Blockchain and Smart Contracts as Complex Self-Organizing Frameworks: Theoretical Perspective

Blockchain offers unprecedented opportunities for innovation in financial transactions with a whole new world of opportunities for banking, lending, insurance, and money transfers. Through its algorithms, digital security by decentralization, form smart contracts. Smart contracts allow the performance of credible transactions without third parties, the transactions premised by trackable and irreversible processes are superior to traditional contract law and greatly reduce other transaction costs associated with contracting. Globally, enterprises are undergoing a major transformation towards smart businesses that use intelligent systems integrated into planning for their daily routine. Blockchain technology and smart contacts termed disruptive technologies provide innovative solutions that cannot be ignored due to their inherent complexities. Regarded as complex systems, there is a need to have a theoretical view to understanding the hidden order to the evolution of these systems to bring out traits that are common and have a combination of independent actors behaving as a single unit responding and adapting to their existent setting, as self-organizing systems. This study significantly plays a unique role in contemporary science by explaining how blockchain and smart contracts unify run as nonlinearity complex system that adapts to their environment to bring about consistency hence their applicability

Digital Inheritance in Web3: A Case Study of Soulbound Tokens and the Social Recovery Pallet within the Polkadot and Kusama Ecosystems

In recent years discussions centered around digital inheritance have increased among social media users and across blockchain ecosystems. As a result digital assets such as social media content cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens have become increasingly valuable and widespread, leading to the need for clear and secure mechanisms for transferring these assets upon the testators death or incapacitation. This study proposes a framework for digital inheritance using soulbound tokens and the social recovery pallet as a use case in the Polkadot and Kusama blockchain networks. The findings discussed within this study suggest that while soulbound tokens and the social recovery pallet offer a promising solution for creating a digital inheritance plan the findings also raise important considerations for testators digital executors and developers. While further research is needed to fully understand the potential impacts and risks of other technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing this study provides a primer for users to begin planning a digital inheritance strategy and for developers to develop a more intuitive solution.Comment: To be published in IEEE Acces

Y-DWMS - A digital watermark management system based on smart contracts

With the development of information technology, films, music, and other publications are inclined to be distributed in digitalized form. However, the low cost of data replication and dissemination leads to digital rights problems and brings huge economic losses. Up to now, existing digital rights management (DRM) schemes have been powerless to deter attempts of infringing digital rights and recover losses of copyright holders. This paper presents a YODA-based digital watermark management system (Y-DWMS), adopting non-repudiation of smart contract and blockchain, to implement a DRM mechanism to infinitely amplify the cost of infringement and recover losses copyright holders suffered once the infringement is reported. We adopt game analysis to prove that in Y-DWMS, the decision of non-infringement always dominates rational users, so as to fundamentally eradicate the infringement of digital rights, which current mainstream DRM schemes cannot reach

A Smart Contract Refereed Data Retrieval Protocol with a Provably Low Collateral Requirement

We present a protocol for a cryptoeconomic fair exchange of data previously owned by the purchaser for tokens that functions even when both parties are anonymous. This enables peer-to-peer data storage without identity verification. We use a smart contract on a decentralized ledger as a trusted third party. Actual data transfer can take place with any standard anonymous exchange channel. Due to the anonymity of the parties, the smart contract cannot punish either party\u27s off-ledger reputation. Furthermore, the contract has limited power to arbitrate fault in off-ledger disputes. Thus, an important feature of our protocol is a collateral mechanism that collectively punishes both Alice and Bob if either of them abandons the protocol or cheats. However, we prove that parameters can be chosen such that the collateral can be made, subject to data size, arbitrarily low and still result in an expected financial loss if either Alice or Bob cheats. We are able to achieve this due to our non-standard use of error-correcting codes. In addition, the protocol allows those storing the data to exchange it without the client\u27s participation

Understanding manager resistance to blockchain systems

Blockchain technology has received much attention in the media and there is an increasing interest amongst organizations within financial services due to the potential benefits. As blockchain-based systems are a nascent technology, the requirements of the technology need to be understood, to allow blockchain systems to be successfully integrated within financial service organizations. There are gaps in academic research in understanding how managers evaluate the value of a blockchain-based system. This study develops a model to explain manager resistance to implementing blockchain-based systems in financial services organizations. This research advances the theoretical understanding of managers’ perspectives on blockchain-based systems and models their resistance to blockchain technology

Blockchain-basierte Anwendungen im Online-Advertising - eine qualitative Inhaltsanalyse

