Efforts of various international institutions have supported implementation of national/regional single windows and the next logical step would be to internationalize and make them interoperable to allow for greater collaborative information sharing. The purpose of this paper is to review the legal framework necessary for implementing international single window environment (ISWE) and, in that context, examine particular economic and financial aspects of the current developments. The discussion shows that ISWE is desirable as it may contribute towards creating a level playing field for SMEs participating in global supply chains. The paper discusses ASEAN Single Window to identify prospects and challenges, and highlight the legal and economic viability of interoperability. ASW is examined from transaction cost and information asymmetry theory perspectives to provide a methodology for conducting empirical analysis at country-level. Based on the findings the paper argues that full potential of ISWE can be realised through integration of transport and commercial requirements thereby improving G2G, B2G and B2B information flows. Nevertheless, such integration would require the ability to capture the complex relationships between various transport actors from legal and technical standpoints. To illustrate this legal complexity from transport and e-commerce law angle, the disadvantageous position of SMEs vis-à-vis use of electronic bills of lading and access to supply chain finance is examined. A critical analysis of selected legal texts is made through the lens of recent developments such as distributed ledger and cloud technologies to suggest solutions for SMEs. The conclusion highlights that transport and commercial requirements in the ISWE has to be incorporated through laws made for e-commerce and not through a piecemeal approach that replicate the functions of paper documents in an electronic environment.
W artykule przedstawiono współczesne zagadnienia w dziedzinie walut cyfrowych. Przeanalizowano czynniki ekonomiczne, które doprowadzily do powstania walut cyfrowych wskazując, że jest to naturalny krok w rozwoju środków płatniczych. Dokonano przeglądu głów­nych typów walut cyfrowych i omówiono wplyw ich konstrukcji na popularność poszczególnych walut. Opisano zwięźle konkurencję na rynku kryptowalut.
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.
Bitcoin is a system created to service micro-payments in e-commerce, as well as the digital unit of value functioning in the system's environment. When analysed, the behaviour of market participants indicates that the introduction of investment applications of the cryptocurrency, in parallel with its original payment application, had a tremendous impact on the larger-scale functioning of the system. This was aided by the functioning of many trading platforms allowing for exchange into traditional currencies and a high volatility of quotations. Without doubt, bitcoin may be branded a ground-breaking financial innovation or a work of genius. However, the growing, and even global use of bitcoin has brought some of the system's imperfections to light. As the system developed, bitcoin users started to have a better view of the threats to the correct functioning of the system arising from its construction. The paper aims to indicate the main barriers limiting the functioning of the bitcoin system, and its use in payments in particular. The work has adopted the following research hypothesis: In the early stages of bitcoin functioning, users had little awareness of the technological flaws of the system. The study analyses the literature on the subject and the results of a survey carried out among Polish bitcoin users. The analysis confirms of the research hypothesis, as it shows that in the system's first several years, users identified the following threats to the system's functioning: the speculative nature of bitcoin, the lack of adequate awareness in society which would allow for a widespread use of the innovation, potential too strict regulation of the cryptocurrencies market or its banning. The authors also present threats to the functioning of the system which in their opinion are of greatest importance at the moment. These relate to the existence of intermediaries, the lack of systemic incentives addressed to bitcoin merchants, growing costs and payment processing time. The authors intend to indicate those aspects of bitcoin's functioning in order to make the use of cryptocurrencies more conscious and contribute to limiting financial risk of system users.
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are the result of the high-speed development of international economy and internet technology, this new management approach is also the need of management in different complicated industries as well. The objective of this paper is to present the basic concepts related to DAOs, blockchain technology and to reveal their advantages and disadvantages. A management perspective to the DAOs and related concepts is presented, also. Besides, in this paper the application of DAOs also will be discussed, from a general perspective but from our own, also.
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.
