The Regulation of New Electronic Payment Services in China

PhDDue to the lack of efficient offline payment services for small value payment, and along with the booming of the Internet and telecommunications technologies, new electronic payment services and instruments are becoming increasingly popular and important in the first and second decades of the 21 century in China’s electronic commerce economy. The new electronic payment instruments, which primarily include Internet third party payment and virtual currency, are the subjects of research in this thesis. This thesis focuses on electronic payment law relating to the Internet, and the e-payment law which has been altered substantially by the Internet, rather than focusing on a comprehensive law of payment, clearance and settlement, or traditional mechanisms of payment, such as negotiable instruments and electronic funds transfers that occurs only within the intranet of closed banking systems. Although the new electronic payment instruments cannot escape from the influence of the traditional payment, and new payment instruments are based upon the traditional one both in technological infrastructure and in legal framework, the new electronic payment instruments do possess their own special features in technology, business models and in law. On this regard, readers might be asking why the author did not use the topic of “Internet Payment” or “online payment” instead of “new electronic payment” for the title of the thesis. The answer is because in China, telephone payment, along with Internet payment should be collectively considered as new electronic payment tools, and therefore, it is too narrow to just use the term “Internet Payment”. Also, the word “online” is, somewhat, a misleading word, and the author tries to specify in most cases whether it is an “Internet” or a “mobile network” or “landlines” or any other forms of networks in the following analysis when the concept of “online” has to be referred to. On the other hand, it is a truth that, among those new electronic payment instruments, it is the Internet that has been shaking and reshaping the infrastructure framework of payment, clearance and settlement; and telephone payment as well as mobile payment, to a great extent, are relying on the Internet. Therefore, Internet-related payment lies at the heart of the thesis. Furthermore, in China, new electronic payment instruments are largely created and facilitated through non-bank Internet third party payment providers and virtual currency, These two types of new electronic payment services possess enormous scale and are developing in a fast speed. Therefore, this thesis will treat the law on non-bank Internet third party payment platform providers and virtual currency as two crucial points to discuss.1 1.2 Research Questions The hypothesis of the thesis is that legal issues arising from new electronic payment services, which heavily rely on and is substantially attached to the Internet, are different from legal issues pertaining to traditional electronic payment services which are primarily intra-bank or inter-bank related. For example, in the Internet third party payment system (see Chapter 4 of the thesis), non-bank intermediaries are involved which is outside the regulatory framework of the traditional banking and payment system; also for example, in the virtual currency system (see Chapter 5 & 6 of the thesis), money is not issued by governments and denominated into any national legitimate currencies such as Renminbi in China, instead, money is issued by private Internet companies and denominated into currencies of those private companies. Thus, there are a number of legal questions to be considered: how is the Internet third party payment being regulated in China? What are the key issues in regulating the Internet third party payment? Is the current regulation appropriate? How to regulate the Internet games virtual currency in China? How is the Internet third party payment and virtual currency regulated in the European Union? Are there any lessons that China may learn from the European Union? In the thesis, the author examines these important legal issues relating to new electronic payment in detail, evaluate current existing regulations both in China and in the EU/UK, and propose specific regulatory approaches and measures for China

A Bayesian Approach to Identify Bitcoin Users

Bitcoin is a digital currency and electronic payment system operating over a peer-to-peer network on the Internet. One of its most important properties is the high level of anonymity it provides for its users. The users are identified by their Bitcoin addresses, which are random strings in the public records of transactions, the blockchain. When a user initiates a Bitcoin-transaction, his Bitcoin client program relays messages to other clients through the Bitcoin network. Monitoring the propagation of these messages and analyzing them carefully reveal hidden relations. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model using a probabilistic approach to link Bitcoin addresses and transactions to the originator IP address. To utilize our model, we carried out experiments by installing more than a hundred modified Bitcoin clients distributed in the network to observe as many messages as possible. During a two month observation period we were able to identify several thousand Bitcoin clients and bind their transactions to geographical locations

Effect of crypto currency on the government backed currency

Abstract. As international financial systems are becoming political tools to manipulate the exchange of money for good, cryptocurrency, and its potential to avoid the international banking system becomes more popular. Thus, the question becomes what happens to the nation’s monitory system if cryptocurrency’s electronic payment transaction and system replace the current system?  Most nation’s central bank controls the financial systems, which affect institutions, rules, regulations, and laws of the land that affect this system. Robinson (2016) suggests money as a commodity in the national scope. International banks use BIC for transferring money with each other. Cryptocurrency, so far, does not need BIC to transfer money from one location to another.  Bitcoin, the system is a peer-to-peer internet currency allowing verified, and decentralized transfers of value between individuals and businesses. This article is a short introduction discussing the legacy money and cryptocurrency and the potential of cryptocurrency as a new currency and its possible implications.Keywords. Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Currency, Money, Bitcoin, BIC, SWIFT.JEL. O30, O35, O36

Strategic Challenges for Exchanges and Securities Settlement

A common feature of major trends in securities and derivative markets is that they facilitate cross-border competition between financial institutions and markets. These trends include financial deregulation, technological developments that increase network externalities and the introduction of the single currency in Europe. This paper discusses future prospects for stock and derivative exchanges and securities settlement systems globally in the light of this analytical framework. The increased contestability of the financial markets opens the way for a completely new situation where economies of scale and network effects enable new systems to challenge existing exchanges and settlement systems. This has already led towards more integrated trading and settlement infrastructure via mergers, alliances, links, agreements and other forms of cooperation between existing infrastructure companies. At the same time new electronic communication networks and electronic exchanges operated by members of exchanges or off-exchange companies and Internet brokers have emerged. We expect that economies of scale and scope and network effects will foster global competition. The business conducted by brokers and exchanges will tend to converge, thus posing a major challenge for the management of these businesses. Trading and settlement services for the most liquid global trading products will, we believe, be provided by limited liability companies that employ efficient governance practices. We anticipate that US stock and derivative exchanges will have to adopt fully electronic trading systems. This might lead to intense competition between exchanges in the US and globally. We also anticipate that European alliances will be based on a more efficient operational model than the models proposed so far. An increase in Internet-routed equity and derivative trades will lead to partial fragmentation of liquidity. As technology advances, we expect pooling of liquidity in one of the networks.exchanges; settlement systems; technology; network externalities; economies of scale

