Abstract
Contrary to the current systems, with BCT, transactions are broadcasted, recorded and stored by many participants of the network and not in any central proprietary server, which allows transactions to be finalised in minutes because no reconciliation or any manual intervention is needed in the background. Further improvements of the technology offer the capability of implementing a broader range of software routines, including the entirety of what is offered by mere token systems, which opens up the possibility of also representing financial securities and instruments directly on the distributed ledger.
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- 1.
Terminology is still evolving and strict definitions have not yet been fully established (IFF 2015).
- 2.
The timestamp is a 4-byte file, which is based on the number of seconds elapsed from 1 January 1970, midnight UTC/GMT (Epoch Unit Timestamp) (Antonopoulos 2014, p. 188). At the time of writing (2 March 2016, 11:59 A.M), the time is 1456916388 (http://www.epochconverter.com/).
- 3.
Calculated with the SHA256 hash calculator, from http://www.xorbin.com/tools/sha256-hash-calculator.
- 4.
Due to the complexity of the cryptographic proof protocol, the example is simplified. The purpose is to show the underlying process behind cryptographic proof.
- 5.
The merkel root is constructed by recursively hashing pairs of nodes of the merkel tree until there is only one hash. Merkel trees are the summary of all transactions and provide an efficient process to verify whether a transaction is included in a block (Antonopoulos 2014, p. 164).
- 6.
For Bitcoin, it takes on average 150 quadrillion hash calculations per second for the network to solve the problem, which means a block every 10 min (Antonopoulos 2014, p. 194).
- 7.
For the complete list see on http://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/.
- 8.
UBS revealed in a further report that it is experimenting with smart bond applications using a private fork of Ethereum (Coindesk.com).
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Hofmann, E., Strewe, U., Bosia, N. (2018). Background III—What Is Blockchain Technology?. In: Supply Chain Finance and Blockchain Technology. SpringerBriefs in Finance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62371-9_4
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