Digital Identity and Distributed Ledger Technology:Paving the Way to a Neo-Feudal Brave New World?

While the digital layer of social interaction continues to evolve, the recently proclaimed hopes in the development of digital identity could be both naïf and dangerous. Rather than just asking ourselves how we could digitize existing features of identity management, and corresponding financial transactions on a community or state level, we submit that truly useful and innovative digital identities need to be accompanied by some significant rethinking of the essential basics behind the organization of the world. Once digital technologies leave the realm of purely on-line or deeply local projects, the confrontation with the world of citizenship’s biases and the random distribution of rights and duties precisely on the presumption of the lack of any choice and absolute pre-emption of any disagreement comes into a direct conflict with all the benefits Distributed Ledger Technology purports to enable. Some proponents of Distributed Ledger Technology-based identity systems envisage ‘cloud communities’ with truly ‘self-sovereign’ individuals picking and choosing which communities they belong to. We rather see a clear risk that when implemented at the global scale, digital identity systems could be deeply harmful, reinforcing and amplifying the most repugnant aspects of contemporary citizenship. In this contribution we present a categorization of existing digital identity systems from a governance perspective, and discuss it on basis of three corresponding case studies which allow us to infer opportunities and limitations of Distributed Ledger Technology based identity. Subsequently, we put our findings in the context of existing preconditions of citizenship law, and conclude with a suggestion of a combination of several tests which we propose to avoid the plunge into a neo-feudal ‘brave new world’. We would like to draw attention to the perspective that applying digital identity without rethinking the totalitarian assumptions behind the citizenship status will result in perfecting the current inequitable system, which is a move away from striving towards justice and a more dignified future of humanity. We see the danger that those might be provided with plenty of opportunities who already do not lack such under current governance structures, while less privileged individuals will witness their already weak position becoming increasingly worse

$=€=Bitcoin?

Bitcoin (and other virtual currencies) have the potential to revolutionize the way that payments are processed, but only if they become ubiquitous. This Article argues that if virtual currencies are used at that scale, it would pose threats to the stability of the financial system—threats that have been largely unexplored to date. Such threats will arise because the ability of a virtual currency to function as money is very fragile—Bitcoin can remain money only for so long as people have confidence that bitcoins will be readily accepted by others as a means of payment. Unlike the U.S. dollar, which is backed by both a national government and a central bank, and the euro, which is at least backed by a central bank, there is no institution that can shore up confidence in Bitcoin (or any other virtual currency) in the event of a panic. This Article explores some regulatory measures that could help address the systemic risks posed by virtual currencies, but argues that the best way to contain those risks is for regulated institutions to out-compete virtual currencies by offering better payment services, thus consigning virtual currencies to a niche role in the economy. This Article therefore concludes by exploring how the distributed ledger technology pioneered by Bitcoin could be adapted to allow regulated entities to provide vastly more efficient payment services for sovereign currency-denominated transactions, while at the same time seeking to avoid concentrating the provision of those payment services within “too big to fail” banks

A Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Ordering Service for the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Platform

Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a flexible permissioned blockchain platform designed for business applications beyond the basic digital coin addressed by Bitcoin and other existing networks. A key property of HLF is its extensibility, and in particular the support for multiple ordering services for building the blockchain. Nonetheless, the version 1.0 was launched in early 2017 without an implementation of a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) ordering service. To overcome this limitation, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a BFT ordering service for HLF on top of the BFT-SMaRt state machine replication/consensus library, implementing also optimizations for wide-area deployment. Our results show that HLF with our ordering service can achieve up to ten thousand transactions per second and write a transaction irrevocably in the blockchain in half a second, even with peers spread in different continents

An architecture for distributed ledger-based M2M auditing for Electric Autonomous Vehicles

Electric Autonomous Vehicles (EAVs) promise to be an effective way to solve transportation issues such as accidents, emissions and congestion, and aim at establishing the foundation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy. For this to be possible, the market should be able to offer appropriate charging services without involving humans. The state-of-the-art mechanisms of charging and billing do not meet this requirement, and often impose service fees for value transactions that may also endanger users and their location privacy. This paper aims at filling this gap and envisions a new charging architecture and a billing framework for EAV which would enable M2M transactions via the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc

Personal data broker instead of blockchain for students’ data privacy assurance

Data logs about learning activities are being recorded at a growing pace due to the adoption and evolution of educational technologies (Edtech). Data analytics has entered the field of education under the name of learning analytics. Data analytics can provide insights that can be used to enhance learning activities for educational stakeholders, as well as helping online learning applications providers to enhance their services. However, despite the goodwill in the use of Edtech, some service providers use it as a means to collect private data about the students for their own interests and benefits. This is showcased in recent cases seen in media of bad use of students’ personal information. This growth in cases is due to the recent tightening in data privacy regulations, especially in the EU. The students or their parents should be the owners of the information about them and their learning activities online. Thus they should have the right tools to control how their information is accessed and for what purposes. Currently, there is no technological solution to prevent leaks or the misuse of data about the students or their activity. It seems appropriate to try to solve it from an automation technology perspective. In this paper, we consider the use of Blockchain technologies as a possible basis for a solution to this problem. Our analysis indicates that the Blockchain is not a suitable solution. Finally, we propose a cloud-based solution with a central personal point of management that we have called Personal Data Broker.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc