Globalisation of supply chains makes their management and control more difficult. Blockchain technology, as a distributed digital ledger technology which ensures transparency, traceability, and sec...

Blockchain technology and its relationships to sustainable supply chain management

Blockchains or distributed ledgers are an emerging technology that has drawn considerable interest from energy supply firms, startups, technology developers, financial institutions, national governments and the academic community. Numerous sources coming from these backgrounds identify blockchains as having the potential to bring significant benefits and innovation. Blockchains promise transparent, tamper-proof and secure systems that can enable novel business solutions, especially when combined with smart contracts. This work provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental principles that underpin blockchain technologies, such as system architectures and distributed consensus algorithms. Next, we focus on blockchain solutions for the energy industry and inform the state-of-the-art by thoroughly reviewing the literature and current business cases. To our knowledge, this is one of the first academic, peer-reviewed works to provide a systematic review of blockchain activities and initiatives in the energy sector. Our study reviews 140 blockchain research projects and startups from which we construct a map of the potential and relevance of blockchains for energy applications. These initiatives were systematically classified into different groups according to the field of activity, implementation platform and consensus strategy used. 1 Opportunities, potential challenges and limitations for a number of use cases are discussed, ranging from emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, to decentralised marketplaces, electric vehicle charging and e-mobility. For each of these use cases, our contribution is twofold: first, in identifying the technical challenges that blockchain technology can solve for that application as well as its potential drawbacks, and second in briefly presenting the research and industrial projects and startups that are currently applying blockchain technology to that area. The paper ends with a discussion of challenges and market barriers the technology needs to overcome to get past the hype phase, prove its commercial viability and finally be adopted in the mainstream.

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Blockchain technology in the energy sector: A systematic review of challenges and opportunities

A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues

Designing microgrid energy markets : A case study : The Brooklyn Microgrid

The dissemination of patients’ medical records results in diverse risks to patients’ privacy as malicious activities on these records cause severe damage to the reputation, finances, and so on of all parties related directly or indirectly to the data. Current methods to effectively manage and protect medical records have been proved to be insufficient. In this paper, we propose MeDShare, a system that addresses the issue of medical data sharing among medical big data custodians in a trust-less environment. The system is blockchain-based and provides data provenance, auditing, and control for shared medical data in cloud repositories among big data entities. MeDShare monitors entities that access data for malicious use from a data custodian system. In MeDShare, data transitions and sharing from one entity to the other, along with all actions performed on the MeDShare system, are recorded in a tamper-proof manner. The design employs smart contracts and an access control mechanism to effectively track the behavior of the data and revoke access to offending entities on detection of violation of permissions on data. The performance of MeDShare is comparable to current cutting edge solutions to data sharing among cloud service providers. By implementing MeDShare, cloud service providers and other data guardians will be able to achieve data provenance and auditing while sharing medical data with entities such as research and medical institutions with minimal risk to data privacy.

MeDShare: Trust-Less Medical Data Sharing Among Cloud Service Providers via Blockchain

This paper expounds the main principles behind blockchain technology and some of its cutting-edge applications. Firstly, we present the core concepts at the heart of the blockchain, and we discuss the potential risks and drawbacks of public distributed ledgers, and the shift toward hybrid solutions. Secondly, we expose the main features of decentralized public ledger platforms. Thirdly, we show why the blockchain is a disruptive and foundational technology, and fourthly, we sketch out a list of important applications, bearing in mind the most recent evolutions.

Blockchain Technology: Principles and Applications

The Global Financial Crisis has reshuffled the cards for central banks throughout the world. In the wake of the biggest crisis since the Great Depression, this volume traces the evolution of modern central banking over the last fifty years. It takes in the inflationary chaos of the 1970s and the monetarist experiments of the 1980s, eventually leading to the New Monetary Consensus, which took shape in the 1990s and prevailed until 2007. The book then goes on to review the limitations placed on monetary policy in the aftermath of the global meltdown, arguing that the financial crisis has shaken the new monetary consensus.

The Global Financial Crisis and the New Monetary Consensus

This paper investigates the foundations of Bitcoin, the controversial digital and stateless currency launched in 2009. After explaining why Bitcoin is a complex object of study, the latter electronic currency is analyzed through the lenses of complexity theory. In this sense, by breaking away from the holy trinity of the mainstream, namely rationality, equilibrium and self-interest, the Bitcoin phenomenon casts light on the emergence of non-intuitive macroeconomic results derived from numerous micro-interactions involving groundbreaking technology. Further, the paper discusses how established knowledge fields, such as monetary policy and banking regulation have been shaken by Bitcoin. The methodological implications for economic theory are then singled out. Finally, we conclude.

Bitcoin through the Lenses of Complexity Theory: Some Non-Orthodox Implications for Economic Theorizing

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the need for renewed collaborative efforts between linguists and economists; to develop a multidisciplinary approach to discourse studies, in order to single out, in the case at hand, how financial media discourse might reflect either a prevailing mainstream or a Minskian conceptual apparatus in financial crisis related papers.

Pilkington Marc

Papers

Blockchain Technology: Principles and Applications

Blockchain Technology: Principles and Applications

The Global Financial Crisis and the New Monetary Consensus

Bitcoin through the Lenses of Complexity Theory: Some Non-Orthodox Implications for Economic Theorizing

Crisis Perception in Financial Media Discourse: a Concrete Application through the Minskian/Mainstream Opposition