Jonathan Chiu, Thorsten V. Koeppl, Chiu, Jonathan, Koeppl, Thorsten
How well can a cryptocurrency serve as a means of payment? We study the optimal design of cryptocurrencies and assess quantitatively how well such currencies can support bilateral trade. The challenge for cryptocurrencies is to overcome double-spending by relying on competition to update the blockchain (costly mining) and by delaying settlement. We estimate that the current Bitcoin scheme generates a large welfare loss of 1.4% of consumption. This welfare loss can be lowered substantially to 0.08% by adopting an optimal design that reduces mining and relies exclusively on money growth rather than transaction fees to finance mining rewards. We also point out that cryptocurrencies can potentially challenge retail payment systems provided scaling limitations can be addressed.
Abstract By declaring an item legal tender or making it publicly receivable, governments might generate sufficient demand to determine the medium of exchange. How do private actors launch a new money? There are two views in the literature. The first requires offering an item with a use value to some agents that is distinct from its role as a medium of exchange. The second suggests that agents might coordinate on an intrinsically useless item. With these views in mind, I survey the logs from the original bitcoin forum, bitcoin-list. I find that early participants in the bitcoin community understood the importance of coordination and took steps to coordinate users.
Lan Ge, Christopher Brewster, J.C. Spek, Anton Smeenk · 9 authors
This report documents experiences and findings from the public private partnership (PPP) project 'Blockchain for Agrifood' that was started in March 2017. The project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the blockchain technology (BCT) and its implications for agrifood, especially how it can impact specific aspects of supply chains and what is needed to apply BCT in agrifood chains. A second aim of this project is to conceptualise and develop a proof of concept in an application based on a use case concerning table grapes from South Africa where BCT could be applied. This has been done by building a demonstrator that keeps track of different certificates involved in the table grapes supply chain. The code of this demonstrator is published at Github. 1 Furthermore, the project explored issues regarding the relevance, applicability and implications of BCT for the agrifood sector through literature study and stakeholder consultation.
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.
The aim of this chapter is to situate blockchain-based governance tools within a public value (PV) context, arguing that public governance on the blockchain requires elements of a “public value mindset,” which is comprised of transparency, efficiency, stakeholder salience and participation, innovative thinking, decentralization, and trust. To illustrate this PV mindset, the chapter analogizes the powerful solution put forth by cryptocurrencies towards the “double spending problem,” an issue that had once plagued electronic money, by arguing that the manner in which the double-spending problem was solved by blockchain technology (as best embodied by cryptocurrencies) also offers lessons for public governance on the blockchain, specifically in terms of the PV elements enumerated above. By elucidating the nature of the double-spending problem and the revolutionary solution offered by cryptocurrencies, the chapter advocates for a similar approach in the application of blockchain technologies to public management and governance.
Stefan Dziembowski, Lisa Eckey, Sebastian Faust, Daniel Malinowski
Payment channels emerged recently as an efficient method for performing cheap micropayments in cryptocurrencies. In contrast to traditional on-chain transactions, payment channels have the advantage that they allow for nearly unlimited number of transactions between parties without involving the blockchain. In this work, we introduce Perun, an off-chain channel system that offers a new method for connecting channels that is more efficient than the existing technique of ``routing transactions'' over multiple channels. To this end, Perun introduces a technique called ``virtual payment channels'' that avoids involvement of the intermediary for each individual payment. In this paper we formally model and prove security of this technique in the case of one intermediary, who can be viewed as a ``payment hub'' that has direct channels with several parties. Our scheme works over any cryptocurrency that provides Turing-complete smart contracts. As a proof of concept, we implemented Perun's smart contracts in Ethereum.
Open access
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Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin as concept was coined in 2009 and can be described as a partly open and shared transactional database. What makes bitcoin unique is that for the first time, we can prove and move ownership of anything digital without a central authority. The technology facilitates many benefits, one being a worldwide, digital currency and we observe that some stores allow payments in bitcoin. Drawing on concepts from the Diffusion of Innovation theory we investigated: What are the end-users’ motivations and barriers for using bitcoin as digital currency? Through a small survey, we collected 135 answers during the summer of 2016. Our findings include that the bitcoin users embrace bitcoin due to technological curiosity, thus an individual reason. The largest group, the non-users, state that they are awaiting for others to start using bitcoin, as they question the value and security issues. We conclude that we may witness a deadlock where “everybody waits for everybody”, and that more research is needed.