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What's Next in Blockchain Research? -An Identification of Key Topics Using a Multidisciplinary Perspective
Abstract and Figures
Distributed ledger technology, frequently designated as "blockchain," is evolving from its hype phase toward greater maturity and long-term value creation. Although many academic communities were initially slow to grasp the technology's numerous potential implications, meanwhile a substantial amount of research is dedicated to investigating the development and impact of blockchain and related technologies. As undertaken, most research projects take a specific homogenous perspective, such as a technical or business viewpoint. To date, blockchain research studies are largely missing a bridge between and across academic disciplines. Given the manifold implications of blockchain technology, a fruitful cross-disciplinary exchange is therefore needed. In this paper, we bring together researchers with varying expertise to provide a vision into what may be next in terms of concepts, applications, and research agendas. We consider business, economic, societal, legal, technical, and philosophical viewpoints and propose multiple research questions as well as hypotheses arising from these diverse viewpoints. Simultaneously, we challenge various academic communities to tackle some of the most crucial issues of current blockchain research and to develop a solid foundation for future exploration.
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... Their reliance on historical data and linear assumptions limits their ability to capture nonlinear price movements [24]. This led researchers to explore more flexible methodologies capable of capturing the complex dynamics of the cryptocurrency [25]. ...
... Method Limitations [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [8], [11], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25] Financial econometrics and timeseries analysis (e.g., ARIMA, SARIMAX) ...
... Our findings align with calls for an incremental nature of academic research and the need to tackle pending problems [17]. Even though we used a blockchain case as an example, our suggested approach applies to all kinds of technologies. ...
Innovative technologies promise countless disruptive use cases in the travel and tourism industry. Despite their potential to improve the sector, technology adoption faces substantial barriers, such as high implementation costs, the need for significant infrastructure upgrades, and a lack of technical expertise among stakeholders. Existing theoretical approaches (e.g., Diffusion of Innovation, Technology-Organization-Environment framework) regularly assume a gradual adoption process and identify potentially relevant adoption drivers. However, such broad theories can only partially explain the high failure rates of startups in the industry and offer little advice for new endeavors. In this study, we use the case of Winding Tree, a startup that strived to create a decentralized, open-source marketplace for the travel industry, to illustrate the need for a stronger focus on the adoption gap and the key factors that enable or prevent enterprises from reaching a critical market size. We suggest a modification of Chasm Theory for tourism and travel research and present a framework that can help to better explore, explain, and predict the impact of digital transformation.
... This fragmentation complicates efforts to build a cohesive understanding of the psychological effects of cryptocurrency trading, highlighting the need for greater interdisciplinary collaboration in future research efforts. 33,34 Alongside this, our review identified a range of psychological factors, including cognitive biases, anxiety, and addiction, that shape trading behaviors. Different methodologies, study designs, and focal points have made building a cohesive body of knowledge challenging. ...
Background
Cryptocurrency trading seemingly mirrors the high-risk, high-reward nature of gambling, and may cause significant psychological challenges to traders. As cryptocurrency trading becomes mainstream, this scoping review aims to synthesize evidence from empirical studies to understand the emotional, cognitive, and social influences on cryptocurrency traders, and identify associated mental health traits/attributes influencing their behaviors.
Methods
This review adhered to PRISMA-ScR guidelines, pooling in 13 studies involving 11,177 participants across multiple countries. A detailed literature search was conducted up to August 4, 2024, and was rerun on October 9, 2024 using databases including PubMed/Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and Scopus. Keywords used included psychiatry, psychology, mental health, cryptocurrency, trading behavior, mental health, substance use, gambling, investment, and/or emotional impact. These terms were refined through iterative searches to retrieve the most relevant studies.
Results
The scoping review found several key psychological factors affecting cryptocurrency trading behaviors. Many traders exhibited addiction-like behaviors, compulsively trading even when it leads to financial losses. Social media was found to have a strong influence, encouraging herd behavior and impulsive decision-making to follow trends. High levels of psychological distress, including anxiety and depression, were found to be linked to the market’s volatility and risks. Overconfidence bias was observed to make traders underestimate risks and overestimate their ability to predict the market. Cognitive biases like confirmation bias and the disposition effect caused traders to hold onto losing investments and sell winning ones too early.
Conclusion
Due to the shared psychological traits between cryptocurrency trading and gambling, it is imperative to implement targeted early interventions to mitigate the risk of its progression into a pathological condition. Tools like the Problematic Cryptocurrency Trading Scale may help identify and manage risky behaviors. Ongoing research is crucial to identify both positive and negative impact of cryptocurrency trading to develop effective support systems and regulatory policies to address traders’ mental well-being.
