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1,518 results · page 52 of 64
Zeta Avarikioti, Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos, Roger Wattenhofer
No abstract is available for this record.
Christian Rueckert
Cryptocurrencies,1 like bitcoin, raise new legal questions due to their innovative technological concepts. While academic research covers nearly all areas of the technological concepts of those currencies, legal studies focus only on a few topics. The papers that have been published so far discuss mainly economic law, tax law, and financial regulations. At the same time, governments are starting to explicitly regulate cryptocurrencies in terms of anti-money-laundering (AML) and to clarify or strengthen the legal basis for prosecuting crimes in the context of cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, criminal investigation in the context of cryptocurrencies is intensifying with the rising number of cryptocurrency-related crimes. Moreover, governments should also start to consider crime prevention in the context of cryptocurrencies. AML regulation, crime prevention, and prosecution have to take heed of the fundamental rights of the citizens affected. To date, legal research has not discussed the relationship between AML regulation (regarding cryptocurrencies), crime prevention (in conjunction with cryptocurrencies), the prosecution of crimes involving cryptocurrencies and fundamental rights. Many future regulatory concepts will collide with the fundamental right to property of the owners of cryptocurrency units and the freedom to pursue a trade or profession of owners and operators of exchange platforms, mining pools, etc. In cryptocurrencies organized as peer-to-peer systems, the freedom of association also has to be mentioned. With particular regard to prosecution, law enforcement agencies restrict the freedom of telecommunication, data privacy (including the right to informational self-determination), freedom of expression, and the freedom of information. Whenever some of these fundamental rights are impinged upon, regulation concepts and investigation or prosecution approaches must be provided for by law and must fulfill the criterion of necessity. Further interdisciplinary research is needed to develop efficient and legit prevention as well as criminal investigation concepts.
Seunghyeon Lee, Changhoon Yoon, Heedo Kang, Yeonkeun Kim · 8 authors
The Dark Web is notorious for being a major distribution channel of harmful content as well as unlawful goods.Perpetrators have also used cryptocurrencies to conduct illicit financial transactions while hiding their identities.The limited coverage and outdated data of the Dark Web in previous studies motivated us to conduct an in-depth investigative study to understand how perpetrators abuse cryptocurrencies in the Dark Web.We designed and implemented MFScope, a new framework which collects Dark Web data, extracts cryptocurrency information, and analyzes their usage characteristics on the Dark Web.Specifically, MFScope collected more than 27 million dark webpages and extracted around 10 million unique cryptocurrency addresses for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero.It then classified their usages to identify trades of illicit goods and traced cryptocurrency money flows, to reveal black money operations on the Dark Web.In total, using MFScope we discovered that more than 80% of Bitcoin addresses on the Dark Web were used with malicious intent; their monetary volume was around 180 million USD, and they sent a large sum of their money to several popular cryptocurrency services (e.g., exchange services).Furthermore, we present two real-world unlawful services and demonstrate their Bitcoin transaction traces, which helps in understanding their marketing strategy as well as black money operations.
Savva Shanaev, Satish Kumar Sharma, Binam Ghimire, Arina Shuraeva
No abstract is available for this record.
Miles B. Gietzmann, Francesco Grossetti
No abstract is available for this record.
Di Wu, Xiangdong Liu, Xiangbin Yan, Rui Peng · 5 authors
No abstract is available for this record.
Paolo Tasca
No abstract is available for this record.
Jens Mattke, Christian Maier, Lea Müller, Tim Weitzel
Bitcoin could revolutionize the system of payments, yet most individuals do not use Bitcoin as a means of payment. As the success of Bitcoin as a means of payment depends upon a high number of individuals using Bitcoin, this study examines why individuals
Rômulo Rhemo Palitot Braga, Arthur Augusto Barbosa Luna
This article analyzes some of the existing digital anonymity technologies, as well as their impact on the process and facilitation of the money laundering process. It presents the concept of superficial Internet and clarifies the difference between the Deep Web and the Dark Web, exposing how it works one of its most important operating structures, the TOR protocol. It also details the operation of BitCoin, one of the most important crypto-coins today, and draws a parallel on how these technologies can impact the practice of money laundering, as well as discusses the capacity of the mechanisms currently in place to curb and punish it. The anonymity guaranteed by the use of BitCoin is so much that in the first half of May 2017, hackers infected thousands of computers in dozens of countries, including Brazil, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Russia, Spain and Italy, encrypting computer files and requiring redemption payment for the coded data.
