Building Decentralized Trust Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Design of Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Design of Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers
Abstract
This volume brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars from diverse fields including computer science, engineering, archival science, law, business, psychology, economics, medicine and more to discuss the trade-offs between different “layers” in designing the use of blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for social trust, trust in data and records, and trust in systems.
Blockchain technology has emerged as a solution to the problem of trust in data and records, as well as trust in social, political and economic institutions, due to its profound potential as a digital trust infrastructure. Blockchain is a DLT in which confirmed and validated sets of transactions are stored in blocks that are chained together to make tampering more difficult and render records immutable.
This book is dedicated to exploring and disseminating the latest findings on the relationships between socio-political and economic data, record-keeping, and technical aspects of blockchain.
... The theory of transparency aligns with the transparency features of blockchain technology [29]. Blockchain provides a shared and auditable ledger accessible to all authorized participants, allowing for greater transparency and accountability. ...
Diplomas are of particular importance in society, as they serve as official proof of education. Therefore, it is not surprising that counterfeits of such documents have become common. Thus, employers usually have to verify diplomas manually with the issuer. In line with the principles of social responsibility (accountability, transparence, ethical behavior, respect of stakeholders’ interest), ensure inclusive and equitable quality education (SDG 4) become a priority for universities. Blockchain technology creates opportunities to surmount these obstacles because it has revolutionized the way people interact with each other. For that purpose, a total of 147 students from a technical university in Romania answered questionnaires to determine how familiar they are with blockchain concepts and what they think about the implementation of this technology. Further, structured interviews were conducted with education and ICT experts to determine the main advantages and disadvantages, applications, and needs for adopting blockchain technology. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to explore the influence of blockchain on education through the assessment of 69 variables. The final part contains the consequences of the analysis’s findings and potential future advancements.
... al, 2018;Yeung, 2019;De Filippi & Hassan, 2018;De Filippi & Wright, 2018) as well as the its potential provide incentives and lead to better collective action, reinvigorating liberal principles in international cooperation and global governance (De Filippi, 2021;Reinsberg, 2021). Additionally, scholars have discussed the ideological origins and proclivities of blockchain communities (Brunton, 2019; Swartz, 2017) and 'decentralization' as a (contended) feature of blockchain systems (Srinivasan & Lee, 2017;Sai et al., 2021;Lemieux & Feng, 2021). Yet, the 'democratizing' aspect of blockchain technologies, i.e., the extent to which technical and political decentralization overlap, and how this relates to liberal democratic principles, has been largely neglected. ...
Proceedings of the ETHICOMP 2022
Conference was held in Turku, Finland, July 26-28, 2022.
Efficient traceability query processing is of utmost importance in blockchain systems. However, existing methods suffer from efficiency challenges, necessitating immediate optimization. Prior research primarily focuses on introducing complex data structures to alleviate storage system burdens in scenarios with frequent traceability requests. Unfortunately, these optimizations impose a substantial maintenance burden on full nodes, making it challenging to strike a balance between traceability efficiency and resource consumption. Through an analysis of traceability query processing methods in existing blockchain full nodes, this paper proposes a novel optimization scheme based on a multilevel cache. This scheme replaces repetitive and inefficient disk I/O operations with efficient in-memory operations, thereby significantly enhancing the efficiency of traceability queries. Additionally, the multilevel cache structure minimizes the memory overhead associated with maintaining the cache in full nodes, achieving an optimal trade-off between traceability efficiency and resource consumption while alleviating the burden on full nodes. Experimental validation confirms the effectiveness of the proposed efficiency optimization scheme for traceability queries in full nodes. The results demonstrate its ability to enhance the overall performance of traceability query processing, contributing to improved efficiency and scalability in blockchain systems.
The recent progress in blockchain and wireless communication infrastructures has paved the way for creating blockchain-based systems that protect data integrity and enable secure information sharing. Despite these advancements, concerns regarding security and privacy continue to impede the widespread adoption of blockchain technology, especially when sharing sensitive data. Specific security attacks against blockchains, such as data poisoning attacks, privacy leaks, and a single point of failure, must be addressed to develop efficient blockchain-supported IT infrastructures. This study proposes the use of deep learning methods, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bi-directional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), and convolutional neural network LSTM (CNN-LSTM), to detect phishing attacks in a blockchain transaction network. These methods were evaluated on a dataset comprising malicious and benign addresses from the Ethereum blockchain dark list and whitelist dataset, and the results showed an accuracy of 99.72%.
The increased use of advanced technologies by consumers and hospitals is moving care closer to patients, and the challenge is one of how patient data can be shared with external care providers and patients. To support care continuity, patient data include both clinical data used by external care providers and non-clinical data used by social care providers. Care coordination of a patient outside a hospital requires peer-to-peer connectivity among a number of these clinical and social care providers, using a digital platform that aligns their goals and assigns their resource sharing responsibilities. With no single entity supporting such care coordination, most hospitals currently distribute this responsibility to several of its provider partners and patients. Such a division of responsibility with no real time feedback leads to discontinuous resource sharing, localized data analysis, and challenges in tailoring care to improve health outcomes. The goal of this paper is to propose a blockchain architecture model that uses a number of constructs for creating and assigning ownership to patient data so it can support peer-to-peer resource sharing and uses smart contracts to support goal alignment. Using two blockchain applications implemented in Hyperledger and illustrating their potential representation using the constructs in multi-chain, we develop a conceptual model for developing blockchain applications in general to support continuity of care. The generalizability of this model is illustrated by applying these constructs to four additional healthcare applications. Finally, we conclude the paper with a discussion of the limitations and directions for future research.
