First it has to be stated that Cryptocurrencies are mostly used for legal transfers between legitimate partners and are becoming more and more popular in our society. Any heavy regime of new regulations would make all transactions costlier and less convenient. Such negative economic impact is opposing the need of monitoring the financing structures of organized criminal and terrorist organisations. With the increasing importance of cryptocurrencies, a completely new field of complex problems is arising through the implied anonymity and complexity or sheer impossibility to track transfers in the dark net. As regulations in this new financial market will be difficult to enforce, it is necessary to establish international cooperation and capacity building to implement some possibilities for law-enforcement and intelligence entities to monitor the illegal parts of the capital flowing in these systems. To solve this situation, the focus should lie on the attempts to make the risk of detection of such transfers higher for the parties involved. Without interfering too strongly with the new financing system developing, this process asks for improved compliance and cooperation on all levels and capacities.
papers
In digital we trust: Bitcoin discourse, digital currencies, and decentralized network fetishism\
This paper outlines how the digital currency and network technology of bitcoin functions and explores the context from which it emerged. Bitcoin was conceived in 2008 as an attempt to alleviate trust in government and banks which was at a low during this period of financial crisis. However, with bitcoin trust does not dissipate, rather it shifts. Trust moves from trust in banks or states to trust in algorithms and encryption software. There is a move from conventional trust in the gold standard—“In Gold We Trust”—to the trust announced on U.S. currency—“In God We Trust”—to trust in software and networks—“In Digital We Trust”. The hyperbole of bitcoin discourse is deemed to be an expression of the Californian Ideology, which itself often conceals a right-wing agenda. The paper analyses the hype behind the celebration of decentralised digital networks. It proposes that a form of network fetishism operates here. The failure of bitcoin as a currency (rather than as a hoarded commodity in an emergent bubble) and as an idea might be attributed to the failure to see how ultra-modern digital networks conceal very traditional consolidation of power and capital. The rise and fall of bitcoin, in terms of its original ambition, serves as a cautionary tale in the digital age—it reveals how ingenious innovations that might challenge power and the consolidation of capital become co-opted and colonised by capital. Finally, the paper offers a discussion of the possible progressive uses of the digital technology bitcoin has facilitated.
The Scalability of Trustless Trust
Permission-less blockchains can realise trustless trust, albeit at the cost of limiting the complexity of computation tasks. To explain the implications for scalability, we have implemented a trust model for smart contracts, described as agents in an open multi-agent system. Agent intentions are not necessarily known and autonomous agents have to be able to make decisions under risk. The ramifications of these general conditions for scalability are analysed for Ethereum and then generalised to other current and future platforms.
the DAO: A Million Dollar Lesson in Blockchain Governance
Control over Blockchain Network by Aleksei Gudkov :: SSRN
Abstract
One of the key problems of blockchain technology is lack of control of users, organized societies, and state authorities over the transactions and asset on the decentralized network.
The distributed ledger and blockchain are interesting as an example of new technology, which is the rule not only for users but also for governments. Technology-driven rules can be viewed as a technological law for blockchain users and legislative authorities. No legal regulation can change the anonymity or immutability of blockchain. Only another technology could turn the situation around. This is a lesson for every lawyer to learn not only the law but the scope of technology.
The purpose of the article is an analysis of modern determinants of control distribution over assets, transactions, and decentralized organizations on blockchain distributed network.
The article shows how control appears in a variety of different situations on blockchain network. Examples range from the individual and organizational control to control over the networking system discussing the possibilities of the participants to exercise control.
On the base of the legal cases, the ability of controlling shareholder, directors, managers, governments, stakeholders and users of crypto-communities to control the organization, transactions and assets are discussed.
Keywords: control, blockchain, decentralized organization, virtual organization
Realizing the Potential of Blockchain | World Economic Forum
Realizing the Potential of BlockchainA Multistakeholder Approach to the Stewardship of Blockchain and CryptocurrenciesBlockchain, or distributed ledger technology, could soon give rise to a new era of the Internet even more disruptive and transformative than the current one. Blockchain’s ability to generate unprecedented opportunities to create and trade value in society will lead to a generational shift in the Internet’s evolution, from an Internet of Information to a new generation Internet of Value. The key to enabling this transition is the formation of a multistakeholder consensus around how the technology functions, its current and potential applications and how to create the regulatory, cultural and organizational conditions for it to succeed.
Source: Realizing the Potential of Blockchain | World Economic Forum
The digital traces of bubbles: feedback cycles between socio-economic signals in the Bitcoin economy
What is the role of social interactions in the creation of price bubbles? Answering this question requires obtaining collective behavioural traces generated by the activity of a large number of actors. Digital currencies offer a unique possibility to measure socio-economic signals from such digital traces. Here, we focus on Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has experienced periods of rapid increase in exchange rates (price) followed by sharp decline; we hypothesise that these fluctuations are largely driven by the interplay between different social phenomena. We thus quantify four socio-economic signals about Bitcoin from large data sets: price on on-line exchanges, volume of word-of-mouth communication in on-line social media, volume of information search, and user base growth. By using vector autoregression, we identify two positive feedback loops that lead to price bubbles in the absence of exogenous stimuli: one driven by word of mouth, and the other by new Bitcoin adopters. We also observe that spikes in information search, presumably linked to external events, precede drastic price declines. Understanding the interplay between the socio-economic signals we measured can lead to applications beyond cryptocurrencies to other phenomena which leave digital footprints, such as on-line social network usage.
A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names | April 2016 | Communications of the ACM
Bitcoin is a purely online virtual currency, unbacked by either physical commodities or sovereign obligation; instead, it relies on a combination of cryptographic protection and a peer-to-peer protocol for witnessing settlements. Consequently, Bitcoin has the unintuitive property that while the ownership of money is implicitly anonymous, its flow is globally visible. In this paper we explore this unique characteristic further, using heuristic clustering to group Bitcoin wallets based on evidence of shared authority, and then using re-identification attacks (i.e., empirical purchasing of goods and services) to classify the operators of those clusters. From this analysis, we consider the challenges for those seeking to use Bitcoin for criminal or fraudulent purposes at scale.
Understanding the landscape of Distributed Ledger Technologies/Blockchain: Challenges, opportunities, and the prospects for standards | RAND
In this report, we present an overview of the current landscape of DLT/Blockchain developments and closely examine the issues that are central to the development of DLT/Blockchain. We articulate a set of areas for further consideration by the DLT/Blockchain community regarding the potential role of standardization. Rather than providing a definitive list of topics, the aim of the study is to provoke further discussion across the DLT/Blockchain community about the potential role of standards in supporting the development and adoption of the technology. The research has been carried out using a mixed methods approach involving a focused review of the literature, in-depth interviews with experts from public and private organizations, and an internal workshop.