Blockchain Papers

Usman W. Chohan

No abstract is available for this record.

Mary E. Maginnis

No abstract is available for this record.

Octavian Nica, Karolina Piotrowska, Klaus Reiner Schenk–Hoppé

Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009, hundreds of cryptocurrencies have emerged, thus becoming a common fixture of financial news bulletins. With a market capitalization of the five highest-valued cryptocurrencies exceeding $140 billion at the time of writing, these alternative currencies have caught the attention of both financial institutions and central banks with their innovative technological foundations and their potential to disrupt current financial institutional structures. We provide a non-technical overview of the concept and current market structure of cryptocurrencies for researchers in economics, finance, mathematics and computer science.

Dr Craig S Wright, Stephane Savanah

No abstract is available for this record.

John O. McGinnis, Kyle Roche

Modern law makes currency a creature of the state and ultimately the value of its currency depends on the public’s trust in that state. While some nations are more capable than others at instilling public trust in the stability of their monetary institutions, it is nonetheless impossible for any legal system to make the pre-commitments necessary to completely isolate the governance of its money supply from political pressure. This proposition is true not only today, where nearly all government institutions manage their money supply in the form of central banking, but also true of past private banking regimes circulating their notes under the shadow of public law. However, bitcoin represents a potential third currency regime far more resistant to state control because it mints currency units that exist in no physical place, places a numerical ceiling on the number of units that can be created, and relies on scientific principles from cryptography to guarantee that ceiling and verify any person-to-person transfer. The trust required is not in any government but in the decentralized order of those who verify bitcoin transactions and those who create the software these verifiers choose to run on their connected computers.\nThis Article explores the fundamental structure of bitcoin, first by demystifying it as a technology, and second by showing how its decentralized order contrasts with other currency regimes. Unlike governments that use the power of law to compel action, bitcoin relies on a system of built-in incentives to encourage behavior that benefits not only those seeking to use bitcoin, but also bitcoin miners—those who voluntarily undertake the task of maintaining the payment network. While currently bitcoin is too volatile to compete with all but the worst government-issued currencies, the qualities of this system may give bitcoin a long-term advantage over many currencies. As the bitcoin ecosystem continues to grow, its nonlegal order can help it climb the rungs of stability created by distrust in government.\nThe technology underpinning bitcoin is the next point of innovation in the digital age—the same era that has already seen software create institutional disruption from Amazon, Facebook, and Uber, among many others. As bitcoin gains in popularity, it offers a platform for other kinds of technological alternatives to traditional legal regimes, like smart contracts. Bitcoin’s order without currency law will facilitate other forms of order with less law.\nThis is a propitious time for fundamental examination of bitcoin. Despite experiencing significant speculation and volatility throughout late 2017 and early 2018, its ten-year history demonstrates a downward trend in volatility and an upward trend in market capitalization.

Luca Brunoni, Olivier Beaudet-Labrecque

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief explanation regarding the authors' current research in the field of the possible uses of smart contracts in cybercrime, focusing in particular on how the technology could provide a substitute for trust both in client-criminal transactions and in transactions taking place within criminal organizations. The authors share the conviction put forward by Alharby and Moorsel [1] in their 2017 analysis of blockchain- based smart contracts that there is a ”lack of studies on criminal activities in smart contracts”: while quality research does exist, including a paper by Juels et al. [2] detailing three types of such activities that can be facilitated by the technology, it is evident that the subject deserves a more widespread attention. Quality research, in fact, could play an important role in aiding authorities and regulators to understand the issue and react accordingly.

Yevhen Zolotavkin, Julián García, Carsten Rudolph

No abstract is available for this record.

Sailendra Prasanna Mishra

No abstract is available for this record.

Joe Blankenship

Cryptocurrencies and blockchains are increasingly used, implemented and adapted for numerous purposes; people and businesses are integrating these technologies into their practices and strategies, creating new political economies and spaces in and of everyday life. This thesis seeks to develop a foundation of geographic theory for the study of spatial production within and surrounding blockchain technologies focusing on acute studies of Bitcoin as cryptocurrency, Ethereum as digital marketplace, and their conditions of possibility as decentralized autonomous organizations. Utilizing concepts from Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space, this thesis situates blockchain technologies within the wider discussion about the political economy of modes of spatial production, dialectical material methods, code/space, and network society through an examination of human and machine relations within their unique and emergent spaces. Combining phenomenological and dialectical material methods with the methodological practice of discourse analysis and systems theory, this thesis explores an understanding of how systemic mechanisms and actant actions driving blockchain technologies are indications of new evolutions in our conceptions of space and place in everyday life of later informational capitalism.

Christian Janze

While public and private entities question the utility of privacy preserving means of electronic payments for individuals other than criminals, discussions are primarily based on anecdotal evidence. Thus, we address the overall research question of whether pseudonymous cryptocurrencies are primarily used by criminals. Based on Rational Choice Theory and darknet market design, we build a dynamic research model. Utilizing panel data of 296,875 unique product and service listings that were available on 19 darknet markets from June 2014 to July 2015 as well as Bitcoin blockchain transactions, we provide evidence for the co-evolution of Bitcoin and darknet markets. We find that transactions within the Bitcoin blockchain and the usage of transaction obfuscation services can be related to previous sales on darknet markets. The temporal lag can be attributed to escrow mechanisms. We contribute to the research stream of cryptocurrency usage behavior and discussions of regulators, governments and financial services firms.