The goal of this chapter is to reveal socio-organizational barriers for blockchain adoption in life sciences organizations and delineate the strategies that managers and executives can undertake to facilitate adoption. By drawing on the literature on innovation adoption and organizational culture and studying real-time blockchain adoption, this chapter describes the following socio-organizational barriers for blockchain adoption in life sciences organizations: (1) negative stereotypes of blockchain technology, (2) perceived technological complexity of blockchain, (3) highly institutionalized nature of life sciences organizations, and (4) lack of ecosystem mindset. The chapter also reveals strategies that can facilitate adoption: (1) holistic evaluation of blockchain life sciences use cases, (2) framing blockchain adoption as aligned with the innovative and safety-driven culture in life sciences organizations, (3) unobtrusive implementation, and (4) acting swiftly when the innovative culture gains strength. These insights draw attention to the overlooked socio-organizational aspects of blockchain adoption in life science and offer practical insights to make blockchain adoption a reality.KeywordsBlockchain adoptionSocio-organizational barriersAdoption strategiesOrganizational cultureResourcesLife sciences
Recently, digital innovation has revolutionized the world of payments and settlement services. Innovative technologies, such as the tokenization of assets, as well as new forms of digital payments, have challenged both current business models and the existing models of regulation. In this scenario, semantic transparency is fundamental not only to adapt regulation frameworks, but also to support information integration and semantic interoperability. In this paper, we deal with these issues by proposing an ontology-based approach for the modeling of payments and linked obligation settlements, that reuses reference ontologies to create ontology-based modeling patterns that are applied to model the domain-related concepts.
KeywordsEconomic exchangesDelivery versus paymentOntoUMLgUFO
Inspired by an industry initiative to address the celebrated market for lemons (poor-quality used cars), we investigate how incentives for a permissioned blockchain-based system in the automobile ecosystem can be designed to ensure high-quality data storage and use by different stakeholders. The peer-to-peer distributed ledger platform connects organizations and car owners with disparate interests and hidden intentions. While previous literature has chiefly examined incentives for permissionless platforms, we leverage studies about crowdsensing applications to stimulate research on incentives in permissioned blockchains. This paper uses the action design research approach to create an incentive system featuring a rating mechanism influenced by data correction measures. Furthermore, we propose relying on certain institutions capable of assessing data generated within the system. This combined approach of a decentralized data correction and an institutionalized data assessment is distinct from similar incentive systems suggested by literature. By using an agent-based model with strategy evolution, we evaluate the proposed incentive system. Our findings indicate that a rating-based revenue distribution leads to markedly higher data quality in the system. Additionally, the incentive system reveals hidden information of the agents and alleviates agency problems, contributing to an understanding of incentive design in inter-organizational blockchain-based data platforms. Furthermore, we explore incentive design in permissioned blockchains and discuss its latest implications.
Recently, digital innovation has revolutionized the world of payments and settlement services. Innovative technologies, such as the tokenization of assets , as well as new forms of digital payments, have challenged both current business models and the existing models of regulation. In this scenario, semantic transparency is fundamental not only to adapt regulation frameworks, but also to support information integration and semantic interoperability. In this paper, we deal with these issues by proposing an ontology-based approach for the modeling of payments and linked obligation settlements, that reuses reference ontologies to create ontology-based modeling patterns that are applied to model the domain-related concepts.
Archives, both analogue and digital, are primarily concerned with preserving records as originals. Because of this, immutable data as used in a blockchain data structure seem a logical choice when designing such systems. At the same time, archives maintain records which may need to change over the long term. It is a requirement of archival preservation to be able to update records’ metadata in order not only to guarantee authenticity after digital preservation actions but also to ensure that relationships to other records, which might be created after an original record has entered the archive (and has been registered in a blockchain), can be maintained. The need to maintain an archival bond, which represents a network of relationships between aggregation of records, ie, the relationship connecting previous and subsequent records belonging to the same activity, is a prime example of this requirement. This paper explores realisation of the archival bond in the context of blockchain-based archival system by proposing a supporting database system which enables metadata to be changed as required but also significantly simplifies searching compared to searching on-chain information, while keeping the immutability characteristic of blockchain.
Blockchain networks have attracted tremendous attention for creating cryptocurrencies and decentralized economies built on peer-to-peer protocols. However, the complex nature of the dynamics and feedback mechanisms within these economic networks has rendered it difficult to reason about the growth and evolution of these networks. Hence, proper mathematical frameworks to model and analyze the behavior of blockchain-enabled networks are essential. To address this need, we establish a formal mathematical framework, based on dynamical systems, to model the core concepts in blockchain-enabled economies. Drawing on concepts from differential games, control engineering, and stochastic dynamical systems, this paper proposes a methodology to model, simulate, and engineer networked token economies. To illustrate our framework, a model of a generalized token economy is developed, where miners provide a commodity service to a platform in exchange for a cryptocurrency and users consume a service from the platform. We illustrate the dynamics of token economies by simulating and testing two different block reward strategies. We then conclude by outlining future research directions that will integrate additional methods from signal processing and control theory into the toolkit for designers of blockchain-enabled economic systems.
Drawing on interviews with 77 high-performing eBay business sellers in France and Belgium, this article investigates the power asymmetries generated by customers’ evaluations in online work settings. Sellers revealed a high degree of sensitivity to negative reviews, which, while infrequent, triggered feelings of anxiety and vulnerability. Their accounts exposed power asymmetries at two levels: the transactional level between sellers and customers and the governance level between sellers and eBay. Our findings highlight three main mechanisms underlying power asymmetries in this context. First, online customer evaluations have created a new form of employee monitoring in which power is exercised through the construction of visibility gaps between buyers and sellers and through an implicit coalition between buyers and the platform owner, who join together in the evaluation procedures. Second, by mediating and objectifying relations, algorithms reproduce power asymmetries among the different categories of actors, thereby constraining human agency. Third, online customer evaluations prompt sellers to exploit their practical knowledge of the algorithm to increase their agency. Through the lived experience of working for an algorithm, our findings contribute new understandings of power and agency in online work settings.
