Can Blockchain Technologies Resolve the U.S. Antitrust Enforcement Problem?

The U.S. antitrust enforcement mechanism is criticized for being ill-adapted to ensuring competition in digital platforms. In the U.S., several bills have been introduced in Congress with the aim to create a new antitrust regulatory framework for digital platforms. This paper proposes a different solution by exploring the adoption of a blockchain system and smart contracts to make the present antitrust enforcement more efficient. In the U.S. approximately ninety percent of no-merger antitrust proceedings are settled by means of consent decrees. However, the consent decree procedure is criticized for a lack of transparency and there is often the need for more coordination among different antitrust enforcers in the definition of remedies. This begs the question of whether a distributed ledger can assist in making the consent decree mechanism more transparent by enhancing coordination and data consistency. Furthermore, verifying companies’ compliance with antitrust remedies enshrined in consent decrees is typically costly and time-consuming for an antitrust agency and these remedies can become ineffective. This paper investigates a blockchain system to tackle the lack of transparency and coordination in reaching the antitrust consent in the context of the FTC consent decree procedure. It further investigates the use of smart contracts and blockchain-based smart contracts to enforce antitrust remedies enshrined in antitrust consent decrees by using FTC remedies as an example. Antitrust does not really need a new regulatory framework, what it does need is to explore the adoption of new tools and resources to make the antitrust enforcement more efficient through a technologically managed solution

Music 2025 : The Music Data Dilemma: issues facing the music industry in improving data management

© Crown Copyright 2019Music 2025ʼ investigates the infrastructure issues around the management of digital data in an increasingly stream driven industry. The findings are the culmination of over 50 interviews with high profile music industry representatives across the sector and reflects key issues as well as areas of consensus and contrasting views. The findings reveal whilst there are great examples of data initiatives across the value chain, there are opportunities to improve efficiency and interoperability

The Brave New Virtual Art World The Evolution of Digital Art: NFTs and their Effects on the Art Market in 2021

The first half of 2021, NFT crypto art captured both the public’s attention and the art market due to the escalation of sales prices and the auction houses acceptance of cryptocurrencies. As an artform, digital art is not new. It began in the 1960s and 1970s with roots as early as the 1940s. During this evolution the lines between technology and art have intersected, often become blurred and in many cases have merged into new artforms. Even when scholars trace the origins of digital art to present day it is difficult to tell if scientists are influencing artists or artists shape technology. Crypto art comes with a unique set of benefits to both collectors and artists alike, but it also poses several new threats to the environment and the art economy. While museums, collectors and galleries are experimenting with best ways to store and display the crypto digital art, collectors and artists have the challenge to define how they would like to preserve and maintain the work whose technology is sure to be obsolete in the future

Privacy-Preserving and Regulation-Enabled Mechanisms for Blockchain-based Financial Services