Anastasia Sotiropoulou, Dominique Guégan

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.

Philipp Hacker

No abstract is available for this record.

Christoph Kinkeldey, Jean‐Daniel Fekete, Petra Isenberg

BitConduite is a system we are developing for the visual exploration of financial activity on the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin is the largest digital pseudo-currency worldwide and its study is of increasing interest and importance to economists, bankers, policymakers, and law enforcement authorities. All financial transactions in Bitcoin are available in an openly accessible online ledger-the (Bitcoin) blockchain. Yet, the open data does not lend itself easily to an analysis of how different individuals and institutions-or entities on the network-actually use Bitcoin. Our system BitConduite offers a data transformation back end that gives us an entity-based access to the blockchain data and a visualization front end that supports a novel high-level view on transactions over time. In particular, it facilitates the exploration of activity through filtering and clustering interactions. We are developing our system with experts in economics and will conduct a formal user study to assess our approach of Bitcoin activity analysis.

Octavian Nica, Karolina Piotrowska, Klaus Reiner Schenk–Hoppé

No abstract is available for this record.

Usman W. Chohan

Services known as Cryptocurrency “Tumblers” obfuscate the provenance, possession, and movement of cryptocurrencies through a process of “mixing” . While this speaks to the cryptoanarchist philosophical roots of cryptocurrencies, it poses various forms of risks, particularly those subsumed by the anti-money laundering (AML) category. This discussion paper examines that dichotomy, between cryptoanarchism and oversight, through the Tumbler lens, so as to consider the regulation, oversight, and legality of Tumblers themselves.

Hanqing Liu, Na Ruan, Rongtian Du, Weijia Jia

Selfish mining is a well-known mining attack strategy discovered by Eyal and Sirer in 2014. After that, the attackers' strategy has been further discussed by many other works, which analyze the strategy and behavior of a single attacker. The extension of the strategy research is greatly restricted by the assumption that there is only one attacker in the blockchain network, since, in many cases, a proof of work blockchain has multiple attackers. The attackers can be independent of others instead of sharing information and attacking the blockchain as a whole. In this paper, we will establish a new model to analyze the miners' behavior in a proof of work blockchain with multiple attackers. Based on our model, we extend the attackers' strategy by proposing a new strategy set publish-n. Meanwhile, we will also review other attacking strategies such as selfish mining and stubborn mining in our model to explore whether these strategies work or not when there are multiple attackers. The performances of different strategies are compared using relative stale block rate of the attackers. In a proof of work blockchain model with two attackers, strategy publish-n can beat selfish mining by up to 26.3%.

Zura Kakushadze, Jim Kyung-Soo Liew

We discuss Russia's underlying motives for issuing its government-backed cryptocurrency, CryptoRuble, and the implications thereof and of other likely-soon-forthcoming government-issued cryptocurrencies to some stakeholders (populace, governments, economy, finance, etc.), existing decentralized cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum), as well as the future of the world monetary system (the role of the U.S. therein and a necessity for the U.S. to issue CryptoDollar), including a future algorithmic universal world currency that may also emerge. We further provide a comprehensive list of references on cryptocurrencies.

Fabio Massacci, Chan Nam Ngo, Jing Nie, Daniele Venturi · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Yaron Velner, Jason Teutsch, Loi Luu

Despite their incentive structure flaws, mining pools account for more than 95% of Bitcoin’s computation power. This paper introduces an attack against mining pools in which a malicious party pays pool members to withhold their solutions from their pool operator. We show that an adversary with a tiny amount of computing power and capital can execute this attack. Smart contracts enforce the malicious party’s payments, and therefore miners need neither trust the attacker’s intentions nor his ability to pay. Assuming pool members are rational, an adversary with a single mining ASIC can, in theory, destroy all big mining pools without losing any money (and even make some profit).

Zac Zimmer

Bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency, has been celebrated as the future of money on the Internet. Although Bitcoin does present several forward-looking innovations, it also integrates a very old concept into its digital architecture: the mining of precious metals. Even though Bitcoin explicitly invokes mining as a metaphor and gold as an example for understanding the cryptocurrency, there has been little critical work on the connections between Bitcoin and previous metalist currency regimes. The following essay proposes a historical comparison with colonial South American silver mining and the global currency regime based on the New World silver peso it created as a way to interrogate Bitcoin. The comparison with colonial South America, and specifically the silver mining economy around the Cerro Rico de Potosí, will help to develop a historical and political understanding of Bitcoin's stakes, including questions of resources, labor, energy, and ecology. Mining and the extractive apparatus that accompanies it always imply massive-scale earthworks that reshape the planet itself, a process known as terraforming. The Potosí comparison will reveal Bitcoin to form part of a similar process of digital primitive accumulation we can provisionally name cryptoforming.

Stephen Ranshous, Cliff Joslyn, Sean J. Kreyling, Kathleen Nowak · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Usman W. Chohan

The meteoric rise of Bitcoin has led to heightened investment, academic, commercial, numismatic, transactional, and practitioner interest in that cryptocurrency, as well as in the growing array of such instruments worldwide. This leads to an accentuated need for an examination of the historical evolution of Bitcoin as the seminal instrument in the development of cryptocurrencies, and this discussion paper seeks to address that gap.

Okke Schrijvers, Joseph Bonneau, Dan Boneh, Tim Roughgarden

No abstract is available for this record.

David Easley, Maureen O’Hara, Soumya Basu

No abstract is available for this record.