This paper discusses blockchain technology as a public record keeping system, linking record keeping to power of authority, veneration (temples), and control (prisons) that configure and reconfigure social, economic, and political relations. It discusses blockchain technology as being constructed as a mechanism to counter institutions and social actors that currently hold power, but whom are nowadays often viewed with mistrust. It explores claims for blockchain as a record keeping force of resistance to those powers using an archival theoretic analytic lens. The paper evaluates claims that blockchain technology can support the creation and preservation of trustworthy records able to serve as alternative sources of evidence of rights, entitlements and actions with the potential to unseat the institutional power of the nation-state.
This paper explores blockchain technology’s potential to alter contracting both in the market and within organizations. We identify and discuss how blockchain reduces certain types of transaction costs while introducing additional costs that have not been present in traditional contracts. Blockchain technology also presents a new method to mitigate or avoid certain types of agency costs that stem from contracting with agents inside the firm. Through this theoretical discussion, our paper proposes several avenues for future research on how blockchain may alter contracting.
Biomedical research and clinical decision depend increasingly on scientific evidence realized by a number of authoritative databases, mostly public and continually enriched via peer scientific contributions. Given the dynamic nature of biomedical evidence data and their usage in the sensitive domain of biomedical science, it is important to ensure retrieved data integrity and non-repudiation. In this work, we present a blockchain-based notarization service that uses smart digital contracts to seal a biomedical database query and the respective results. The goal is to ensure that retrieved data cannot be modified after retrieval and that the database cannot validly deny that the particular data has been provided as a result of a specific query. Biomedical evidence data versioning is also supported. The feasibility of the proposed notarization approach is demonstrated using a real blockchain infrastructure and is tested on two different biomedical evidence databases: a publicly available medical risk factor reference repository and on the PubMed database of biomedical literature references and abstracts.
EU Data Protection Agencies have been vigorously enforcing violations of regional and national data protection law in recent years against U.S. tech companies but few changes have been made to their business model of exchanging free services for personal data. With the Cambridge Analytica debacle revealing how insufficient American privacy law is, we now find ourselves questioning whether the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is not the onerous 99 article regulation to be feared, but rather a creation years ahead of its time. This paper will explain how the differences in U.S. and EU privacy and data protection law and ideology have led to a wide divergence in enforcement actions and what U.S. companies will need to do in order legally process the data of their users in the EU. The failure of U.S. tech companies to fulfill the requirements of the GDPR, which has extraterritorial application and becomes applicable on May 25, 2018, could result in massive fines (up to $4 billion using the example of Google). The GDPR will mandate a completely new business model for these U.S. tech companies that have been operating for well over a decade with very loose restrictions under U.S. law. Will the GDPR be the end of Google and Facebook or will it be embraced as the gold standard of how companies ought to operate?
This is a working paper that is available for download at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3212210 and will be published in edited form in the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology in 2018 (volume 25).
Data provenance is a technique that describes the history of digital objects. In health data settings, it can be used to deliver auditability and transparency, and to achieve trust in a software system. However, implementing data provenance in analytics software at an enterprise level presents a different set of challenges from the research environments where data provenance was originally devised. In this paper, the challenges of reporting provenance information to the user is presented. Provenance captured from analytics software can be large and complex and visualizing a series of tasks over a long period can be overwhelming even for a domain expert, requiring visual aggregation mechanisms that fit with complex human cognitive activities involved in the process. This research studied how provenance-based reporting can be integrated into a health data analytics software, using the example of Atmolytics visual reporting tool.
Much digital preservation research has evolved around the idea of authentic digital objects and their significant properties. However, the nature of digital preservation work continues to be ill-defined. This paper unpacks definitions of digital objects and their significant properties to deconstruct misleading conflations. I review how the use of the terms digital object and significant properties has evolved in digital preservation, and I identify conceptual inconsistencies. By critiquing the system boundaries assigned by different writers to the term digital objects, I explore the metaphorical nature of the concept and show that the discourse routinely ignores the role of computation in favour of artifact-centred concepts of bits and records. As a consequence, I illustrate category errors around what it means to migrate and preserve digital objects. I suggest a reformulation of both terms based on their metaphorical nature and discuss how this reformu-lation aligns with insights from research on electronic records and digital preservation. The discussion shows that digital objects are best understood as a meta-phorical concept that allows us to articulate the emergent properties of computed performances relying on data, software, and hardware. Significant properties are best understood as mechanisms that allow curators to specify shared under-standings of what constitutes authentic reproductions of digital objects. At the core of digital preservation is the design of software-based information systems intended to reproduce authentic digital objects. The article thus contributes to a reframing of the nature of digital preservation and emphasizes the importance of the conceptual frame of computing and systems design in archival education and practice. Metaphors We Work By Reframing Digital Objects, Significant Properties, and the Design of Digital Preservation Systems christoph becker 7 RÉSUMÉ L'idée des objets numériques authentiques et de leurs propriétés impor-tantes a fait évoluer une grande quantité de recherche portant sur la préserva-tion numérique. Cependant, la nature du travail en préservation numérique n'est toujours pas bien définie. Cet article décortique les définitions des objets numériques et leurs propriétés importantes afin de déconstruire des amalgames trompeurs. J'examine comment l'utilisation des termes objets numériques et propriétés importantes ont évolué en préservation numérique et j'identifie les inconsistances conceptuelles. En critiquant l'attribution de limites de système à la notion d'objet numérique par divers auteurs, j'explore la nature métaphorique du concept et je montre que ce discours ignore couramment le rôle du traite-ment informatique en faveur de concepts centrés sur l'artéfact tels les bits et le document d'archives. Comme résultat, je dresse les erreurs de catégories dans ce que l'on entend par la migration et la préservation d'objets numériques. Je suggère une reformulation des deux termes en fonction de leur nature métaphorique et je discute de la façon dont cette reformulation s'aligne sur les résultats de la recherche sur les documents numériques et la préservation numérique. Cette discussion démontre que les objets numériques sont davantage compris comme un concept métaphorique permettant d'énoncer les propriétés émergentes des performances de système qui utilisent des données, des logiciels et du matériel informatique. Les propriétés importantes sont davantage comprises comme des mécanismes qui permettent aux conservateurs de préciser les compréhen-sions communes de ce en quoi consiste la reproduction authentique d'objets numériques. Au coeur de la préservation numérique se trouve la conception de systèmes d'information logiciels qui servent à la reproduction authentique des objets numériques. Cet article contribue alors à la redéfinition de la nature de la préservation numérique et met l'accent sur l'importance d'un cadre conceptuel en matière de traitement informatique et de conception de systèmes d'informa-tion dans la formation et la pratique archivistiques.