R. Vedapradha, Hariharan Ravi
Abstract Banks are automating their processes, migrating their infrastructure and applications to the cloud to create a seamless customer journey. Transformative technology has enabled banks and financial institutions to automate their operations based on advanced data-driven. Banks are adopting AI based anti-money-laundering, anti-fraud, compliance, credit-underwriting and smart contracts technology in their operations. These applications have been embraced by the investment banks as regulatory framework are failing to combat conventional way in combating against money laundering. Artificial Intelligence will focus on cognitive application in functional areas of business along with investment and compliance sectors of financial services industry. Adopting AI based anti-money-laundering, anti-fraud, compliance, credit-underwriting and smart contracts technology in their operations.
Joanie Arsenault, Myriam Ertz
À la fin de l’année 2017, le cours du Bitcoin a frôlé la barre symbolique des 20 000 dollars américains,créant ainsi un intérêt grandissant de la part des milieux d’affaires, des médias, des preneurs de décision, et du grandpublic. La communauté scientifique n’est pas en reste puisque des courants de recherche entiers sur le sujet sontapparus dans des disciplines aussi variées que la finance, l’économie, le marketing, l’éthique, l’informatique ou encorele droit. L’intérêt du duo cryptomonnaies – chaîne de blocs, en général, et du Bitcoin, en particulier –, s’est toutefoislimité à l’examen des aspects techniques, des capacités transactionnelles et des implications pour le commerce et lafinance. Très peu d’études se sont penchées sur l’examen des conséquences de ces systèmes d’échange décentraliséset pair-à-pair, tels que le Bitcoin et la chaîne de blocs, sur les configurations actuelles de la gouvernance mondiale.Cet article a pour objectif de faire un compte rendu commenté de l’ouvrage collectif Bitcoin and Beyond : Cryptocurrencies,Blockchains, and Global Governance. Dans cet ouvrage, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn met à contribution plusieursauteurs afin de mettre en lumière la manière dont la chaîne de blocs déborde du strict cadre économique et financierpour s’intégrer dans la gestion des sphères politique, légale et juridique. Ce faisant, l’ouvrage lève le voile sur denombreuses implications des cryptomonnaies et de la chaîne de blocs pour la gouvernance mondiale, souventméconnues et très peu étudiées dans la littérature, mais d’importance capitale dans un monde de plus en plusmondialisé.
Josh Kamps, Bennett Kleinberg
Pump-and-dump schemes are fraudulent price manipulations through the spread of misinformation and have been around in economic settings since at least the 1700s. With new technologies around cryptocurrency trading, the problem has intensified to a shorter time scale and broader scope. The scientific literature on cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes is scarce, and government regulation has not yet caught up, leaving cryptocurrencies particularly vulnerable to this type of market manipulation. This paper examines existing information on pump-and-dump schemes from classical economic literature, synthesises this with cryptocurrencies, and proposes criteria that can be used to define a cryptocurrency pump-and-dump. These pump-and-dump patterns exhibit anomalous behaviour; thus, techniques from anomaly detection research are utilised to locate points of anomalous trading activity in order to flag potential pump-and-dump activity. The findings suggest that there are some signals in the trading data that might help detect pump-and-dump schemes, and we demonstrate these in our detection system by examining several real-world cases. Moreover, we found that fraudulent activity clusters on specific cryptocurrency exchanges and coins. The approach, data, and findings of this paper might form a basis for further research into this emerging fraud problem and could ultimately inform crime prevention.
