Colloquium - Panel "Blockchain und Cryptocurren­cies"

The event continues the succesful panel on blockchaines and crypto currencies from summer term 2018. With Prof. Rainer Böhme (University of Innsbruck) and Prof. Wolfgang K. Härdle (HU Berlin), a business informatics expert and a statistician are on hand to highlight the crypto currencies and the underlying technology from different perspectives. While Rainer Böhme will first give insights into how virtual currency systems work, Wolfgang K. Härdle then examines crypto currencies from a financial and econometric perspective.

Abstracts:
Rainer Böhme, University of Innsbruck - "Principles of Cryptocurrencies"
Cryptocurrencies have brought distributed systems into the radar of economists, and economic arguments into the design of technical protocols. I will discuss selected principles of decentralized systems through an economic lens, thereby arguing that some notion of money is needed to keep the systems stable. In other words, virtual currency in not just one, but THE application of blockchain-based systems. Knowing the principles helps us to navigate the design space of recent technical developments (alternatives to proof-of-work, "off-chain" payment channels, increased privacy), which I briefly sketch. It further allows us to reason about transition dynamics, which raise questions of competition, governance, and amenability to regulation. These topics host a wealth of problems of potential interest to economic researchers.

Wolfgang K. Härdle, HU Berlin – "Understanding Cryptocurrencies"
Cryptocurrencies refer to a type of digital cash that use distributed ledger - or blockchain technology - to provide secure transactions. These currencies are generally misunderstood. While initially dismissed as fads or bubbles, many large central banks are considering launching their own version of national cryptocurrencies. In contrast to most data in financial economics, there is a plethora of detailed (free) data on the history of every transaction for the cryptocurrency complex. Further, there is little empirically-oriented research on this new asset class. This is an extraordinary research opportunity for academia. We provide a starting point by giving an insight into cryptocurrency mechanisms and detailing summary statistics and focusing on potential future research avenues in financial economics