The electronic sharing of medical imaging data is an important element of modern healthcare systems, but current infrastructure for cross-site image transfer depends on trust in third-party intermediaries. In this work, we examine the blockchain concept, which enables parties to establish consensus without relying on a central authority. We develop a framework for cross-domain image sharing that uses a blockchain as a distributed data store to establish a ledger of radiological studies and patient-defined access permissions. The blockchain framework is shown to eliminate third-party access to protected health information, satisfy many criteria of an interoperable health system, and readily generalize to domains beyond medical imaging. Relative drawbacks of the framework include the complexity of the privacy and security models and an unclear regulatory environment. Ultimately, the large-scale feasibility of such an approach remains to be demonstrated and will depend on a number of factors which we discuss in detail.
Blockchain technology is often referred to as a groundbreaking innovation and the harbinger of a new economic era. Blockchains may be capable of engendering a new type of economic system: the blockchain economy. In the blockchain economy, agreed-upon transactions would be enforced autonomously, following rules defined by smart contracts. The blockchain economy would manifest itself in a new form of organizational design—decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO)—which are organizations with governance rules specified in the blockchain. We discuss the blockchain economy along dimensions defined in the IT governance literature: decision rights, accountability, and incentives. Our case study of a DAO illustrates that governance in the blockchain economy may depart radically from established notions of governance. Using the three governance dimensions, we propose a novel IT governance framework and a research agenda for governance in the blockchain economy. We challenge common assumptions in the blockchain discourse, and propose promising information systems research related to these assumptions.
This paper considers research documenting several cases of the application of blockchain technology to land transaction, medical, and financial record keeping. Using a thematic synthesis of the cases, the paper describes a typology of blockchain solutions for managing current records representing three distinct design patterns. It then considers the different types of solutions in relation to implications for long-term preservation of authentic records.
(15) A typology of blockchain recordkeeping solutions and some reflections on their implications for the future of archival preservation. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322511343_A_typology_of_blockchain_recordkeeping_solutions_and_some_reflections_on_their_implications_for_the_future_of_archival_preservation?origin=mail&reqAcc=Jean_Daniel_Zeller2 [accessed Feb 27 2018].
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have demonstrated how to securely implement traditionally centralized systems, such as currencies, in a decentralized fashion. However, there have been few measurement studies on the level of decentralization they achieve in practice. We present a measurement study on various decentralization metrics of two of the leading cryptocurrencies with the largest market capitalization and user base, Bitcoin and Ethereum. We investigate the extent of decentralization by measuring the network resources of nodes and the interconnection among them, the protocol requirements affecting the operation of nodes, and the robustness of the two systems against attacks. In particular, we adapted existing internet measurement techniques and used the Falcon Relay Network as a novel measurement tool to obtain our data. We discovered that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum has strictly better properties than the other. We also provide concrete suggestions for improving both systems.
In the Bitcoin system, participants are rewarded for solving cryptographic puzzles. In order to receive more consistent rewards over time, some participants organize mining pools and split the rewards from the pool in proportion to each participant's contribution. However, several attacks threaten the ability to participate in pools. The block withholding (BWH) attack makes the pool reward system unfair by letting malicious participants receive unearned wages while only pretending to contribute work. When two pools launch BWH attacks against each other, they encounter the miner's dilemma: in a Nash equilibrium, the revenue of both pools is diminished. In another attack called selfish mining, an attacker can unfairly earn extra rewards by deliberately generating forks.
In this paper, we propose a novel attack called a fork after withholding (FAW) attack. FAW is not just another attack. The reward for an FAW attacker is always equal to or greater than that for a BWH attacker, and it is usable up to four times more often per pool than in BWH attack. When considering multiple pools --- the current state of the Bitcoin network -- the extra reward for an FAW attack is about 56% more than that for a BWH attack. Furthermore, when two pools execute FAW attacks on each other, the miner's dilemma may not hold: under certain circumstances, the larger pool can consistently win. More importantly, an FAW attack, while using intentional forks, does not suffer from practicality issues, unlike selfish mining. We also discuss partial countermeasures against the FAW attack, but finding a cheap and efficient countermeasure remains an open problem. As a result, we expect to see FAW attacks among mining pools.