... Second, numerous criticisms and challenges exist regarding Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain, both individually and in their interplay. For example, both technologies can be notoriously energy-intensive (in the case of Blockchain, this pertains mainly to the use of Proof-of-Work as a consensus mechanism), but there are also other issues such as scalability, interoperability, security, privacy, and potentially also regulatory issues, calling for extensive and structured future investigations (Treiblmaier et al. 2021). ...
Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, coined the term "chaordic" to describe simultaneously chaotic and ordered systems. Based on his reasoning, we introduce the Theory of Chaordic Economics to explain how economic systems are transformed by two disruptive technologies: Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain. Artificial intelligence can generate novel output through algorithmic yet rather unpredictable processes. Blockchain creates deterministic results without central authorities and relies on elaborated protocols that prescribe how consensus can be reached within a network of peers. The amalgamation of chaos and order produces chaordic economic systems and can yield hitherto unthinkable economic structures.
... It is a decentralised distributed ledger system that is immutable and append-only [35]. The fundamental components of blockchain technology, including associated time stamping, verifiable logs, proof-of-work, fault tolerance, asymmetric encryption, and smart contracts, were conceptualised and developed several decades before the emergence of the first online blockchain [36]. Blockchain technology enables the establishment of a decentralised service by replicating distributed systems, accomplishing similar objectives as those of a trustworthy centralised system [22]. ...
Blockchain technology has become significant for financial sectors, especially digital payment systems, offering enhanced security, transparency, and efficiency. However, there is limited research on the factors influencing user trust in and acceptance of blockchain adoption in digital payment systems. This systematic review provides insight into the key factors impacting consumers’ perceptions and behaviours towards embracing blockchain technology. A total of 1859 studies were collected, with 48 meeting the criteria for comprehensive analysis. The results showed that security, privacy, transparency, and regulation are the most significant factors influencing trust for blockchain adoption. The most influential factors identified in the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model include performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions. Incorporating a trust and acceptance model could be a viable approach to tackling obstacles and ensuring the successful integration of blockchain technology into digital payment systems. Understanding these factors is crucial for creating a favourable atmosphere for adopting blockchain technology in digital payments. User-perspective research on blockchain adoption in digital payment systems is still insufficient, and this aspect still requires further investigation. Blockchain adoption in digital payment systems has not been sufficiently conducted from the user’s perspective, and there is a scope for it to be carried out. This review aims to shed light on the factors of trust in and acceptance of blockchain adoption in digital payment systems so that the full potential of blockchain technology can be realised. Understanding these factors and their intricate connections is imperative in fostering a conducive environment for the widespread acceptance of blockchain technology in digital payments.
... Additionally, the results indicated that the opinions of the leaders were not in line with the majority. Moreover, in research, there is an inertia between the emergence of technology and publications [48]. However, substantial research has been undertaken regarding blockchain and Bitcoin. ...
Since 2012, researchers have explored various factors influencing Bitcoin prices. Up until the end of July 2023, more than 9100 research papers on cryptocurrencies were published and indexed in the Web of Science Clarivate platform. The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of publications on Bitcoin prices. This study aims to uncover significant themes within these research articles, focusing on cryptocurrencies in general and Bitcoin specifically. The research employs latent Dirichlet allocation to identify key topics from the unstructured abstracts. To determine the optimal number of topics, perplexity and topic coherence metrics are calculated. Additionally, the abstracts are processed using BERT-transformers and Word2Vec and their potential to predict Bitcoin prices is assessed. Based on the results, while the research helps in understanding cryptocurrencies, the potential of academic publications to influence Bitcoin prices is not significant, demonstrating a weak connection. In other words, the movements of Bitcoin prices are not influenced by the scientific writing in this specific field. The primary topics emerging from the analysis are the blockchain, market dynamics, transactions, pricing trends, network security, and the mining process. These findings suggest that future research should pay closer attention to issues like the energy demands and environmental impacts of mining, anti-money laundering measures, and behavioral aspects related to cryptocurrencies.
... 4 [29], [59], [83], [141], [156] Discussions 7 [2], [5], [60], [80], [95], [104], [119] Bibliometric analysis 3 [46], [85], [94], 3 MCDM 13 [8], [16], [24], [45], [47], [52], [88], [90], [100], [116], [136], [140], [142], [157] Statistical 11 [6], [19], [51], [78], [79], [98], [117], [118], [126], [130], [ [1], [9], [23], [27], [54], [56], [57], [62], [64], [86], [91], [129], [145] Implementation 3 [42], [6585] ...
