Programmable money for trustworthy currency transactions

Abstract

With bitcoin being the first blockchain success story, followed by other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, there has been a keen interest in potential technologies on the blockchain platform from different sectors, including finance, education, and supply chain. Conditional payments are an example of potential solutions being investigated. Programmable money, a new trustworthy virtual currency, provides for conditional payments. It is a scenario where the behaviour is removed from the human and embedded in the money using attaching contracts to the currency itself. This research follows the design science research (DSR) methodology to develop and evaluate programmable money by pivoting the capabilities of smart contract technology. Using a simulation, the artefact is subjected to realistic conditions to determine the feasibility of the programmable money concept in terms of functional and non-functional performance. Quantitative data generated during the observation of the simulation was used to obtain the findings. The findings show a strong performance in the functional test where the evaluation criteria focused on how the artefact addresses contract breaches attempted by simulation users. The non-functional tests were centred around performance under stress to gauge how the artefact would perform when processing a) many requests while the number of concurrent users remained constant and b) many requests caused by the periodically increased number of concurrent users. In the concurrency simulation, the findings show a quadratic time complexity T(n)= O(n2) compared to a linear time complexity function of T(n)= O(n) observed where the concurrency level remained the constant.