Imagine meeting a stranger and entering into a trusted economic exchange without needing a third party to vouch for you. What changes in your theoretical perspective in such a world? That model of interaction is what distributed trust technologies such as blockchain bring. I introduce the basic concept of distributed trust, describe some early instances, and highlight how organizational theories need to be updated to no longer rely upon fundamental assumptions about trust which are becoming outdated. Distributed trust fundamentally transforms boundaries of organizations, and challenges assumptions about internalizing organizational functions to overcome market trust coordination issues. Implicit assumptions about the legitimacy and power of central network positions no longer ring true. This is very fertile ground for organizations research as the core tenet of the field – what roles and functions should group together within an organization - is being called into question at the most fundamental level.
This chapter describes an emerging form of algorithmic governance, using the case study of " The DAO, " a short-lived attempt to create a decentralized autonomous organization on the Ethereum blockchain platform. In June, 2016, The DAO launched and raised an unprecedented $250m USD in investment. Within days of its launch, however, The DAO was exploited and drained of nearly 3.7m Ethereum tokens. This study traces the rise and fall of this emerging technology, and details the governance structures that were promised and hoped for, and those that were actually observed in its discourses. Through 2016-2017, these discourses were collected from online discussions and subsequently analysed. Using computer-assisted, qualitative analysis and coding, I traced the discursive strategies of the developers and the community of investors, identifying: 1) questions of legal authority, 2) tensions in practical govern-ance, and 3) admissions of the inherent complexity of bringing to life an algorithmic and experimental organizational model. This chapter describes a short-lived experiment in organizational governance that attempted to utilize algorithmic authority through cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies to create a social and political world quite unlike anything we have seen before. According to the visionaries behind the project, by encoding the rules of governance for organizations and governments in a set of " smart contracts " running on an immutable, decentralized, and potentially unstoppable and public blockchain, new forms of social interactions and order would emerge. This experiment was an example of a new form of organization , called a " Decentralized Autonomous Organization , " or DAO. The forms of sociality that would emerge—they promised—would be transparent, efficient , fair, and democratic. While the idea of decentralized autonomous organizations had been mooted since the early days of cryptocurrencies, the launch of sophisticated block-chain platforms with built-in programming interfaces gave enthusiasts a practical, technical apparatus to realize their vision. Foremost among these emerging blockchain platforms was Ethereum, a so-called distributed " Turing-complete " computer. The Ethereum platform is new and expanded version of the Bitcoin system in that it adds a layer of software on top of a blockchain. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum is
Bitcoin’s innovative and distributedly maintained blockchain data structure hinges on the adequate degree of difficulty of so-called “proofs of work,” which miners have to produce in order for transactions to be inserted. Importantly, these proofs of work have to be hard enough so that miners have an opportunity to unify their views in the presence of an adversary who interferes but has bounded computational power, but easy enough to be solvable regularly and enable the miners to make progress. As such, as the miners’ population evolves over time, so should the difficulty of these proofs. Bitcoin provides this adjustment mechanism, with empirical evidence of a constant block generation rate against such population changes.
Reproducibility, data sharing, personal data privacy concerns and patient enrolment in clinical trials are huge medical challenges for contemporary clinical research. A new technology, Blockchain, may be a key to addressing these challenges and should draw the attention of the whole clinical research community.
Blockchain brings the Internet to its definitive decentralisation goal. The core principle of Blockchain is that any service relying on trusted third parties can be built in a transparent, decentralised, secure “trustless” manner at the top of the Blockchain (in fact, there is trust, but it is hardcoded in the Blockchain protocol via a complex cryptographic algorithm). Therefore, users have a high degree of control over and autonomy and trust of the data and its integrity. Blockchain allows for reaching a substantial level of historicity and inviolability of data for the whole document flow in a clinical trial. Hence, it ensures traceability, prevents a posteriori reconstruction and allows for securely automating the clinical trial through what are called Smart Contracts. At the same time, the technology ensures fine-grained control of the data, its security and its shareable parameters, for a single patient or group of patients or clinical trial stakeholders.
In this commentary article, we explore the core functionalities of Blockchain applied to clinical trials and we illustrate concretely its general principle in the context of consent to a trial protocol. Trying to figure out the potential impact of Blockchain implementations in the setting of clinical trials will shed new light on how modern clinical trial methods could evolve and benefit from Blockchain technologies in order to tackle the aforementioned challenges.
In this article, I propose a theory of network opportunity emergence. The core of the argument is that as an overall industry network structure becomes centralized, opportunities emerge for new entrants. As the institutional environment evolves toward a centralized network flow structure, innovators can identify newly emerged rich resource niches that serve as the perfect breeding ground for an entrepreneurial start-up. While the framework is an aggregate level conceptualization of market opportunities, it also identifies specific actionable opportunities at a very micro level. Examples from the networks of the airline industry illustrate the logic. I conclude by discussing the innovation and entrepreneurship implications for a wide variety of industries and network tie types, calling for utilization of the framework to answer a broad variety of research questions.