Untersuchungsziel – Diese Arbeit untersucht, welche Chancen und Herausforderungen mit dem Einsatz blockchain-basierter Anwendungen im Online-Advertising einhergehen. Zweck dieser Arbeit ist es, mit den gewonnenen Erkenntnissen das noch junge Forschungsfeld, das die Schnittmenge von Blockchain-Technologie und Online-Advertising zum Gegenstand hat, durch Grundlagenforschung zu unterstützen und so Forschung und Praxis gleichermaßen dienlich zu sein. Methodologie – Zur Beantwortung der forschungsleitenden Fragestellung werden Websites von Unternehmen, respektive ihren blockchain-basierten Anwendungen, im Online-Advertising recherchiert. Hierfür kommen methodische Anleihen aus dem Bereich systematischer Literatur-Reviews zum Einsatz. Die Texte der recherchierten Websites werden dann qualitativ inhaltsanalytisch erschlossen. Das Vorgehen der Inhaltsanalyse orientiert sich maßgeblich an den Vorgaben von Philipp A. E. Mayring. Resultate – Die Ergebnisse dieser Untersuchung zeigen, dass der Einsatz blockchain-basierter Anwendungen Transparenz schafft, Kontrolle der Supply-Chain ermöglicht, und damit einen Mehrwert für das Ökosystem stiftet. Die Kontrolle der Akteure und ihrer Aktivitäten sowie deren Validierung auf der Blockchain erzeugt Brand-Safety und reduziert Ad-Fraud. Durch Smart Contracts können manuelle und damit fehleranfällige Prozesse automatisiert und ersetzt werden. Für Konsumenten hält die Blockchain technologie-immanente Schutzmechanismen für ihre Daten bereit. Allerdings gilt es, die Kardinalprobleme Skalierbarkeit, Interoperabilität und Energieeffizienz zu überwinden. Implikationen – Die Wissenschaft sollte eben jene Kardinalprobleme erforschen und Lösungen entwickeln. Die Legislative sollte Rechtssicherheit schaffen. Verbraucherschützer sollten über die positiven (wie negativen) Effekte der Technologie informieren. Die Wirtschaft sollte weiterhin spezifische Anwendungsszenarien prüfen. Limitationen – Zur Untermauerung der Ergebnisse dieser Untersuchung sollten quantifizierende Methoden eingesetzt werden

A socio-technical framework to guide implementation and value realisation of distributed ledger technologies (dlt) in the construction sector

Construction is highly resistant to change. Its many challenges have persisted for decades rooted in a lack of trust, reluctance to collaborate and share information. New technologies offer increased transparency, efficiency, and collaboration. Building Information Modelling (BIM), while being the most successful to advance construction to date, has not done enough to combat the challenges. The aim of this research was to investigate the potential of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) and smart contracts (SCs) to provide solutions for the sector. Through empirical investigations (systematic literature review, interviews, focus groups, survey), a framework to guide implementation and value realisation of DLT and SCs in the construction sector was proposed. A socio-technical approach was taken resulting in a framework encompassing four dimensions of technology, process, policy and society. This approach recognises DLT and SCs are not a panacea in and of themselves and should be used in conjunction with advancements across the four dimensions to de-risk any potential failure of these systems. The framework is made up of several conceptual constructs for use at meso and macro scales to support evaluation of the as-is to achieve a desired state and offers progressive roadmaps to reach the point of implementation. The findings demonstrate the requirement for DLT and SCs to integrate with other systems (e.g., BIM, IoT, AI) to add value. Furthermore, technology alone is insufficient to solve the sector’s problems also requiring reform of outdated practices (e.g., procurement, payments, contract management). Contributions to knowledge include: the first known socio-technical framework for systematic and progressive implementation of DLT and SCs in construction. This places equal importance on society and technology for the implementation of these new technological systems and will facilitate their success to unlock benefits for the sector amid the myriad challenges it faces; through this socio-technical approach, the framework encourages active involvement of stakeholders placing importance on the realisation that engaging with users of the system is central to its success; the position of an organisation (or group) looking to develop DLT- or SC-based applications at the meso scale or the position of the sector with regard to how it wants to incorporate these technologies into its existing systems and processes at the macro scale can be evaluated using the framework’s progressive approach that considers every stage of developing and implementing an application; the constructs considering both meso and macro scales minimise any potential decoupling between policy and practice in terms of implementation; and the framework aims to provide a flexible set of tools to encourage the sector to create an ecosystem ready to support these applications as well as provide guidance in the development of applications