Understanding the prospective of blockchain technology and its uses in the healthcare sector is essential so that its considerable implementation can support the industry’s much-needed digitization. Furthermore, blockchain can provide answers to the issues in the healthcare industry today. Blockchain’s features like security, traceability, transparency, cost efficiency etc. can help bring supply chain transparency, health record management and prevent drug counterfeiting. Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology with great ability to bring changes to the healthcare sector. Therefore, this study aims to comprehend the current state of blockchain technology research in the healthcare supply chains. Further, it presents potential repercussions and the potential routes it may open for future research initiatives in this area. A systematic literature (SLR) process has been used and conducted in two stages. In the first stage, articles were identified through literature search and were subjected to keyword selection, database search and screening process. Finally, 124 papers were categorized through bibliographic coupling. A detailed investigation of these included papers was performed in the second stage with descriptive and content analysis. The results reveal that research related to blockchain applications or implementation is at a nascent stage. The publications in this area have been rising steadily over the past few years. When it comes to publishing in this field, India is the most productive nation while IEEE Access is the most productive journal. Applications for blockchain technology in healthcare include medical insurance, remote patient monitoring, medication supply chain management, electronic health records (EHRs), and more. The most popular use case is EHR management. The analysis further conveys that findings are less generalizable due to more theoretical or less empirically designed studies published in this domain. This study will help stakeholders, policymakers, researchers, and managers in taking strategic decisions regarding the adoption of the technology in the healthcare industry. This study is done concerning the blockchain’s use in the healthcare sector context, so other emerging technologies and sectors not taken must be considered while generalizing the results. This study is among the few up-to-date consolidated attempts to present a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis for assessing blockchain technology’s potential in the healthcare sector. It provides an overview of the published work with implications and proposed cluster-wise future research directions.
With advancements in distributed ledger technologies and smart contracts, tokenized voting rights gained prominence within Decentralized Finance (DeFi). Voting rights tokens (aka. governance tokens) are fungible tokens that grant individual holders the right to vote upon the fate of a project. The motivation behind these tokens is to achieve decentral control within a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Because the initial allocations of these tokens is often un-democratic, the DeFi project and DAO of Yearn Finance experimented with a fair launch allocation where no tokens are pre-mined and all participants have an equal opportunity to receive them. Regardless, research on voting rights tokens highlights the formation of timocracies over time. The consideration is that the tokens’ tradability is the cause of concentration. To examine this proposition, this paper uses an agent-based model to simulate and analyze the concentration of voting rights tokens post three fair launch allocation scenarios under different trading modalities. The results show that regardless of the allocation, concentration persistently occurs. It confirms the consideration that the ‘disease’ is endogenous: the cause of concentration is the tokens’ tradablility. The findings inform theoretical understandings and practical implications for on-chain governance mediated by tokens.
Investment and attention to blockchain burgeoned since 2019 and healthcare is one active industry experimenting with this novel technology. Among the projects in the healthcare blockchain sphere, the most prevalent theme is the booming of healthcare blockchain consortia. To explore the growing partnership activities in the healthcare blockchain sphere, we conducted a content analysis of collected archival data from public sources to address two research questions: What are these healthcare blockchain consortia and what are the potential benefits and challenges to these consortia? We found that healthcare organizations activities in forming consortia are largely unstructured. Information about their members, visions, objectives, and agenda is fragmentary, elusive, and sometimes confusing; most consortia are small size with less than or equal to 5 members and most organization join one consortia. Insights from strategic alliances and the emerging blockchain governance literature suggest that these consortia might face several organizational challenges to mature, especially when they are not prepared for the novel decentralized governance of blockchain consortia.
Since the 2000s, the interest around smart cities continues to grow due to the increasing digitalization, urbanization, and marketing of the smart city idea by tech companies. A central characteristic of smart cities is their use of digital technologies. One of these technologies that is increasingly applied in smart cities is the blockchain. Re-search on blockchain and how it is used within smart cities has grown significantly over the last years. Nowadays, research on blockchain in smart cities is a heterogeneous research field with contributions from many different disciplines. This paper therefore seeks to provide an analysis and overview of the emergent research field of the application of blockchain technology in smart cities. We do so by conducting a bibliometric analysis of research published between 2014 and 2021. As results, we give a thematic and bibliometric overview of this research field. This includes an overview of the past research on blockchain for smart cities, its key topics, and main areas of research. Furthermore, by giving an overview of potential future research questions, we aim to provide researchers with a platform for further developments within this field.
We significantly reduce the cost of factoring integers and computing discrete logarithms in finite fields on a quantum computer by combining techniques from Shor 1994, Griffiths-Niu 1996, Zalka 2006, Fowler 2012, Ekerå-Håstad 2017, Ekerå 2017, Ekerå 2018, Gidney-Fowler 2019, Gidney 2019. We estimate the approximate cost of our construction using plausible physical assumptions for large-scale superconducting qubit platforms: a planar grid of qubits with nearest-neighbor connectivity, a characteristic physical gate error rate of 10 − 3 , a surface code cycle time of 1 microsecond, and a reaction time of 10 microseconds. We account for factors that are normally ignored such as noise, the need to make repeated attempts, and the spacetime layout of the computation. When factoring 2048 bit RSA integers, our construction's spacetime volume is a hundredfold less than comparable estimates from earlier works (Van Meter et al. 2009, Jones et al. 2010, Fowler et al. 2012, Gheorghiu et al. 2019). In the abstract circuit model (which ignores overheads from distillation, routing, and error correction) our construction uses 3 n + 0.002 n lg n logical qubits, 0.3 n 3 + 0.0005 n 3 lg n Toffolis, and 500 n 2 + n 2 lg n measurement depth to factor n -bit RSA integers. We quantify the cryptographic implications of our work, both for RSA and for schemes based on the DLP in finite fields.