Purpose
Distributed trust technologies, such as blockchain, propose to permit peer-to-peer transactions without trusted third parties. Yet not all implementations of such technologies fully decentralize. Information professionals make strategic choices about the level of decentralization when implementing such solutions, and many organizations are taking a hybrid (i.e. partially decentralized) approach to the implementation of distributed trust technologies. This paper conjectures that while hybrid approaches may resolve some challenges of decentralizing information governance, they also introduce others. To better understand these challenges, this paper aims first to elaborate a framework that conceptualizes a centralized–decentralized information governance continuum along three distinct dimensions: custody, ownership and right to access data. This paper then applies this framework to two illustrative blockchain case studies – a pilot Brazilian land transfer recording solution and a Canadian health data consent sharing project – to exemplify how the current transition state of blockchain pilots straddles both the old (centralized) and new (decentralized) worlds. Finally, this paper outlines the novel challenges that hybrid approaches introduce for information governance and what information professionals should do to navigate this thorny transition period. Counterintuitively, it may be much better for information professionals to embrace decentralization when implementing distributed trust technologies, as hybrid models could offer the worst of both the centralized and future decentralized worlds when consideration is given to the balance between information governance risks and new strategic business opportunities.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper illustrates how blockchain is transforming organizations and societies by highlighting new strategic information governance challenges using our original analytic framework in two detailed blockchain case studies – a pilot solution in Brazil to record land transfers (Flores et al. , 2018) and another in Canada to handle health data sharing consent (Hofman et al. , 2018). The two case studies represent research output of the first phase of an ongoing multidisciplinary research project focused on gaining an understanding of how blockchain technology generates organizational, societal and data transformations and challenges. The analytic framework was developed inductively from a thematic synthesis of the findings of the case studies conducted under the auspices of this research project. Each case discussed in detail in this paper was chosen from among the project's case studies, as it represents a desire to move away from the old centralized world of information governance to a new decentralized one. However, each case study also represents and embodies a transition state between the old and new worlds and highlights many of the associated strategic information governance challenges.
Findings
Decentralization continues to disrupt organizations and societies. New emerging distributed trust technologies such as blockchain break the old rules with respect to the trust and authority structures of organizations and how records and data are created, managed and used. While governments and businesses around the world clearly see value in this technology to drive business efficiency, open up new market opportunities and create new forms of value, these advantages will not come without challenges. For information executives then, the question is not if they will be disrupted, but how. Understanding the how as will be discussed in this paper provides the business know how to leverage the incredible innovation and transformation that decentralized trust technology enables before being leapfrogged by another organization. It requires a change of mindset to consider an organization as one part of a broader ecosystem, and for those who successfully do so, this paper views this as a strategic opportunity for those responsible for strategic information governance to design the future instead of being disrupted by it.
Research limitations/implications
This paper presents a novel analytic framework for strategic information governance challenges as we transition from a traditional world of centralized records and information management to a new decentralized world. This paper analyzes these transitions and their implications for strategic information governance along three trajectories: custody, ownership and right to access records and data, illustrating with reference to our case studies.
Practical implications
This paper predicts a large number of organizations will miss the opportunities of the new decentralized trust world, resulting in a rather major churning of organizations, as those who successfully participate in building the new model will outcompete those stuck in the old world or the extremely problematic hybrid transition state. Counterintuitively, this paper argues that it may be much less complex for information executives to embrace decentralization as fast as they can, as in some ways the hybrid model seems to offer the worst of both the centralized and future decentralized worlds with respect to information governance risks.
Social implications
This paper anticipates broader societal consequences of the predicted organization churn, in particular with respect to uncertainty about the evidence that records provide for public accountability and contractual rights and entitlements.
Originality/value
Decentralized trust technologies, such as blockchain, permit peer-to-peer transactions without trusted third parties. Of course, such radical shifts do not happen overnight. The current transition state of blockchain pilots straddles both the old and new worlds. This paper presents a theoretical framework categorizing strategic information governance challenges on a spectrum of centralized to decentralized in three primary areas: custody, ownership and right to access records and data. To illustrate how decentralized trust is transforming organizations and societies, this paper presents these strategic information governance challenges in two blockchain case studies – a pilot Brazilian land transfer recording solution and a Canadian health data consent sharing project. Drawing on the theoretical framework and case studies, this paper outlines what information executives should do to navigate this thorny transition period.
Trusting Records and Data in the Cloud - edited by Luciana Duranti November 2018
The paradox of openness is inherent to all platform ecosystems—the tension in enabling maximum openness to create joint innovation while guaranteeing value capturing for all actors. Governance mechanisms to solve this paradox are embedded into the technical architecture of the platform, addressing the dimensions of access, control, and incentives. Blockchain technology offers unique ways to design novel governance mechanisms through the standardization of interactions. However, the design of such an architecture requires careful consideration of the cost associated with it.
This chapter first describes the current use of the term “decentralized” as applied to permissionless blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then, it analyzes the complex, contested nature of the term, delving into issues such as the different domains where power is exercised in blockchain systems and the fluid nature of power concentration and diffusion in these systems. Next, it provides examples of events that reveal sites of concentrated power in permissionless blockchain systems, focusing on the activities of software developers and miners. Finally, it explores the significant implications for law of using a fuzzy term like “decentralized” to make legal decisions, as misunderstandings about power hidden in the term can lead to flawed decisions across a wide swath of legal fields.
Today’s artificial intelligence still faces two major challenges. One is that, in most industries, data exists in the form of isolated islands. The other is the strengthening of data privacy and security. We propose a possible solution to these challenges: secure federated learning. Beyond the federated-learning framework first proposed by Google in 2016, we introduce a comprehensive secure federated-learning framework, which includes horizontal federated learning, vertical federated learning, and federated transfer learning. We provide definitions, architectures, and applications for the federated-learning framework, and provide a comprehensive survey of existing works on this subject. In addition, we propose building data networks among organizations based on federated mechanisms as an effective solution to allowing knowledge to be shared without compromising user privacy.