With the success of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, blockchain technology has attracted extensive attention from both academia and industry. As a distributed ledger technology, blockchain provides decentralization and immutability, and can build trust among multiple parties. Owning to these unique characteristics, blockchain has become an innovative approach to secure and reliable record-keeping and transaction execution, and has the potential to revolutionize the financial industry and drive economic change on a global scale. For example, it can streamline banking and lending services, enable decentralized trading, and facilitate cross-border payment transactions. Although blockchain is expected to create a new paradigm for the financial industry, transactions stored on the blockchain are shared among the nodes in the blockchain network, which may contain sensitive information of users, such as the identities of senders and receivers, and the contents of transactions. Thus, privacy preservation should be achieved when applying blockchain to different financial services. Many privacy-preserving mechanisms have been proposed to guarantee identity privacy and data confidentiality for blockchain-based transactions. However, the strong degree of privacy may create new regulatory concerns. First, in privacy-preserving mortgage lending, there exists double-mortgage fraud, by which a borrower can use the same asset as collateral to obtain multiple loans from different financial institutions. Second, in decentralized data trading, data buyers may refuse to pay funds to data sellers after obtaining data, and data sellers may send fake data to data buyers. Verifying data availability and retrievability without viewing data before payment for fair trading is a challenging issue. Moreover, the identity privacy of data sellers should be preserved during the trading. Third, in privacy-preserving blockchain-based payment systems, the identities of the payer, payee, and transferred amount are protected. Nevertheless, the anonymity of transactions can be exploited for illegal activities, such as money laundering. Thus, considering the strict regulatory requirements of the financial industry, such as limiting the amount of cryptocurrency transferred over a period of time, privacy preservation and regulation should be balanced in blockchain-based financial services. In this thesis, we focus on three major blockchain-based financial services to concentrate on how to solve the dilemma between privacy protection and strict regulatory requirements at various phases in the fund flow, which are lending, trading, and payment. Firstly, the thesis investigates the borrower privacy and double-mortgage regulation issues in mortgage lending, and proposes a blockchain-based privacy-preserving and accountable mortgage data management scheme. In the scheme, the mortgage data of borrowers can be shared on the blockchain to detect the double-mortgage fraud without revealing the identity of borrowers. But financial institutions can still uncover the identity of a dishonest borrower if he/she pledges the same asset for multiple mortgages, which is achieved by integrating cryptographic tools such as verifiable secret sharing, zero-knowledge proof, and ElGamal encryption. A mortgage request contains a share of identity information of the borrower and the ownership certificate of an asset. By utilizing ElGamal encryption and verifiable secret sharing, the borrower can prove that its identity information is indeed included in the mortgage request and can be used to reconstruct its identity when double-mortgage behavior is detected. Secondly, the thesis investigates the identity privacy and trading-misbehavior regulation in blockchain-based data trading. Blockchain can build trust between data buyers and data sellers. To resolve the fairness issue of demonstrating data availability and retrievability without leaking data while preserving identity privacy of data sellers, we propose a blockchain-based fair data trading protocol with privacy preservation, where a data buyer can declare data requirements and acceptable issuers of data, and a data seller can conduct privacy-preserving and fine-grained data selling. We first define the fairness and privacy demands for both parties. By incorporating anonymous attribute-based credentials, structure-preserving signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs, data can be traded in part while data authenticity is guaranteed and data issuers are hidden. A smart contract is utilized to realize atomic transactions. Security proof is provided to demonstrate that the scheme can achieve privacy preservation and fairness for the participants. Thirdly, the thesis investigates the transaction privacy and anti-money laundering regulation issues in distributed anonymous payment (DAP) systems. To solve the conflict between privacy and regulation, we propose a novel DAP scheme that supports regulatory compliance and enforcement. We first introduce regulators into the system, who define regulatory policies, including limiting the total amount of cryptocurrency one can transfer and the frequency of transactions one can conduct in a time period. The policies are enforced through commitments and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs for compostable statements. By this, users can prove that transactions are valid and comply with regulations. We use both Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (Zk-SNARKs) and sigma protocols to generate the zero-knowledge proofs for regulation compliance. A tracing mechanism is designed in the scheme to allow regulators to recover the real identities of users when suspicious transactions are detected. In summary, this thesis proposes effective privacy-preserving and regulation-enabled solutions for blockchain-based lending, data trading, and anonymous payment. The results from the thesis should shed light for future study on blockchain-based systems where privacy preservation and regulation are required