Muhammad Saad, Laurent Njilla, Charles Kamhoua, Aziz Mohaisen
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of this attack facilitated by recent developments in blockchain technology opening new attack avenues. By outlining the limitations of existing countermeasures, we highlight a need for new defense strategies to counter this attack, and leverage key system parameters in blockchain applications to propose an algorithm that enforces fair mining. We use the expected transaction confirmation height and block publishing height to detect selfish mining behavior and develop a network-wide defense mechanism to disincentivize selfish miners. Our design involves a simple modifications to transactions' data structure in order to obtain a “truth state” used to catch the selfish miners and prevent honest miners from losing block rewards.
Simon Dyson, William Buchanan, Liam Bell
We increasingly live in a world where there is a balance between the rights to privacy and the requirements for consent, and the rights of society to protect itself. Within this world, there is an ever-increasing requirement to protect the identities involved within financial transactions, but this makes things increasingly difficult for law enforcement agencies, especially in terms of financial fraud and money laundering. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in terms of the methods of privacy that are being used within cryptocurrency transactions, and in the challenges that law enforcement face.
Wesley Joon-Wie Tann, Xing Han, Sourav Sen Gupta, Yew-Soon Ong
No abstract is available for this record.
Moisés Toapanta, José Mero, Dario Huilcapi, Máximo Giovani Tandazo Espinoza · 6 authors
It was analysed in a general way and the security problem of the public organizations of Ecuador was determined. The objective is to generate a prototype in a blockchain diagram, based on an algorithm using flowchart techniques to provide robustness against failures, third-party attacks and mitigate information vulnerabilities. The deductive and exploratory research method was used in order to analyse the information available in the medium and scientific articles. Resulted an algorithm developed through flow diagram techniques to improve the processing of information in a public organization in Ecuador from the use of the Blockchain technology and the use of the SHA 256 algorithm. It was concluded that access to the data to a generic public organization of Ecuador will have an alternative to improve the security of the information with the implementation of the blockchain.
Yuen C Lo, Francesca Medda
Bitcoin is the world’s leading cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization briefly exceeding $300 billion. This hints at Bitcoin’s \namorphous nature: is this a monetary or a corporate measure? Hard values become explicit in the processing of transactions and \nthe digital mining of Bitcoins. Electricity is a primary input cost. Bitcoins earned are often used to circumvent local currency \ncontrols and acquire US dollars. For the period August 2010 to February 2018, we examine the components of Bitcoin mining \nrevenues, their statistical contribution to daily changes, and to its variance. We provide evidence that Bitcoin transaction processing \nis capacity constrained.
Alejandro Tomas Dini, Esteban Gabriel Abete, Marcelo Colombo, Javier Guevara · 6 authors
Blockchain is an innovative technology that allows a untrusted node network to share transactional data consistently while removing the need of a centralized authority. In this paper we propose a system to store citizen criminal records in a decentralized way by using a permissioned blockchain, taking advantage of some of its characteristics to ensure privacy, security, immutability, and disponibility of stored sensitive data. This system would overcome the current one since it can cryptographically guarantee that data, once stored, had not been modified but by a competent authority. It also improves the delivery of the records to its destination which can be geographically spread throughout the territory.
Esmeralda Kadëna, Péter Holicza
The innovative potential of blockchain technology proves to be convenient and useful in different sectors, but these opportunities may also be disruptive and create challenges. This paper investigates technical, risk and security related challenges of blockchain. The use of this technology is viewed in light of financial crime that pose a threat to security on national and international level as well. Firstly, elements of blockchain technology and the reasons they really matter are explained. Secondly, we focus on national security and how is it affected by the criminal use of cryptocurrencies. Thirdly, we elaborate on the lack of standards and mechanisms in connection with illegal activities, particularly money-laundering and financing terrorism. Finally, we suggest the use of fuzzy methods for security analysis and testing, and compatibility with GDPR for better protection of the recorded data in chain. We conclude that a collaboration of responsible entities in different sectors is needed as well as the investigation of potential ways in which actors can exploit further applications. The convergence of terrorism and cybercrime should be considered, and the necessary preventive actions taken.
