Sensing-as-a-Service (S2aaS) is an emerging Internet of Things (IOT) business model pattern. To be technically feasible and to effectively allow for broad adoption, S2aaS implementations have to overcome manifold systemic hurdles, specifically regarding payment and sensor identification. In an effort to overcome these hurdles, we propose Bitcoin as protocol for S2aaS networks. To lay the ground...

The Bitcoin ecosystem has grown tremendously in recent years. While the main sectors of growth and venture capital funding have been infrastructure for the Bitcoin ecosystem itself as well as financial services, there is also a more recent evolution in sectors beyond financial services. We classify the venture-capital backed start up ecosystem accordingly and present its evolution over time. Th...

PGP is built upon a Distributed Web of Trust in which a user’s trustworthiness is established by others who can vouch through a digital signature for that user’s identity. Preventing its wholesale adoption are a number of inherent weaknesses to include (but not limited to) the following: 1) Trust Relationships are built on a subjective honor system, 2) Only first degree relationships can be ful...

Over recent years, the innovative decentralized payment system Bitcoin has received much attention in practice and academia. Despite a growth of transaction volume and an increasing attention in the area of e-commerce, there is little academic research examining the factors influencing adoption. To fill this research gap, this paper documents an exploratory study of the key determinants and inh...

The recent discussion about changes to the Bitcoin protocol have shown that the Bitcoin community is unable to reach timely decisions with a transparent process. Despite starting as a trivial change, removing an artificial limit to the maximum number of transactions, the discussion quickly degenerated into heated discussions about non-issues, name-calling and speculation, that to date did not p...

For money-like informational commodities the notions of architectural adequacy and evolutionary adequacy are proposed as the first two stages of a moneyness maturity hierarchy. Then three classes of informational commodities are distinguished: exclusively informational commodities, strictly informational commodities, and ownable informational commodities. For each class money-like instances of ...

The Bitcoin protocol allows to save arbitrary data on the blockchain through a special instruction of the scripting language, called OP RETURN. A growing number of protocols exploit this feature to extend the range of applications of the Bitcoin blockchain beyond transfer of currency. A point of debate in the Bitcoin community is whether loading data through OP RETURN can negatively affect the ...

It is argued that a Bitcoin-style money-like informational commodity may constitute an effective instrument for the further development of Islamic Finance. The argument involves the following elements: (i) an application of circulation theory to Bitcoin with the objective to establish the implausibility of interest payment in connection with Bitcoin, (ii) viewing a Bitcoin-like system as a mone...

With the increasing popularity of Bitcoin, a digital decentralized currency and payment system, the number of malicious third parties attempting to steal bitcoins has grown substantially. Attackers have stolen bitcoins worth millions of dollars from victims by using malware to gain access to the private keys stored on the victims’ computers or smart phones. In order to protect the Bitcoin priva...

Bitcoin as the current leader in cryptocurrencies is a new asset class receiving significant attention in the financial and investment community and presents an interesting time series prediction problem. In this paper, some forecasting models based on classical like ARIMA and machine learning approaches including Kriging, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Bayesian method, Support Vector Machine...