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We have entered an era where the importance of decentralized solutions has become more obvious. Blockchain technology and its derivatives are distributed ledger technologies that keep the registry of data between peers of a network. This…
The philosophy of blockchain technology is concerned, among other things, with blockchain ontology, how it might be characterised, how it is being created, implemented, and adopted, how it operates in the world, and how it evolves over…
There is an ongoing competition among blockchain technologies and the existence of one ultimate blockchain is impossible for many reasons. On the other hand, such variety can create difficulties in adoption, especially for the governments…
Blockchains are being positioned as the "technology of trust" that can be used to mediate transactions between non-trusting parties without the need for a central authority. They support transaction types that are native to the blockchain…
Digital payment schemes show an ever increasing importance. Out of the countless different schemes available this article focuses on the popular Bitcoin system. The authors provide a description of Bitcoin's unique technological basis and…
In an age of financial system digitisation and the increasing adoption of digital currencies, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have emerged as a focal point for technological innovation. Privacy compliance has become a key factor in…
Off-Chain transactions allow for the immediate transfer of Cryptocurrency between two parties, without delays or unavoidable transaction fees. Such capabilities are critical for mainstream Cryptocurrency adaption. They allow for the…
In this paper, we consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows -- implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract -- successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this…
Payments architectures are on the verge of a great bifurcation that must be documented in order to be debated. Google is moving towards a quasi bank while Apple and Google disseminate payment systems over smartphones. At the same time,…
Recent advances have improved the throughput and latency of blockchains by processing transactions accessing different parts of the state concurrently. However, these systems are unable to concurrently process (a) transactions accessing the…
Semi-quantum protocols that allow some of the users to remain classical are proposed for a large class of problems associated with secure communication and secure multiparty computation. Specifically, first time semi-quantum protocols are…
Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 we have seen a great push towards public and private blockchains. In order to avoid fragmentation, a global network connecting all these blockchains is envisioned. Just like the Internet facilitates…
Blockchain represents a technology for establishing a shared, immutable version of the truth between a network of participants that do not trust one another, and therefore has the potential to disrupt any financial or other industries that…
We characterize digital cash as the digital equivalent of physical cash: secure, fungible, decentralized, directly controlled, privacy-preserving; but enhanced with qualitatively new functionality. It is extremely efficiently transferable…
Electronic government (e-government) uses information and communication technologies to deliver public services to individuals and organisations effectively, efficiently and transparently. E-government is one of the most complex systems…
Public-key quantum money is a cryptographic protocol in which a bank can create quantum states which anyone can verify but no one except possibly the bank can clone or forge. There are no secure public-key quantum money schemes in the…
This paper studies an interacting particle system of interest in econophysics inspired from a model introduced in the physics literature. The original model consists of the customers of a single bank characterized by their capital, and the…
Open technologies, decentralized computation and intelligent applications enable the third-generation web, Web 3.0, thereby digitizing whole industries. The emerging Economy of Things (EoT) will be based on software agents running on…
Grassroots platforms aim to offer an egalitarian alternative to global platforms. Whereas global platforms can have only a single instance, grassroots platforms can have multiple instances that emerge and operate independently of each other…
While the physical lives of many of us are in democracies (one person, one vote - e.g., the EU and the US), our digital lives are mostly in autocracies (one person, all votes - e.g., Facebook). Cryptocurrencies promise liberation but stop…