Guillermo Sahonero-Alvarez
Peace engineering implies taking positive and proactive actions to promote peace and jnstice. Blockchain, on the other hand, is a distributed sequence of blocks which acts like a public ledger. Motivations to develop blockchain based systems are usually related to transparency and trust. Inherently, blockchain ideals relate to peace engineering because of the way users can manage information globally: transparently and confidently. Application of blockchain in higher education may represent a fundamental change in the way professors deliver contents, manage courses, and even assess student work. Moreover, higher education institutions can find blockchain useful as it has the potential to change the way of providing certifications and the way knowledge is managed, produced, and shared. In this work, we review previous works that address blockchain implementation in higher education highlighting implementation advantages and possible disadvantages Additionally, we explore further potential applications of smart contracts as a tool in blockchain based approaches to enhance engineering education programs.
Kentaroh Toyoda, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, P. Takis Mathiopoulos
Due to the increased popularity of Bitcoin, many researchers have analyzed how Bitcoin is being used based on the transaction history. However, the existing works analyze the transaction history in a "static" manner and none of them analyzes transaction history "dynamically", i.e. without taking into account the "time variation of how Bitcoin is transferred". The time analysis is in great demand for many practical cases, such as digital forensics tool that infers what was going on behind the scene of a fraudulent scam, and real-time inference of marketplace sales. In this paper, we propose a novel time series analysis for analyzing the history of Bitcoin transactions. In fact the main goal of our research is to detect changing points, namely anomaly detection, against a given (Bitcoin) address's transaction history. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it is tested against the transaction history of Pirate@40's HYIP (High Yielding Investment Program) scheme, which raised 700,000 BTC from his investors and was charged by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2013. It is shown that the proposed approach can successfully detect several remarkable points of Pirate@40's HYIP scheme, such as when its program's name was changed to Bitcoin Saving & Trust and when its investment rule was changed.
Silivanxay Phetsouvanh, Frédérique Oggier, Anwitaman Datta
The Bitcoin network is a complex network that records anonymous financial transactions while encapsulating the relationships among its pseudonymous users. This paper proposes graph mining techniques to explore the relationships among wallet addresses (pseudonyms for Bitcoin users) suspected to be involved in a given extortion racket, exploiting the anonymity of the Bitcoin network to collect and launder money. Starting around Bitcoin addresses of potential interest, neighborhood subgraphs are analyzed in terms of path length and confluence to detect suspicious Bitcoin flow and other wallet addresses controlled by the suspected perpetrators. We show with a dataset of the Ashley Madison blackmail campaign from August 2015 how the mechanisms can be used both to estimate the amount of money that was extorted by the suspected perpetrators under the specific blackmail campaign, and also estimate the amount of money handled by them during the same period of time.
Maxime Lambrecht, Louis Larue
How promising is Bitcoin as a currency? This paper discusses four claims on the advantages of Bitcoin: a more stable currency than state-backed ones; a secure and efficient payment system; a credible alternative to the central management of money; and a better protection of transaction privacy. We discuss these arguments by relating them to their philosophical roots in libertarian and neoliberal theories, and assess whether Bitcoin can effectively meet these expectations. We conclude that despite its advocates' enthusiasm, there are good reasons to doubt that Bitcoin can fulfill its promises and act as a functioning currency, rather than as a mere speculative asset.
Haaroon Yousaf, George Kappos, Sarah Meiklejohn
One of the defining features of a cryptocurrency is that its ledger, containing all transactions that have ever taken place, is globally visible. As one consequence of this degree of transparency, a long line of recent research has demonstrated that--even in cryptocurrencies that are specifically designed to improve anonymity--it is often possible to track money as it changes hands, and in some cases to de-anonymize users entirely. With the recent proliferation of alternative cryptocurrencies, however, it becomes relevant to ask not only whether or not money can be traced as it moves within the ledger of a single cryptocurrency, but if it can in fact be traced as it moves across ledgers. This is especially pertinent given the rise in popularity of automated trading platforms such as ShapeShift, which make it effortless to carry out such cross-currency trades. In this paper, we use data scraped from ShapeShift over a thirteen-month period and the data from eight different blockchains to explore this question. Beyond developing new heuristics and creating new types of links across cryptocurrency ledgers, we also identify various patterns of cross-currency trades and of the general usage of these platforms, with the ultimate goal of understanding whether they serve a criminal or a profit-driven agenda.