using a peer-to-peer system. This disruptive technology has done for money transfers what email did for sending mail - by removing the need for a trusted third party just as email removed the need for using the post office to send mail.\nIf this technology can be used for peer-to-peer money transfers, why not extend the technology to accomplish other forms of transfers? Imagine selling a house or buying a car peer-to-peer. What about using the Blockchain technology to buy and sell stocks? Stocks exchanged completely peer-to-peer could resolve many of the issues facing the stock market today, including high frequency trading and short sales. This article develops a peer-to-peer stock market system, the legal implications of such a system, and how this system will fit in with current legislation and regulation.

Miika Perä

Confirmation bias is a cognitive fallacy that can lead investors to make wrong decisions. It affects how one interprets, searches and recalls information. Yet there is lack of research on how confirmation bias influences information sharing behaviour. Do people share more readily news or information that is closer to their beliefs? I investigate the sharing (retweeting) behaviour of bitcoin media followers. I further assume that bitcoin investors belong to a subset of bitcoin media followers. I find evidence that retweeting behaviour of positive and negative sentiment news is related to bitcoin price changes on a weekly level. When price goes up bitcoin investors tend to share more positive news and when price goes down relatively more negative news are shared. I also investigate the long term sharing tendency and find that on average bitcoin investors tend to share equal amounts of positive and negative news. I argue that this sharing behaviour is a demonstration of confirmation bias influencing information sharing behaviour.

Angela Walch

[NOTE: This paper was written in late 2014 and early 2015. It is relevant given the continued movement of Bitcoin toward the mainstream, exemplified by El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in June 2021.] After a slow beginning in 2009, the digital currency Bitcoin has edged closer to the mainstream, and regulators are scrambling to determine what to do with it. So far, they have focused on harms that its use creates, such as easy money laundering and sales of illicit goods. But Bitcoin’s ability to grease the wheels of crime is not the only risk we should worry about. Rather, due to its status as decentralized, open-source software, Bitcoin poses a risk that money has not historically been subject to – the risk that the money will just stop working one day due to a technology or basic governance problem. Illuminating the importance of reliable money to our society, this paper unpacks the operational risks generated by Bitcoin’s very structure, such as the inherent vulnerabilities of software to bugs and attacks, the governance problems spawned by its decentralized structure and open-source nature, and the lack of monetary expertise of the coders who run the currency. Explicitly considering how each operational risk impacts Bitcoin’s status as money, I conclude that the aggregation of Bitcoin’s operational risks means that it is simply not durable enough to serve as money – even if it becomes widely accepted and achieves a stable value. With hundreds of millions of dollars in investments now pouring into Bitcoin and the larger virtual currency ecosystem, and with more and more prominent individuals jumping daily on the Bitcoin bandwagon, this paper urges regulators and policy-makers to specifically address Bitcoin’s critical operational risks as they design the soon-to-come regulations for virtual currencies.

Γεώργιος Παπαδόπουλος

No abstract is available for this record.

Andras Kristof

No abstract is available for this record.

Michael P. Malloy

This paper explores the legal character of the Bitcoin and other emerging "virtual currencies," and the legal and policy implications of Bitcoin trading. It observes that these "cryptocurrencies" exhibit different legal characteristics depending on the context in which they are examinedwhether transactional law, tax law, or criminal law, for example. The paper argues that the appropriate legal analogue for classifying Bitcoins should be investment and commercial notes, since this characterisation would lead to the application of an appropriate and effective body of transactional and regulatory law to Bitcoins.

Saifedean Ammous

No abstract is available for this record.

Jiasun Li

No abstract is available for this record.

J.A. Bergstra

It is argued that a Bitcoin-style money-like informational commodity may constitute an effective instrument for the further development of Islamic Finance. The argument involves the following elements: (i) an application of circulation theory to Bitcoin with the objective to establish the implausibility of interest payment in connection with Bitcoin, (ii) viewing a Bitcoin-like system as a money-like exclusively informational commodity with the implication that such a system need not support debt, (iii) the idea that Islamic Finance imposes different requirements compared to conventional financial policies on a money concerning its use as a tool for achieving social and economic objectives, and (iv) identification of two aspects of mining, gambling and lack of trust, that may both be considered problematic from the perspective of compliance with the rules of Islamic Finance and a corresponding proposal to modify the architecture of mining in order to improve compliance with these rules.

Chelsea Deppert

No abstract is available for this record.

James Gatto, Elsa S. Broeker

Bitcoin is a virtual currency transaction protocol.It also is a type of virtual currency.One of Bitcoin's unique features is that it is decentralized; it is not created or issued by a single person or entity.Rather, it is "mined" by miners that are issued bitcoins in exchange for solving complex math problems with special software.Bitcoins may be converted to governmentissued legal tender (commonly referred to as fiat currency) or other types of virtual currency through an exchange, or they may be used to purchase goods and services from any of the tens of thousands of merchants who accept bitcoins for payment.The Bitcoin protocol enables the transfer of bitcoins and also can be used for other purposes, such as providing the infrastructure for smart contracts, escrow systems, smart property/title systems, and much more.Many other virtual currencies exist.Some are centralized virtual currencies that are created and issued by a single entity.Some of these virtual currencies may be converted to fiat currency, but others may not.Many are "closed loop" virtual currencies that may only be used to obtain goods and services of the issuer.

