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Bitcoin: Bubble or Blockchain

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Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications

Part of the book series: Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies ((SIST,volume 38))

Abstract

This paper sets out a brief, deliberately non-technical, overview of Bitcoin, a new, but becoming more mainstream, crypto currency, generated and managed by a distributed multi–agent system. Bitcoin was developed in late 2008 by “Satoshi Nakamoto”. The nature of Bitcoin as a disruptive currency, payments system and asset, is juxtaposed against the potential for its transactional ledger, the blockchain, to usher in a revolutionary way of recording “digital truth”. The main contribution of this paper is to progress the debate around Bitcoin beyond the technical and towards legal and ethical issues and the nature of money and memory itself.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Exeter Business School, Exeter, UK

    Philip Godsiff

Authors
  1. Philip Godsiff
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Correspondence to Philip Godsiff .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Telecommunications, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia

    Gordan Jezic

  2. KES International, Shoreham-by-sea, United Kingdom

    Robert J. Howlett

  3. Faculty of Education, Science, Technology and Mathematics, University of Canberra, Canberra, South Australia, Australia

    Lakhmi C. Jain

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Godsiff, P. (2015). Bitcoin: Bubble or Blockchain. In: Jezic, G., Howlett, R., Jain, L. (eds) Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 38. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19728-9_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19728-9_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19727-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19728-9

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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