The blockchain is the underlying technology of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, and it has created much excitement in the technology and research communities. A blockchain is a distributed ledger collectively maintained by a peer‐to‐peer network of participants who in Bitcoin are known as miners. This key innovation enables cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to operate in a decentralized manner with no intermediaries such as financial institutions. But the blockchain can be used to record things other than cryptocurrency transactions. While many of the concepts of Bitcoin build on what have been around since the 1980s and 1990s, the designer(s) of it have made important assumptions that make it work along with the use of an incentive protocol, leading to a major breakthrough from traditional academic thinking. In this paper, we present the state‐of‐the‐art of blockchain and cryptocurrencies along with research challenges and opportunities that would be of interest to researchers getting into this exciting field.
Friedrich Holotiuk, Francesco Pisani, Jürgen Moormann
Blockchain is receiving considerable attention among practitioners and academics. However, a detailed analysis investigating how the impact of blockchain is going to unfold is still missing. Our article sets out to assess the radicalness of blockchain at an early stage of its development and substantiates the analysis with evidence from the payments industry. We start by distilling five key aspects of radical innovation from extant literature. Our analysis of blockchain then focuses on the payments industry, which represents a major business field of banking and the cradle of this technology. The results of a Delphi study provide 17 statements about the current development of blockchain. The statements deliver insights into the impact of blockchain on the payments industry and reveal the radicalness of the technology. Based on these insights, we investigate how blockchain affects the five key aspects of radical innovation and develop contributions from an innovation management’s perspective.
Karthik Balisagar, Thomas Brown, Guillaume Duquesne, Miguel de la Mano · 5 authors
This series of articles explores the implications of blockhain for competition in the banking industry. Each of the articles takes a slightly different perspective on the issue. The first…
Integrating triple bottom line (TBL) goals into supply chains (SCs) is a challenging task which necessitates the careful coordination of numerous stakeholders’ individual interests. Recent technological advancements can impact TBL sustainability by changing the design, structure, and management of modern SCs. Blockchain technology enables immutable data records and facilitates a shared data view along the supply chain. The Physical Internet (PI) is an overarching framework that can be applied to create a layered and comprehensive view of the SC. In this conceptual paper, I define and combine these technologies and derive several high-level research areas and research questions (RQ) to investigate adoption and management as well as structural SC issues. I suggest a theory-based research agenda for the years to come that exploits the strengths of rigorous academic research, while remaining relevant for industry. Furthermore, I suggest various well-established theories to tackle the respective research questions and provide specific directions for future research.
Conventional railway operations employ specialized software and hardware to ensure safe and secure train operations. Track occupation and signaling are governed by central control offices, while trains (and their drivers) receive instructions. To make this setup more dynamic, the train operations can be decentralized by enabling the trains to find routes and make decisions which are safeguarded and protocolled in an auditable manner. In this paper, we present the case study findings of a first-of-its-kind blockchain-based prototype implementation for railway control, based on decentralization but also ensuring that the overall system state remains conflict-free and safe. We also show how a blockchain-based approach simplifies usage billing and enables a train-to-train/machine-to-machine economy. Finally, first ideas addressing the use of blockchain technology as a life-cycle approach for condition-based monitoring and predictive maintenance in train operations are outlined.
Conventional railway operations employ specialized software and hardware to\nensure safe and secure train operations. Track occupation and signaling are\ngoverned by central control offices, while trains (and their drivers) receive\ninstructions. To make this setup more dynamic, the train operations can be\ndecentralized by enabling the trains to find routes and make decisions which\nare safeguarded and protocolled in an auditable manner. In this paper, we\npresent the findings of a first-of-its-kind blockchain-based prototype\nimplementation for railway control, based on decentralization but also ensuring\nthat the overall system state remains conflict-free and safe. We also show how\na blockchain-based approach simplifies usage billing and enables a\ntrain-to-train/machine-to-machine economy. Finally, first ideas addressing the\nuse of blockchain as a life-cycle approach for condition based monitoring and\npredictive maintenance in train operations are outlined.\n
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinato-rially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have different profitabilities in Ethereum. The attacker can either broadcast his fork one block by one, or keep them secret as long as possible and publish them all at once at the end of an attack cycle. The first strategy is damaging for substantial hashrates, and we show that the second strategy is even worse. This confirms what we already proved for Bitcoin: Selfish mining is most of all an attack on the difficulty adjustment formula. We show that the current reward for signaling uncle blocks is a weak incentive for the attacker to signal blocks. We compute the profitabilities of different strategies and find out that for a large parameter space values, strategies that do not signal blocks are the best ones. We compute closed-form formulas for the apparent hashrates for these strategies and compare them. We use a direct combinatorics analysis with Dyck words to find these closed-form formulas.
