Blockchain Papers

Meni Rosenfeld

In this paper we describe the various scoring systems used to calculate rewards of participants in Bitcoin pooled mining, explain the problems each were designed to solve and analyze their respective advantages and disadvantages.

Michael Whitecar

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Introduction From the simplest to the most sophisticated human activities, the power of computing has changed the way we interact individually, socially, governmentally, culturally, and globally. Yet have these influences been for the good or have they been less than positive? This year, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the implementation of COBOL, a.k.a. Common Business Oriented Language, one of the most well-known of computer fundamentals. COBOL arose from the profound scholarship and industry of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. Amazing Grace, as she was known, was one of the greatest American pioneers in the history of computer science. COBOL, one of the oldest programming languages, is an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language, which defines its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. Obtaining her doctorate in mathematics at a time when such academic achievements were not the usual experience for American women, Admiral Hopper was eventually elevated to her Navy rank by a specific honor from the Congress of the United States because of her genius, dedication, forward thinking, and unprecedented discoveries. She was an inventor par excellence whose personal life sustained the price of dedicated scholarship. The reflections and contributions of Admiral Hopper can be found today throughout our information industry. Just as we now develop new software or design new data chips, Admiral Hopper discovered the path to wide-spread usability from debugging software to developing the software engineering disciplines necessary to carry out today's demand for information. Her belief in decentralization opened new thought-provoking collaborative models that have both leap-frogged the advancement of technologies and, ironically, added to the many challenges we face today in managing the application of such new technologies. Reflections and Impact: From Mathematician to Professor, to Programmer, to Icon The many contributions of Admiral Hopper are well discussed in Kurt Beyer's 2009 work published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age. Among these contributions is debugging, a methodical process of finding and reducing the number of bugs, or defects, in a computer program or a piece of electronic hardware, to make it behave as expected. The terms bug and debugging were popularly attributed to Admiral Hopper in the 1940s. While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay, thereby impeding operation; thereupon she remarked that they were debugging the system. Sub-routines, as the name subprogram suggests, behave in much the same way as a computer program used as one step in a larger program or another subprogram. A subroutine is often coded so that it can be started (called) several times and/or from several places during a single execution of the program, including from other subroutines, and then branch back (return) to the next instruction after the call once its task is done. Sub-routines today can be found in many object-oriented programming development models known as classes which represent real world activities and objects. More famously, Admiral Hopper had a strong belief in decentralized management--a process of dispersing decision-making governance closer to the users of software applications. It includes the dispersal of administration or governance in sectors like engineering, management science, political science, political economy, sociology and economics. Decentralization has enormous significance beyond software usage or computer governance. It is fundamental to contemporary organizational systems development and the structures and substructures of institutional life, including universities and research institutions. …

Jarrod Long

All bettors, including the ???House,??? experience losing streaks and winning streaks. The House typically has a ???bankroll??? that is orders of magnitude larger than that of any individual bettor, and so can survive losing streaks without going bankrupt, thus remaining solvent long enough to win. Online wagering provides a new twist to this age-old scenario. We use elementary mathematical principles together with the idea of a virtual infinite sample size and the elimination of time as a constraint to develop a fail-proof system that generates the greatest possible exponential growth of capital. Let ?? (stake) be the amount you wish to invest or wager each time and ?? (return) be your return or odds on a proposition. Let n (number) be the sum of consecutive loosing investments or number of times you can loose on an identical proposition before depleting a specified amount of investment capital called ?? ( bankroll). The resultant equation, which I call the: Investment Betters Algorithm (click on thesis to view)
\nprovides the answer to remaining solvent long enough to outlast the irrationality of the simulated online ??? wagers open market ??? through a geometric progression. The augmented bankroll ?? , calculated slightly higher than the typical sum of the Geometric Series, can serve as a safeguard to capital ruin by it extreme disproportion to. Consider further the expected value of even money propositions, a virtual infinite sample size, and the elimination of time as a constraint and you have a no fail system to generate the greatest progressive exponential growth of capital. Current problems associated with financial return optimization algorithms are identified and discussed. Probable solutions to those problems are also prescribed along with improvements to diversified portfolio design.

R. Watson

As enterprises became increasingly information based, making improvements in their information activities is a top priority to assure their continuing competitiveness. A key to achieving these improvements is developing an enterprise information architecture (EIA). An EIA can be viewed as a structured set of multidimensional interrelated elements that support all information processes. The current ad hoc EIA in place within many enterprises cannot meet an organization's future needs because it has an incoherent framework, incompatibilities, missing elements, few and poorly understood standards, uneven quality and unnecessary duplications. This paper discusses the EIA developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a case study, for other information based enterprises, particularly those with decentralized and autonomous organization structures and cultures. While the technical architecture is important the organization and processes by which it is developed and sustained over time are equally important. This paper outlines the motivation for an EIA and discusses each of the interacting elements identified. It also presents an organization structure and processes for building a sustainable EIA activity.

K. Kwiatkowski, Patrícia Flatley Brennan, David L. DeMets, Karen Dahlen · 5 authors

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Health Sciences Schools are currently in the planning stage of developing an Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS). The planning phase of this project attends to the unique opportunities that are found at the flagship campus of a large state university system. Statewide teaching and research initiatives and accelerated campus-level capital development challenge the planners to create an IAIMS plan that anticipates an emerging health science environment. Additionally, UW-Madison has an organizational culture with a strong tradition of faculty governance, which provides a very desirable and flexible decision-making environment for a cross-discipline collaborative information management initiative. Development of a shared IAIMS vision conflicts with a governance model that most directly supports intradepartmental decision-making. The challenge presented here for an IAIMS initiative has less to do with hard wiring a technical infrastructure and more to do with increased stakeholder cooperation in a highly decentralized organization with autonomous information systems.