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Abstract: Blockchain is a brand-new technology invented to evade the global financial industry from smashing again. Unfortunately, only a small portion of people realise this new technology and the way to incorporate it into their work, leaving a significant gap in utilising the benefits of such technologies. In response to the gap, we have designed a simulation game related to Blockchain, which targets to enlighten and encourage entrepreneurs and students to utilise Blockchain. The simulation was evaluated by a group of participants using prior-questionnaire and post-questionnaire. The results indicated that the simulations could help to promote the understanding of the Blockchain concepts, and thus may facilities its broader applications in the future.
Keyword: Blockchain, simulation, emerging technologies, IS education, Bitcoin, Smart Contracts
1. Introduction
In the past decades, rapid growth in electronic payment (e-payment) has been recorded (Ogbanufe and Kim, 2017), which foster the development of related technologies. Among different technologies, Blockchain is one of the most remarkable one (Morris, 2016), which has been considered as a more efficient "peer-to-peer electronic payment method" (Tapscott and Tapscott, 2016).
However, the public is not entirely familiar with blockchain. Occasionally, when blockchain technologies were reported to be applied by terrorists for money-laundering and other illegal activities (Moser et al., 2013), the public confidence and adoption of blockchain are harmed. Any technologies including Blockchain should not be considered as a poison but a double-edged sword. Besides, the applications of Blockchain is not bounded to financial transactions but may also be found in supply chain management (lansiti and Lakhani, 2017) and data management (Dallemule and Davenport, 2017).
In this paper, we are going to present a simulation game called "Blockchain-SimGame", which aims at promoting the concepts of blockchain to entrepreneurs and students, by introducing different scenarios and real-life application of Blockchain. We hope our paper can demonstrate how to utilise simulations for introducing new concepts in Information Systems (IS) such as Blockchain.
2. About Blockchain
A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records (or sometimes called blocks) which are linked and secured using cryptography (Morris, 2016). While it was initially invented for use in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, as its public transaction ledger (Eyal and Sirer, 2014), its applications are not only in digital currencies (Swan, 2015) but also...