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Content
Research objectives
Method
Literature study
Case study
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin as an information infrastructure
Use case: Academic certificates stored on the blockchain
Conclusions and further research
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Research objectives
1. To give an overview of the Bitcoin literature in general and
Bitcoin in e-Government in particular
2. To study the potential for using Bitcoin technology in public
sector services
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Literature overview – in the eGovernment field
Category EGRL 10.5 Google Scholar Bitcoin
Academic Publ.
Search phrase «bitcoin» «Bitcoin e-
Government»
-
Economy 0 1 114
Technology 0 1 124
Regulation 0 4 59
Other 0 0 17
Irrelevant - 78 0
Total 0 84 314
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What is Bitcoin?
1. A crypto currency
A peer-to-peer electronic cash system
2. An infrastructure
An open ledger on the Internet
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Bitcoin development
Proposed in a white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in Oct. 2008
The Bitcoin system was started 3rd of Jan. 2009
Has been running almost seven years without any serious errors
A platform for permissionless innovation, above all in financial
services, but also for use in other sectors
Based on open source and open standards
Bitcoin code published on GitHub
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Bitcoin key characteristics
Distributed system (peer-to-peer)
No central bank (or other central authorities)
Deterministic money supply
21 million bitcoin in total
25 new bitcoin mined every 10 minutes
Halving of new bitcoin mined every four years
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Bitcoin key contributions
A practical solution to the Byzantine Generals’ problem
first formulated by Lamport et al. (1982)
computer systems’ ability to handle conflicting information
how to establish trust in a distributed system (without a third party)
An open platform for financial innovation
But also an open platform for innovation in «trustless» systems
A fully functional digital cash system
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Bitcoin building blocks
Open source software
Digital signatures
Public key cryptography (but not a PKI!)
Hash functions
Consensus based trust
Through Proof of work
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Bitcoin as an information infrastructure
Property Information
Infrastructure
Bitcoin as an II
Shared Universally Universally
Open Yes Yes
Heterogenous Increasingly Yes (althoug early)
Evolving Yes Bears the signs of unltd.
evolvement
Organizing principles Recursice composition Yes/No – only one
reference Bitcoin impl.
Control Distributed and
dynamically negotiated
Distr. and dynamically
neg. (by «voting»)
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Case study: Bitcoin blockchain in eGovernment
Certificate from university courses (or degrees) put on the
blockchain
Simple and cost effective solution
Ubiquitous access to verification of certificates
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Case study: University of Nicosia’s use of
Bitcoin blockchain for storing certificates
1. Prerequisites:
No other services or products than the Bitcoin blockchain
Authntication of certificates without contacting Univ. of Nicosia
Should be possible to perform the authentication even if Univ. of Nicosia
ceases to exist in today’s form (merger, shut down etc.)
2. Storing the index document on the blockchain
3. Verification process
Verification of the index document itself (retrieved from the web)
Verification of the certificate(s)
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Conclusions
The Bitcoin technology is absent from eGov literature
Bitcoin as an information infrastructure has a great potential for
innovative use also in public sector, as the use case indicates
Important research questions:
how can Bitcoin help innovation in public sector?
how should the currency bitcoin and the infrastructure Bitcoin be handled?
Bitcoin in public sector on the blockchain, sidechain or altchain?
Important factors determining adoption of this new technology?
Installed base as a barrier to adoption of the technology
Many similarities with the development of the Internet and web 25
years ago