Blockchains can be public, permissionless networks implementing novel cryptocurrency-based technology features or permissioned, interorganizational networks championed by industry consortia. Some ventures operationalize a hybrid of these two network types to enhance adoption of their blockchain platforms by broadening their base of stakeholders or facilitating interoperability between heterogeneous blockchains. In this article, we synthesize literature and industry writings to identify four hybrid blockchain architectures: hybrid blockchain approach, connected hybrid blockchain, interoperable blockchain architecture, and hard-forked blockchain for enterprise use. We then analyze these architectures along dimensions of semantic modeling support between private and public networks, data connectivity between networks, syntactic interoperability support between networks with heterogeneous codebases, governance model, and technical features. We find that hybrid blockchain ventures make trade-offs: support API's, tools, and customized development so that a codebase is useful for private and public networks
or
provide such support for interoperation between heterogeneous codebases. We then conduct a case study of an exemplar for a hybrid blockchain approach, the startup Insolar. We identify characteristics that have led Insolar to be idiosyncratically agile and effective in its blockchain development, which together with our architecture analysis may be timely and prescriptive as enterprises grow interested in addressing blockchain hybridity and interoperability.
We show that combining two different hypothetical enhancements to quantum computation---namely, quantum advice and non-collapsing measurements---would let a quantum computer solve any decision problem whatsoever in polynomial time, even though neither enhancement yields extravagant power by itself. This complements a related result due to Raz. The proof uses locally decodable codes.
The study of setting up cryptocurrency incentive mechanisms and operationalizing governance is called token economics. Given the US$250 billion market cap for cryptocurrencies, there is compelling need to investigate it. In this article, we present facets of the token engineering process for a Swiss blockchain startup.
This book presents a self-contained, ab initio introduction to random tensors. The book is divided into two parts. The first part introduces the general framework and the main results on random tensors. The second part presents in detail specific examples of random tensors models. The book presents both asymptotic results (or perturbative, in the physics literature) and constructive (non perturbative) results in full detail. The book is suitable for readers unfamiliar with the field. The material presented is divided into three broad categories of results. The first category connects random tensors to topological spaces, Euclidean dynamical triangulations and random geometry. The second category consists of perturbative results on random tensors. It contains the 1/N expansion, the enumeration of graphs of fixed degree, the continuum limit, the double scaling limit as well as the study of phase transitions and symmetry breaking in tensor models. The results in the third category are non perturbative: the proof of the universality of Gaussian tensor measures and the construction of quartically perturbed Gaussian measure. These results are obtained using methods from enumerative combinatorics, probability theory and constructive field theory. Random tensors generalize random matrices and provide a framework for the study of random geometries in any dimension relevant for conformal field theory, statistical physics and quantum gravity.
Modern distributed data management systems face a new challenge: how can autonomous, mutually-distrusting parties cooperate safely and effectively? Addressing this challenge brings up questions familiar from classical distributed systems: how to combine multiple steps into a single atomic action, how to recover from failures, and how to synchronize concurrent access to data. Nevertheless, each of these issues requires rethinking when participants are autonomous and potentially adversarial.
We propose the notion of a cross-chain deal , a new way to structure complex distributed computations that manage assets in an adversarial setting. Deals are inspired by classical atomic transactions, but are necessarily different, in important ways, to accommodate the decentralized and untrusting nature of the exchange. We describe novel safety and liveness properties, along with two alternative protocols for implementing cross-chain deals in a system of independent blockchain ledgers. One protocol, based on synchronous communication, is fully decentralized, while the other, based on semi-synchronous communication, requires a globally shared ledger.
Blockchain technology is a secure and distributed information accounting, storage, and retrieval modality which has the ability to disrupt and revolutionize business practices. One such disruption resides in the capability of Blockchain to serve as a secure method for storing and sharing electronic medical records in new and innovative ways. Current medical record storage and transmission methods are proprietary and have interoperability and security problems. To that end, secure, effective, and interoperable electronic records options are highly prized. This article uses a grounded theory approach to qualitative analysis of electronic medical records users in the United States to develop a perspective from industry and scholarly practice on the suitability of Blockchain technologies for electronic medical records, security, and storage.