Organizational impression management theory traditionally explains how firms manage threats from specific events or from campaigns orchestrated by non-competitors, such as activists or regulators, but has not attempted to explain the complex dynamics of impression management campaigns orchestrated by a firm’s competitor. To address this oversight, we analyze one of the bitterest rivalries in corporate history—the war of the currents between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, which ended in the triumph of Westinghouse’s alternating current over Edison’s direct current for electric power transmission. We define competitive impression management as activity by a firm or its employees that is intended to alter the perceptions of a competing firm or its offerings in the eyes of a common audience. By combining historical case study and grounded theory methods, our findings reveal that the war of the currents unfolded across distinct chronological stages dependent on the actions and reactions of others that were shaped by audiences’ information filters. We explore the implications of our theory of campaigns and their consequences, expanding the scope of impression management theory, deepening our understanding of how organizations compete, and providing fertile ground for future research on market-based campaigns.
Smart contracts are computer programs that self-execute the simple instructions necessary to carry out a transaction. Currently, this technology is most often used to manipulate cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum that are implemented by means of a public blockchain. Supporters believe ideally this automation has the potential to remove the need for third-party oversight entirely such as that currently provided by financial, legal, regulatory, professional practice, and enforcement. Yet, conflating all of these institutions and their roles as a singular target of disruption is a mistake as the motivations and mechanisms of each type of institution varies. This project proposes a call for research on blockchain technology, and smart contracts in particular, as they relate to two types of oversight practices. The first study considers how legal discourse provides (or fails to provide) the proper oversight for digitized contracts and how smart contracts, rather than replace it, might only serve to exacerbate some of its failures. The second study looks at the investigation and prosecution of criminal activity and the creation of standards and regulations by corresponding institutions that force companies to produce records that stand as evidence in these investigations. The analysis draws on previous interpretations of digitized contracts and a series of interviews with two IRS Special Agents who investigate blockchain or related crime.
In this article, the authors explore the origins and evolution of product markets from a sociocognitive perspective. Product markets are defined as socially constructed knowledge structures (i.e., product conceptual systems) that are shared among producers and consumers—sharing that enables consumers and producers to interact in the market. The fundamental thesis is that product markets are neither imposed nor orchestrated by producers or consumers but evolve from producer–consumer interaction feedback effects. Starting as unstable, incomplete, and disjointed conceptual systems held by market actors—which is revealed by the cacophony of uses, claims, and product standards that characterize emerging product markets—product markets become coherent as a result of consumers and producers making sense of each other's behaviors. The authors further argue that the sensemaking process is revealed in the stories that consumers and producers tell each other in published media, such as industry newspapers and consumer magazines, which the authors use as data sources. Specific hypotheses pertaining to the use of product category labels in published sources and the acceptability of different product category members throughout the development process are tested for the minivan market between 1982 and 1988. The findings suggest that category stabilization causes significant differences between consumers and producers in how they use product category labels for emerging and preexisting categories. The findings also show that, as stabilization occurs around a category prototype, the acceptability of particular models changes without any physical changes to the models.
The celebrated Nakamoto consensus protocol [16] ushered in several new consensus applications including cryptocurrencies. A few recent works [7, 17] have analyzed important properties of blockchains, including most significantly, consistency, which is a guarantee that all honest parties output the same sequence of blocks throughout the execution of the protocol. To establish consistency, the prior analysis of Pass, Seeman and Shelat [17] required a careful counting of certain combinatorial events that was difficult to apply to variations of Nakamoto. The work of Garay, Kiayas, and Leonardas [7] provides another method of analyzing the blockchain under the simplifying assumption that the network was synchronous. The contribution of this paper is the development of a simple Markov-chain based method for analyzing consistency properties of blockchain protocols. The method includes a formal way of stating strong concentration bounds as well as easy ways to concretely compute the bounds. We use our new method to answer a number of basic questions about consistency of blockchains: Our new analysis provides a tighter guarantee on the consistency property of Nakamoto's protocol, including for parameter regimes which [17] could not consider; We analyze a family of delaying attacks first presented in [17], and extend them to other protocols; We analyze how long a participant should wait before considering a high-value transaction "confirmed"; We analyze the consistency of CliqueChain, a variation of the Chainweb [14] system; We provide the first rigorous consistency analysis of GHOST [20] and also analyze a folklore "balancing"-attack. In each case, we use our framework to experimentally analyze the consensus bounds for various network delay parameters and adversarial computing percentages. We hope our techniques enable authors of future blockchain proposals to provide a more rigorous analysis of their schemes.
This chapter explores the operational risks raised by the use of common 'grassroots' open-source software practices in public blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, in their potential role as financial market infrastructures. These practices include the informal software development process, problematic funding for software development, and the possibility of forking inherent to open-source software. The paper argues that the risks raised by these practices significantly undermine public blockchains' suitability to serve as financial market infrastructures. Further, they herald the need to reevaluate the use of these practices outside the blockchain technology setting, in other critical infrastructures based on grassroots open-source software.
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom asserts that the mining protocol is incentive-compatible and secure against colluding minority groups, that is, it incentivizes miners to follow the protocol as prescribed.
We show that the Bitcoin mining protocol is not incentive-compatible. We present an attack with which colluding miners' revenue is larger than their fair share. The attack can have significant consequences for Bitcoin: Rational miners will prefer to join the attackers, and the colluding group will increase in size until it becomes a majority. At this point, the Bitcoin system ceases to be a decentralized currency.
Unless certain assumptions are made, selfish mining may be feasible for any coalition size of colluding miners. We propose a practical modification to the Bitcoin protocol that protects Bitcoin in the general case. It prohibits selfish mining by a coalition that command less than 1/4 of the resources. This threshold is lower than the wrongly assumed 1/2 bound, but better than the current reality where a coalition of any size can compromise the system.
Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (www.hyperledger.org).