Blockchain as a chain for humanitarian aid: transforming the lives of refugees

Updated United Nations data shows that 79.5 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced already by the end of 2019. These were already record-setting numbers of refugees and displaced people around the world. Now they face a new unimaginable and threatening emergency: the global health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the consequent economic crisis it has generated. Refugees are amongst the most vulnerable group who now are facing also a pandemic of poverty. It is fair to say that 2020 has been one of the toughest years in history. The present year has also been characterized by a succession of catastrophes and natural disasters, which aggravated a world already severally affected by the Covid-19 crisis. Large emergencies and extreme situations demand for coordination, trust and efficiency. We are currently entering a new era of disruptive technology that will revolutionize the industry, and blockchain holds vast promise for a transformation of the humanitarian sector. This thesis explores the use of blockchain technology to improve effectiveness of contemporary humanitarian aid in the field of refugees and displaced people by focusing on two specific use-case opportunities: digital identity management and aid delivery tracking. This dissertation outlines the use cases of blockchain to help mitigate the impact and strain of the refugee crisis for both refugees and host countries alike. The aim is to reflect on the improvements and pitfalls related to the adaptation of this disruptive technology in the field.Dados atualizados das Nações Unidas mostram que 79,5 milhões de pessoas em todo o mundo foram deslocadas à força no final de 2019. Esses já eram números recordes de refugiados e pessoas deslocadas em todo o mundo. Agora eles enfrentam uma nova emergência inimaginável e ameaçadora: a crise de saúde global causada pela pandemia de Covid-19 e a consequente crise econômica que ela gerou. Os refugiados estão entre o grupo mais vulnerável que agora enfrenta também uma pandemia de pobreza. 2020 foi um dos anos mais difíceis da história. O presente ano também se caracterizou por uma sucessão de catástrofes e desastres naturais, que agravaram um mundo já seriamente afetado pela crise da Covid-19. Grandes emergências e situações extremas exigem coordenação, confiança e eficiência. Atualmente, estamos a entrar em uma nova era de tecnologia disruptiva que revolucionará a indústria, e o "blockchain" é uma grande promessa para a transformação do setor humanitário. Esta tese explora o uso da tecnologia blockchain para melhorar a eficácia da ajuda humanitária contemporânea no campo de refugiados e pessoas deslocadas, concentrando-se em duas oportunidades de casos de uso específicos: gerenciamento de identidade digital e rastreamento de entrega de ajuda. Esta dissertação descreve os casos de uso de "blockchain" para ajudar a mitigar o impacto e a tensão da crise de refugiados para refugiados e países anfitriões. O objetivo é refletir sobre as melhorias e armadilhas relacionadas à adaptação dessa tecnologia disruptiva no campo

How to Interpret a Vending Machine: Smart Contracts and Contract Law

A smart contract is software designed to do the job of a legal contract: ensuring the performance of parties who might not otherwise trust one another to do so. By running a smart contract on blockchain, users can lock themselves into future performances without relying on a third-party enforcer or platform host, thereby realizing a “fully trustless” exchange. This new technology has wide range of potential applications, and contracts are likely to become an increasingly common part of the economy. Some have argued that smart contracts represent a new type of legal contract, analogizing the software’s code to a contractual writing. Others have suggested that smart contracts might in some transactions replace legal contracts. But the relationship between smart contracts and legal contracts is more complex than either claim acknowledges. Although using a smart contract can figure into the formation of a legal contract, it is a mistake to analogize a smart contract’s code to a contractual writing. Unlike writings, code should rarely figure into to the interpretation of a legal contract; and when it does, its interpretation is different in kind. And though some have tried to use incorporation, integration or TINALEA clauses to substitute smart contracts for traditional contractual protections, it is not clear that courts would or should always enforce such provisions. And even if they do, governance by code rather than law comes at a significant cost to the parties. Smart contracts work better when they supplement, rather than supplant, legal contracts. This article analyzes the many ways a smart contract might interact with the law of contracts by taking seriously the comparison, common in the literature, of smart contracts to vending machines. A series of thought experiments is used to explore when and how the mechanisms inside a machine, analog or digital, can affect the terms of a legal contract between its users. The resulting detailed doctrinal analysis provides support for a broader thesis about the relationship between technology, law and society. Smart contracts, though useful tools, instantiate an anemic form of human sociability as compared to the complex, even trusting, relationships for which contract law is designed

Towards Automatically Penalizing Multimedia Breaches

This work studies the problem of automatically penalizing intentional or unintentional data breach (APB) by a receiver/custodian receiving confidential data from a sender. We solve this problem for multimedia data by augmenting a blockchain on-chain smart contract between the sender and receiver with an off-chain cryptographic protocol, such that any significant data breach from the receiver is penalized through a monetary loss. Towards achieving the goal, we develop a natural extension of oblivious transfer called doubly oblivious transfer (DOT) which, when combined with robust watermarking and a claim-or-refund blockchain contract provides the necessary framework to realize the APB protocol in a provably secure manner. In our APB protocol, a public data breach by the receiver leads to her Bitcoin (or other blockchain) private signing key getting revealed to the sender, which allows him to penalize the receiver by claiming the deposit from the claim- or-refund contract. Interestingly, the protocol also ensures that the malicious sender cannot steal the deposit, even as he knows the original multimedia document or releases it in any form. We implement our APB protocol, develop the required smart contract for Bitcoin and observe our system to be efficient and easy to deploy in practice for multimedia documents. We analyze our DOT-based design against partial adversarial leakages and observe it to be robust against even small leakages