Blockchain Technologies and Smart Contracts: New Technological Methods to Regulate Transactions and Trade Operations

Risks and Opportunities for Systems Using Blockchain and Smart Contracts

Using Blockchain and smart contracts for secure data provenance management

Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of transactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive environment for building distributed reliable applications. Although, blockchain technology has been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the previous work focused on using blockchain to develop a secure and immutable scientific data provena...

Blindly Signed Contracts: Anonymous On-Blockchain and Off-Blockchain Bitcoin Transactions

Although Bitcoin is often perceived to be an anonymous currency, research has shown that a user’s Bitcoin transactions can be linked to compromise the user’s anonymity. We present solutions to the anonymity problem for both transactions on Bitcoin’s blockchain and off the blockchain (in so called micropayment channel networks). We use an untrusted third party to issue anonymous vouchers which u...

Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law

This paper critiques blockchain-based “smart contracts,” which aim to automatically and securely execute obligations without reliance on a centralized enforcement authority. Though smart contracts do have some features that might serve the goals of social justice and fairness, I suggest that they are based on a thin conception of what law does, and how it does it. Smart contracts focus on the t...

Distributed Proportional-Fairness Control in MicroGrids via Blockchain Smart Contracts

Residential microgrids (MGs) may host a large number of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). The strategy that maximizes the revenue for each individual DER is the one in which the DER operates at capacity, injecting all available power into the grid. However, when the DER penetration is high and the consumption low, this strategy may lead to power surplus that causes voltage increase over reco...