Virtual Currencies Bitcoin & What Now After Liberty Reserve, Silk Road, and Mt. Gox?

During 2013, the U.S. Treasury Department evoked the first use of the 2001 Patriot Act to exclude virtual currency provider Liberty Reserve from the U.S. financial system. This article will discuss: the regulation of virtual currencies, cybercrimes and payment systems, darknets, Tor and the “deep web,” Bitcoin; Liberty Reserve, Silk Road, and Mt. Gox. Virtual currencies have quickly become a reality, gaining significant traction in a very short period of time, and are evolving rapidly

The Economics of Bitcoin and Similar Private Digital Currencies

Recent innovations have made it feasible to transfer private digital currency without the intervention of an institution. A digital currency must prevent users from spending their balances more than once, which is easier said than done with purely digital currencies. Current digital currencies such as Bitcoin use peer-to-peer networks and open-source software to stop double spending and create finality of transactions. This paper explains how the use of these technologies and limitation of the quantity produced can create an equilibrium in which a digital currency has a positive value. This paper also summarizes the rise of 24/7 trading on computerized markets in Bitcoin in which there are no brokers or other agents, a remarkable innovation in financial markets. I conclude that exchanges of foreign currency may be the obvious way in which use of digital currencies can become widespread and that Bitcoin is likely to limit governments’ revenue from inflation

Bitcoin and the Japanese Retail Investor

The objective of this research is to examine the Bitcoin rally of 2017 as it occurred in Japan and establish a greater context for why it was the Japanese retail investors that propelled the nation to being the largest trader of the cryptocurrency at the end of the year. This dissertation begins with the examination of the technical and economical properties of Bitcoin by classifying it as fulfilling two roles: that of a means of payment and that of an investment commodity. Following that is a description of Bitcoin’s roots and the history of its non-speculative usage. These chapters serve as a base for examining the cryptocurrency’s role in Japan. The third chapter examines the Japanese retail investor and the Japanese retail investment landscape with a focus on the question of the low rates of risk-asset participation in face of a favorable investment environment. Historical context is drawn upon to argue that the present situation, wherein most financial assets are kept as cash, is rather the result of the historical path dependence than the present-day conditions in which Japanese retail investors operate. The final chapter addresses the question of high-risk activities in the form of gambling and margin trading by a group of predominantly middle-aged men and connects this propensity to engage in zero-sum games with Bitcoin’s success in Japan. The author argues that the solitary practice of high-risk financial activities enabled by trusted institutions is separate from the general savings tradition that suffered shocks following the low interest-rate regime and that it was the high-risk gambles that became the primary cause for the popularity of Bitcoin. The dissertation concludes with the argument that the success of Bitcoin in 2017 had been in no small part achieved precisely by inverting the hard-line libertarian values of its creators and making it a centrally-held commodity offered by a banking-like institution with a strong public presence

Hardening Tor Hidden Services

Tor is an overlay anonymization network that provides anonymity for clients surfing the web but also allows hosting anonymous services called hidden services. These enable whistleblowers and political activists to express their opinion and resist censorship. Administrating a hidden service is not trivial and requires extensive knowledge because Tor uses a comprehensive protocol and relies on volunteers. Meanwhile, attackers can spend significant resources to decloak them. This thesis aims to improve the security of hidden services by providing practical guidelines and a theoretical architecture. First, vulnerabilities specific to hidden services are analyzed by conducting an academic literature review. To model realistic real-world attackers, court documents are analyzed to determine their procedures. Both literature reviews classify the identified vulnerabilities into general categories. Afterward, a risk assessment process is introduced, and existing risks for hidden services and their operators are determined. The main contributions of this thesis are practical guidelines for hidden service operators and a theoretical architecture. The former provides operators with a good overview of practices to mitigate attacks. The latter is a comprehensive infrastructure that significantly increases the security of hidden services and alleviates problems in the Tor protocol. Afterward, limitations and the transfer into practice are analyzed. Finally, future research possibilities are determined

Postcolonial Piracy

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity. Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local

The Critique of Digital Capitalism: An Analysis of the Political Economy of Digital Culture and Technology

Anything that can be automated, will be. The “magic” that digital technology has brought us — self-driving cars, Bitcoin, high frequency trading, internet of things, social networking, mass surveillance, the 2009 housing bubble — has not been considered ideologically. The Critique of Digital Capitalism identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities. The theory proposed in this book is the description of how digital capitalism as an ideologically “invisible” framework is realized in technology. Written as a series of articles between 2003 and 2015, it provides a broad critical scope for understanding the inherent demands of capitalist protocols for expansion without constraint (regardless of social, legal or ethical limits) that are increasingly being realized as autonomous systems no longer dependent on human labor or oversight and implemented without social discussion of their impacts. The digital illusion of infinite resources, infinite production, and no costs appears as an “end to scarcity,” whereby digital production supposedly eliminates costs and makes everything equally available to everyone. This fantasy of production without consumption hides the physical costs and real-world impacts of these technologies

Postcolonial Piracy

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity. Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local

Decentralised computer systems

The architecture of the Web was designed to enable decentralised exchange of information. Early architects envisioned an egalitarian yet organic society thriving in cyberspace. The reality of the Web today, unfortunately, does not bear out these visions: information networks have repeatedly shown a tendency towards consolidation and centralisation with the current Web split between a handful of large corporations. The advent of Bitcoin and successor blockchain networks re-ignited interest in developing alternatives to the centralised Web and paving a way back to the earlier architectural visions for the Web. This has led to immense hype around these technologies with the cryptocurrency market valued at several hundred billions of dollars at the time of writing. With great hype, apparently, come great scams. I start off by analysing the use of Bitcoin as an enabler for crime and then present both technical solutions as well as policy recommendations to mitigate the harm these crimes cause. These policy recommendations then lead us on to look more closely at cryptocurrency's tamer cousin: permissioned blockchains. These systems, while less revolutionary in their premise, nevertheless aim to provide sweeping improvements in the efficiency and transparency of existing enterprise systems. To see whether they work in practice, I present the results of my work in delivering a production permissioned blockchain system to real users. This involves comparing several permissioned blockchain systems, exploring their deficiencies and developing solutions for the most egregious of those. Lastly, I do a deep dive into one of the most persistent technical issues with permissioned blockchains, and decentralised networks in general: the lack of scalability in their consensus mechanisms. I present two novel consensus algorithms that aim to improve upon the state of the art in several ways. The first is designed to enable existing permissioned blockchain networks to scale to thousands of nodes. The second presents an entirely new way of building decentralised consensus systems utilising a trie-based data structure at its core as opposed to the usual linear ledgers used in current systems

Taking Sides

Is there an option to oppose without automatically participating in the opposed? This volume explores different perspectives on dissent, understanding practices, cultures, and theories of resistance, dispute, and opposition as inherently participative. It discusses aspects of the body as a political instance, the identity and subjectivity building of individuals and groups, (micro-)practices of dissent, and theories of critique from different disciplinary perspectives. This collection thus touches upon contemporary issues, recent protests and movements, artistic subversion and dissent, online activism as well as historic developments and elemental theories of dissent