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Humans started using the principles of insurance thousands of years ago when they lived in tribes in smaller villages. If one of the tribe members were injured, the others would take care of him and his family. The basic principle of insurance is several people covering each other against a particular risk. Today, most people in regions like Europe have access to insurance, while many people worldwide still have no access at all. The cost and accessibility may be improved with a blockchain-based parametric approach. The insurance process in a parametric approach is exclusively based on data, and decisions are made objectively. Blockchain is a necessary and integral part of the approach to create transparency and connect the customer’s and investor’s risk capital. The paper offers an overview of the opportunities and challenges of blockchain-based parametric insurance, a catalog of criteria for such insurance, a description of all components and their interaction for implementation on Ethereum, and a reference implementation of a train delay insurance in Germany.
Both cryptocurrency researchers and early adopters of cryptocurrencies agree that they possess a special kind of materiality, based on the laborious productive process of digital ‘mining’ [1]. This idea first appears in the Bitcoin White Paper [2] that encourages Bitcoin adopters to construct and justify its value in metaphoric comparison to gold mining. In
this paper, I explore three material aspects of blockchain: physical infrastructure, human language and computer code. I apply the concept of 'continuous materiality' [3] to show how these three aspects interact in practical implementations of blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I start from the concept of ‘digital metallism’ that stands for ‘fundamental value’ of cryptocurrencies, and end with the move of Ethereum to ‘proof-of-stake’, partially as a countermeasure against ‘evil miners’. I conclude that ignoring material aspects of blockchain technology can only further problematize complicated relations between their technical, semiotic and social materiality.
The set of transactions that occurs on the public ledger of an Ethereum network in a specific time frame can be represented as a directed graph, with vertices representing addresses and an edge indicating the interaction between two addresses.
While there exists preliminary research on analyzing an Ethereum network by the means of graph analysis, most existing work is focused on either the public Ethereum Mainnet or on analyzing the different semantic transaction layers using
static graph analysis in order to carve out the different network properties (such as interconnectivity, degrees of centrality, etc.) needed to characterize a blockchain network. By analyzing the consortium-run bloxberg Proof-of-Authority (PoA) Ethereum network, we show that we can identify suspicious and potentially malicious behaviour of network participants by employing statistical graph analysis. We thereby show that it is possible to identify the potentially malicious
exploitation of an unmetered and weakly secured blockchain network resource. In addition, we show that Temporal Network Analysis is a promising technique to identify the occurrence of anomalies in a PoA Ethereum network.
The financial world of blockchains is mostly covered by Bitcoin, taking up about 210 billion dollars in market cap. Despite the huge security and independence which the technology offers to the users, it's not quite easy to adapt with upcoming applications due to the regulated infrastructure behind. For small-scale transactions, everyday use applications or the access to a variety of crypto technologies and projects, Bitcoin is relatively limited in future development. The compatibility for most of those applications is covering currencies from more development-driven blockchains like Ethereum. Those want to reach out for the user base that's already in hold of Bitcoins and offer them a seamless transition to new applications without the risk of losing their funds. Within the article, atomic swaps and tokenization are covered up and current approaches compared. Both mechanisms are used to fulfill this symbiosis between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
To get a more practical view, an example on how to implement such a tokenization within an app is shown. This will give deeper insights and offers inspiration for digital identity-based app development.
To enable smart devices of the internet of things to be connected to a blockchain, a blockchain client needs to run on this hardware. With the Trustless Incentivized Remote Node Network, in short Incubed, it will be possible to establish a decentralized and secure network of remote nodes, which enables trustworthy and fast access to a blockchain for a large number of low-performance IoT devices. Currently, Incubed supports the verification of Ethereum data. To serve a wider audience and more applications this paper proposes the verification of Bitcoin data as well, which can be achieved due to the modularity of Incubed. This paper describes the proof data that is necessary for a client to prove the correctness of a node’s response and the process to verify the response by using this proof data as well. A proof-object which contains the proof data will be part of every response in addition to the actual result. We design, implement and evaluate Bitcoin verification for Incubed. Creation of the proof data for supported methods (on the server-side) and the verification process using this proof data (on the client-side) has been demonstrated. This enables the verification of Bitcoin in Incubed.