Günümüzde teknolojinin hızla gelişmesi hayatımıza birçok alanda yenilik getirmeye başlamıştır. Özellikle finansal açıdan yenilikler hayatımızı direkt olarak etkilemektedir. Yapılan mal veya hizmet harcamaları internet üzerinden yapılmaya başlanmış olması geleneksel ödeme yöntemlerini değişikliğe uğratmış ve elektronik ödeme yöntemlerini hayatımıza sokmuştur. Bununla beraber geleneksel paralar evrimleşerek sanal paralara dönüşmüştür. Sanal para olgusu 2009 yılında Nakamoto isimli kimliği henüz belli olmayan kişi ya da kuruluş tarafından çıkarılmış bitcoin isimli bir para birimi ile hayatımıza girmiş olup günümüzde popülerliğini arttırarak devam etmektedir. Blok zinciri teknolojisine sahip olan bu para birimi tamamen sanal olarak ve herhangi bir kuruluşa bağlı olmaksızın tarafların birbirine para transferleri yapmalarına imkân tanımaktadır. Bu para birimi devletlerce çıkarılmadığından dolayı para arzı, madencilik denilen bir süreç ile çıkmakta olup bir kişi ya da kuruluş fark etmeksizin gerekli donanım ve yazılım ile isteyen herkes bu para biriminin arzını sağlamaktadır. Herhangi bir kuruluşa bağlı olmadığı için de devletler bu paralar ile alakalı düzenlemeler getirmeye ve bazı ülkeler kontrolleri dışı geliştiğinden dolayı bu para birimini kullanımı yasaklamaya çalışmaktadır. Bu bağlamda, bu çalışmada finansal yenilikler ele alınmış özellikle elektronik ödeme yöntemleri ve sanal para olarak bitcoin üzerinde durulmuştur. Çalışmada konu ile ilgili literatür taranmış olup, sanal para kavramı açıklanmış, bu paranın kullandığı günümüzün en yeni teknolojisi olan blok zinciri ele alınmış, sanal para madenciliği ve bu paraya getirilen eleştiriler açıklanmıştır. Sonuç olarak hızla gelişen teknolojiye karşı koyulamayacağı için finansal açıdan değişikliklere hızlı cevap verilmesi ve bu yeniliklerden doğan avantaj ve dezavantajlar iyi belirlenmelidir.
For the sake of enhancing repurchase rate and customer loyalty, plenty of enterprises have issued reward points. However, as there are more enterprises issuing reward points, customers become less and less interested to collect them. Even though there are companies forming a business alliance to make reward points more attractive, it is usually managed by a central leading company. In other words, there still exists a security concern for a centralized system. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based cross-organizational integrated platform (BCOIP) for issuing and redeeming reward points. BCOIP provides customers an electronic reward point system that is easier to collect and manage and could circulate in many enterprises. Besides, since BCOIP deploys the smart contract to operate the reward point and make all point transactions stored on the permissioned blockchain, it provides more interoperability and security to enterprises and more credibility for costumers. Moreover, goods providers joining the BCOIP could not only improve the diversity of the reward market but also reach more costumers. Finally, we conduct two experiments to evaluate the efficiency and stability of the BCOIP. Results indicate that points transactions are stable regardless of the number of parallel processes and the other shows the number of nodes has nothing to do with the efficiency of this system.
Ahmed Gomaa, Mohamed I. Gomaa, Salem Lotfi Boumediene, Magdy Farag
Blockchain technology has evolved beyond its original uses as a methodology to record cryptocurrency transactions to support various business applications. Over the past few years, it has gained increased attention in the accounting profession. The current paper proposes a new conceptual framework to implement and apply blockchain technology in the accounting profession that is based on a single-ledger model. The paper addresses the reconciliation problem if more than one party is involved in a transaction. It defines the requirements to have an accounting system without reconciliation challenges. Following the paper approach, transaction details are recorded on the blockchain ledger before inserting the transaction details in the transacting parties’ ERP systems. This ledger is a single point of truth that can be viewed directly without the need for creating information silos in the ERP systems of transacting parties, hence addressing the reconciliation challenge. The presented framework creates one truth for all parties involved in a transaction eliminating much of the redundancy involved in current accounting systems.
In der Dissertation wird die Eignung der Distributed Ledger oder Blockchain-Technologie als Infrastruktur für dezentrale Marktplattformen untersucht. Dies beinhaltet die Schaffung eines konzeptionellen Rahmens, die technische Umsetzung durch Prototypen und die Analyse ökonomischer Auswirkungen. Im ersten Schritt kombiniert die vorliegende Arbeit die Ergebnisse einer strukturierten Literaturrecherche mit dem Market Engineering-Ansatz von Weinhardt und Gimpel (2007). Das resultierende „Blockchain Engineering Framework“ beschreibt den Aufbau und die Kernelemente blockchainbasierter Marktplattformen, zeigt Grenzen der Technologie auf und bietet einen Rahmen zur Strukturierung und Kommunikation von Forschungsvorhaben und -ergebnissen. Aus technologischer Sicht veranschaulichen zwei Prototypen die Implementierung und den Betrieb dezentraler Märkte. Der erste Prototyp betrachtet die Anwendung in Märkten mit Qualitätsunterschieden und Informationsasymmetrien anhand des Gebrauchtwagenmarktes. Der zweite Prototyp konzentriert sich auf Mikrostrukturaspekte und stellt einen Ansatz zum Handel von Aktien vor. Durch die Prototypen wird deutlich, wie die verteilte Datenbank Transparenz schafft und wie die diskrete Funktionsweise des Konsensmechanismus Interaktionen beeinflusst. Der dritte Teil greift diese Erkenntnisse auf und untersucht ökonomische Auswirkungen. In einem zweiperiodigen Spiel mit unvollständiger Information wird gezeigt, dass die öffentliche Verfügbarkeit von Qualitätsinformation zu opportunistischem Verhalten einzelner Marktteilnehmer und Marktversagen führen kann. Um den Einfluss der Kapazität und Frequenz neuer Datenblöcke auf die Qualität dezentraler Märkte zu analysieren, werden die entsprechenden Marktergebnisse mit Hilfe von Orderdaten der Börse Stuttgart nachgebildet. Die Auswertung der resultierenden Datengrundlage legt nahe, dass größere und schnellere Blöcke die Aktivität und Liquidität steigern. Gleichzeitig begrenzt eine Zunahme von Preisschwankungen die Skalierbarkeit dezentraler Märkte. Insgesamt stellt diese Dissertation einen ersten Schritt in der Analyse und Gestaltung dezentraler Marktplattformen dar. Sie skizziert wesentliche Elemente, demonstriert die technische Machbarkeit, beleuchtet ökonomische Konsequenzen und hebt zukünftigen Forschungsbedarf hervor.