Abstract
After several years of the proposal and implementation of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto, people in the world were enthusiastic about crypto-assets. However, the market prices of crypto-assets are too unstable to use as a payment method. After many cyber-attack incidents, the confidence in the security of crypto-asset exchanges has also been compromised. Satoshi proposed Bitcoin to realize anonymous payment to protect individual privacy. Actual crypto-assets have changed from the original concept. The main reason for this deviation was the reality that ordinary investors cannot manage their secret keys securely. In this chapter, the reasons for this deviation are investigated.
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Notes
- 1.
Counting users of crypto-assets is a controversial issue. According to the report of Chainalysis (2018), the Bitcoin blockchain consists of 460 million addresses as of December 2018. Still, only 27 million addresses actually hold Bitcoin, and there is no information on how these addresses link to actual Bitcoin holders. In 2017, Japanese regulation required crypto-asset exchanges in Japan to perform a strict KYC to every customer in Japan. Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA) aggregated reported numbers of customers of all registered exchanges and disclosed that there are 3.5 million actual crypto-asset holders in Japan (JVCEA 2018).
- 2.
The reward is programmed to decline to 6.25 BTC in mid-May 2020. This event is called “Halving.”
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Iwashita, N. (2020). Bitcoin’s Deviations from Satoshi’s World. In: Pichl, L., Eom, C., Scalas, E., Kaizoji, T. (eds) Advanced Studies of Financial Technologies and Cryptocurrency Markets. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4498-9_6
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