The evolution of the digital currency

In the new digital age, with the rapid development of electronic devices and the Internet, the transformation of money is also inevitable. Cash and credit card payments are beginning to be replaced by mobile, online payment methods. Advances in technology have hastened the spread of cryptocurrencies and created digital currencies. However, this development and the emergence of cryptocurrencies began decades ago. Although decentralized finance does not seem to be a substitute for the traditional financial system, it is unlikely that it will become an official currency in the future, but emerging digital currencies could play this role. The aim of this study is to present the background to the emergence of digital currencies and to seek answers to the challenges it will face in the future to become a full-fledged currency

Bitcoin: the wrong implementation of the right idea at the right time

This paper is a study into some of the regulatory implications of cryptocurrencies using the CAMPO research framework (Context, Actors, Methods, Methods, Practice, Outcomes). We explain in CAMPO format why virtual currencies are of interest, how self-regulation has failed, and what useful lessons can be learned. We are hopeful that the full paper will produce useful and semi-permanent findings into the usefulness of virtual currencies in general, block chains as a means of mining currency, and the profundity of current ‘media darling’ currency Bitcoin as compared with the development of block chain generator Ethereum. While virtual currencies can play a role in creating better trading conditions in virtual communities, despite the risks of non-sovereign issuance and therefore only regulation by code (Brown/Marsden 2013), the methodology used poses significant challenges to researching this ‘community’, if BitCoin can even be said to have created a single community, as opposed to enabling an alternate method of exchange for potentially all virtual community transactions. First, BitCoin users have transparency of ownership but anonymity in many transactions, necessary for libertarians or outright criminals in such illicit markets as #SilkRoad. Studying community dynamics is therefore made much more difficult than even such pseudonymous or avatar based communities as Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft or SecondLife. The ethical implications of studying such communities raise similar problems as those of Tor, Anonymous, Lulzsec and other anonymous hacker communities. Second, the journalistic accounts of BitCoin markets are subject to sensationalism, hype and inaccuracy, even more so than in the earlier hype cycle for SecondLife, exacerbated by the first issue of anonymity. Third, the virtual currency area is subject to slowly emerging regulation by financial authorities and police forces, which appears to be driving much of the early adopter community ‘underground’. Thus, the community in 2016 may not bear much resemblance to that in 2012. Fourth, there has been relatively little academic empirical study of the community, or indeed of virtual currencies in general, until relatively recently. Fifth, the dynamism of the virtual currency environment in the face of the deepening mistrust of the financial system after the 2008 crisis is such that any research conclusions must by their nature be provisional and transient. All these challenges, particularly the final three, also raise the motivation for research – an alternative financial system which is separated from the real-world sovereign and which can use code regulation with limited enforcement from offline policing, both returns the study to the libertarian self-regulated environment of early 1990s MUDs, and offers a tantalising prospect of a tool to evade the perils of ‘private profit, socialized risk’ which existing large financial institutions created in the 2008-12 disaster. The need for further research into virtual currencies based on blockchain mining, and for their usage by virtual communities, is thus pressing and should motivate researchers to solve the many problems in methodology for exploring such an environment

Beyond Bitcoin: Issues in Regulating Blockchain Transactions

The buzz surrounding Bitcoin has reached a fever pitch. Yet in academic legal discussions, disproportionate emphasis is placed on bitcoins (that is, virtual currency), and little mention is made of blockchain technology—the true innovation behind the Bitcoin protocol. Simply, blockchain technology solves an elusive networking problem by enabling “trustless” transactions: value exchanges over computer networks that can be verified, monitored, and enforced without central institutions (for example, banks). This has broad implications for how we transact over electronic networks. This Note integrates current research from leading computer scientists and cryptographers to elevate the legal community’s understanding of blockchain technology and, ultimately, to inform policymakers and practitioners as they consider different regulatory schemes. An examination of the economic properties of a blockchain-based currency suggests the technology’s true value lies in its potential to facilitate more efficient digital-asset transfers. For example, applications of special interest to the legal community include more efficient document and authorship verification, title transfers, and contract enforcement. Though a regulatory patchwork around virtual currencies has begun to form, its careful analysis reveals much uncertainty with respect to these alternative applications

Trends in crypto-currencies and blockchain technologies: A monetary theory and regulation perspective

The internet era has generated a requirement for low cost, anonymous and rapidly verifiable transactions to be used for online barter, and fast settling money have emerged as a consequence. For the most part, e-money has fulfilled this role, but the last few years have seen two new types of money emerge. Centralised virtual currencies, usually for the purpose of transacting in social and gaming economies, and crypto-currencies, which aim to eliminate the need for financial intermediaries by offering direct peer-to-peer online payments. We describe the historical context which led to the development of these currencies and some modern and recent trends in their uptake, in terms of both usage in the real economy and as investment products. As these currencies are purely digital constructs, with no government or local authority backing, we then discuss them in the context of monetary theory, in order to determine how they may be have value under each. Finally, we provide an overview of the state of regulatory readiness in terms of dealing with transactions in these currencies in various regions of the world