Fabric is the first truly extensible blockchain system for running distributed applications. It supports modular consensus protocols, which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Fabric is also the first blockchain system that runs distributed applications written in standard, general-purpose programming languages, without systemic dependency on a native cryptocurrency. This stands in sharp contrast to existing block-chain platforms that require "smart-contracts" to be written in domain-specific languages or rely on a cryptocurrency. Fabric realizes the permissioned model using a portable notion of membership, which may be integrated with industry-standard identity management. To support such flexibility, Fabric introduces an entirely novel blockchain design and revamps the way blockchains cope with non-determinism, resource exhaustion, and performance attacks.
This paper describes Fabric, its architecture, the rationale behind various design decisions, its most prominent implementation aspects, as well as its distributed application programming model. We further evaluate Fabric by implementing and benchmarking a Bitcoin-inspired digital currency. We show that Fabric achieves end-to-end throughput of more than 3500 transactions per second in certain popular deployment configurations, with sub-second latency, scaling well to over 100 peers.
We develop theory on how a contentious moral market can develop, and we test it with data from a study of the commercialization of Buddhist temples in China from 2006 to 2016, as local government officials try to boost the local economy by transforming temples into tourist enterprises that charge admission fees. The practice is resisted by monks and the public such that the central government, which values public appearances of social justice, is pressured to support their resistance to local officials’ economic demands. Using a data panel of 141 temples, we show that temples’ admission fees are significantly related to the pressure that local government officials face to develop the economy. We also find that resistance to the fees exploits a factional political structure, as the monk-led movement leverages the influence of one political clique that is highly concerned with public appearances of social justice to resist the request of another. In addition, bottom-up channels such as the Internet and marketized media help the public voice its grievances, coordinate collective action, and therefore align with and mobilize the central government to override local government. The contentious view enhances our understanding of how resistance can be possible and effective, especially in an authoritarian regime.
An interesting research problem in our age of Big Data is that of determining provenance. Granular evaluation of provenance of physical goods (e.g., tracking ingredients of a pharmaceutical or demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods) has often not been possible with today's items that are produced and transported in complex, interorganizational, often internationally spanning supply chains. Recent adoptions of the Internet of Things and blockchain technologies give promise at better supply‐chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain, as many favored use cases of blockchain are for provenance tracking. We are also interested in applying ontologies, as there has been some work done on knowledge provenance, traceability, and food provenance using ontologies. In this paper, we make a case for why ontologies can contribute to blockchain design. To support this case, we analyze a traceability ontology and translate some of its representations to smart contracts that execute a provenance trace and enforce traceability constraints on the Ethereum blockchain platform.
Engineers interact with their products and processes largely through models, however rarely reflect about the nature of these models and how technical possibilities and actions are affected by the models’ properties and characteristics. Models in engineering describe the product as well as its generating process, but at the same time also shape and create them. This clearly distinguishes them from scientific models that primarily aim to describe a certain target system. While over the last decade, there has been a growing body of literature on models in the sciences, much less research has been done on models in engineering design. In this chapter we aim to fill this gap by taking a closer look at models in engineering design from an epistemic point of view. In particular we suggest a classification of different types of models used in engineering design and compare them to models used in scientific research. Thereby we do not aim at an encompassing map of models in engineering practice, but we aim to identify key categories of models with regards to their relationship to their targets. We contend that the functions of models in engineering design cannot be fully captured when focusing on the representative aspects of models alone as done in contemporary philosophy of science.
Blockchain technology is transforming the way data is shared and value is transferred. However, there remain significant obstacles that must be overcome before blockchain is ready for mainstream adoption – most notably, security. How to protect both the cryptographic keys that allow access to the ledger and blockchain applications remains a top concern for any organisation or individual interested in using blockchain to transact anything of significant value.
Blockchain technology is transforming the way data is shared and value is transferred. However, security concerns must be overcome before it is ready for mainstream adoption.
Protecting cryptographic keys remains a top concern. Using hardware security modules (HSMs) and trusted computers in place of digital wallets and as blockchain nodes will give security-conscious users and organisations assurance that no matter what blockchain application they choose, they have the means to protect digital assets, argues Olivier Boireau of Design SHIFT.
Ecological Interface Design delivers the techniques and examples that provide you with a foundation to succeed in designing advanced display graphics. The opening chapters introduce the “art” of interface design by exposing the analytical methods behind designs, the most common graphical forms, and how these methods and forms are pulled together to create a complete design. The book then incorporates case studies that further emphasize techniques and results. Each example exemplifies a solution to a certain part of the EID puzzle. Some of the examples demonstrate the analysis phase, while others apply more scrutiny to graphical design. Each is unique, allowing allowing you to use them in the development of your own designs. The volume concludes with an analysis that connects ecological interface design with other common interface design methods, enabling you to better understand how to combine approaches in the creation of design solutions.
La versione italiana di questo documento e disponibile al seguente link: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2731132The core technology of Bitcoin, the blockchain, has recently emerged as a disruptive innovation with a wide range of applications, potentially able to redesign our interactions in business, politics and society at large. Although scholarly interest in this subject is growing, a comprehensive analysis of blockchain applications from a political perspective is severely lacking to date. This paper aims to fill this gap and it discusses the key points of blockchain-based decentralized governance, which challenges to varying degrees the traditional mechanisms of State authority, citizenship and democracy. In particular, the paper verifies to which extent blockchain and decentralized platforms can be considered as hyper-political tools, capable to manage social interactions on large scale and dismiss traditional central authorities. The analysis highlights risks related to a dominant position of private powers in distributed ecosystems, which may lead to a general disempowerment of citizens and to the emergence of a stateless global society. While technological utopians urge the demise of any centralized institution, this paper advocates the role of the State as a necessary central point of coordination in society, showing that decentralization through algorithm-based consensus is an organizational theory, not a stand-alone political theory.