Divya Rana, Syed Md Faisal Ali Khan, Arvind Arahant, Jitender Kumar Chaudhary

This study investigates the concept of green cryptocurrencies as a potential solution to mitigate the ecological footprint associated with traditional cryptocurrencies. It explores their viability as a sustainable alternative to traditional currencies. The rising popularity of cryptocurrencies has brought about concerns regarding their environmental impact, particularly due to the energy-intensive nature of mining and transactions.In conclusion, the importance of exploring sustainable alternatives to traditional cryptocurrencies emphasizes the potential of green cryptocurrencies to address environmental concerns.It discusses the growing awareness within the cryptocurrency community and the general public regarding the urgent need to address these issues. Green cryptocurrencies employ alternative consensus mechanisms, such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS) or energy-efficient algorithms, and utilize renewable energy sources for mining and transactions.

Michael Abramowicz

This paper proposes a self-governing cryptocurrency, dubbed Autonocoin. Cryptocurrency owners play formal tacit coordination games by making investments recorded on the blockchain. Such investments represent bets about the focal point resolution of normative issues, such as whether a proposed change to Autonocoin should occur. The game produces a result that resolves the issue. With a typical cryptocurrency, the client software establishes conventions that ultimately lead to the identification of the authoritative blockchain. Autonocoin completes a circle by making transactions on the blockchain that in turn define those conventions and the expected software behavior. The distributed consensus mechanism embodied by formal tacit coordination games, meanwhile, can make other types of decisions, including which of competing blockchains is authoritative and whether new Autonocoins should be rewarded to benefit those who have taken actions to benefit Autonocoin. This establishes a unique funding model for a cryptocurrency, and it addresses objections to cryptocurrencies issued predominantly to the initial founders, as well as to those that encourage wasteful mining activities.

Yunyoung Hur, Seongmin Jeon, Byungjoon Yoo

Ever since its creation by the presumed pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin has garnered significant attention as an innovative online payment system. The purpose of this paper is to discover the degree to which the participation of a Bitcoin user is dependent on the speculative opportunities in the Bitcoin market and, accordingly, to test Bitcoin’s competence against traditional currency. Using a panel data set from one of the largest Bitcoin traders in Asia, we find that $1 increase in arbitrage between market prices is associated with 0.1 more log-ins of users. However, the paper also suggests that such a speculative nature might not be strong enough to dominate user behaviors entirely. The findings report that the actual reason for Bitcoin’s incompetence as a form of currency against the conventional tools of trade may be attributable to its low level of network effects.

Nirupama Devi Bhaskar, Lam Pak Nian, David Lee Kuo Chuen

No abstract is available for this record.

Ralph McKinney, Lawrence P. Shao, Duane C. Rosenlieb, Dale H. Shao

No abstract is available for this record.

Amy J. Connolly, Andreas Kick

This paper describes a study to understand what differentiates organization adopters of Bitcoin from nonadopters by comparing their IT-readiness, innovativeness and social media presence. The craze over cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin has been likened to a modern-day gold rush, yet academic research has not caught up. Governments are struggling with the very idea of cryptocurrency systems. After the price of Bitcoin fell from $1,200 to $300 in 2014, consumer interest flagged, leaving the future of Bitcoin adoption uncertain despite a slow and steady increase of organization adopters. Organization adoption is more important than consumer, because consumers can’t use cryptocurrency if organizations don’t accept them as payment. This research serves as a basis for future research on Bitcoins and Bitcoin adoption by highlighting some important hurdles to its adoption as a new innovation, in the hope that such endeavors move us ever closer to the vision of a true “people’s currency.”

Adam Hayes

Bitcoin has become the de facto 'gold' standard among cryptocurrencies as it is the most widely accepted in commerce, has the largest mining network, and greatest volume of transactions. Because of this, miners of other SHA-256 cryptocurrencies will tend to convert those altcoins into bitcoin in order to transact in a meaningful way with the real economy. The result is that bitcoin mining regulates that of all other SHA-256 blockchains. Specifically, what matters is the expected number of bitcoins produced per day given a unit of hashing (mining) power, whatever the equivalence in the coin being mined. If mining for a different coin would yield a greater return in bitcoins at the margin (per day) for a miner, an apparent arbitrage opportunity will exist to direct mining effort at that cryptocurrency and subsequently exchange those for bitcoin. These opportunities, once taken, quickly eliminate the profitable arbitrage and appear to operate in a fairly efficient and predictable manner. A model is developed in this paper to formalize this process where cryptocurrency miners seeking to maximize production in terms of bitcoins earned in a day will exploit any such opportunities. If no such opportunities exist, they will simply revert to mining bitcoins directly. There are some important implications to this process, such as a tendency for cryptocurrencies to fall in price relative to bitcoin over time, and for changes in bitcoin mining difficulty to indirectly influence the market prices of altcoins. Finally, it seems that those undertaking this process of miners' arbitrage do so at the expense of speculators and noise traders who make decisions regarding buy and sell trades without the use of fundamental data. These participants generally have poor timing, follow trends, and over-react to good and bad news. Altcoins are produced by miners and subsequently offered for sale in the market in order to obtain bitcoins; meanwhile noise traders serve as the only bid-side to the market, on average.

Feng Mai, Qing Bai, Jay Shan, Xin Wang · 5 authors

As the world's first completely decentralized digital payment system, the emergence of Bitcoin represents a revolutionary phenomenon in financial markets. This study examines the dynamic relationships between social media and bitcoin performance. We consider the distinct effects of different social media platforms and different user groups subdivided by posting volume. The results suggest that more bullish forum posts have a positive effect on bitcoin returns, and the effect is stronger when we only include the posts by users who are less likely to contribute. In addition, messages on Internet forum have stronger impacts on future bitcoin market measures at a daily frequency, but microblogs’ effects are more significant at an hourly frequency.

Maria Letizia Perugini, Paolo Dal Checco

No abstract is available for this record.

Jonathan Lim

No abstract is available for this record.

Aleksandra Bal

No abstract is available for this record.