Monirah Ali Aleisa, Mona Alshahrani, Natalia Beloff, Martin White
Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology (BCT) are considered two of the most trending and disruptive technologies. BCT, although commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, has shown a tremendous impact among many other distributed applications domains. BCT characteristics, such as the distribution of data storage among independent nodes and the use of consensus algorithms offer immutability and transparency and remove the need for a central authority making BCT trustworthy. However, decision-makers and stakeholders currently lack the confidence to overcome uncertainty related to AI technology, which affects the acceptance of AI technology in wider application domains, such as the recruitment process. Furthermore, current research literature does not adequately investigate the role of trust as an integral part of an AI-based recruitment application. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate how emerging BCT and AI technologies can improve decision making and stakeholder trust in a job recruitment system that is traditionally focused on just human expert decision-making. In this paper we propose the design of a new solution for trusting AI in recruitment applications through the use of Blockchain Smart Contracts (TAIRA-BSC). TAIRA-BSC integrates Blockchain Smart Contracts (BSC) with the Data Lake (DL), Machine Learning (ML) and AI technologies in our AI Recruitment Model (AIRM) architecture. TAIRA-BSC improves transparency and interoperability in the recruitment process while protecting sensitive job candidate data and ensures data integrity delivery and traceability in the recruiting process through a verifiable decentralized ledger, i.e., the blockchain and associated smart contracts. The paper presents a discussion on the state-of-the-art of integrating AI with BCT focusing on how BCT can be used to bridge trust concerns with AI systems. We also present a conceptual architecture TAIRA-BSC proof of concept that is developed to serve as a foundation for future studies focused on enhancing trust in AI applications through the integration of BCT.
The metaverse gained its momentum after a CEO of the biggest social media made a statement that it would be the next big thing after the Internet. Although there is no single, agreed definition of the metaverse, the common understanding of the metaverse is that the concept combines IoT, AR, VR, XR, and 3D technologies. It is also called the Web 3.0. The market capital and the economic potential of the metaverse are enormous. The market cap was calculated around USD14.8 trillion in October 2021 while the economic potential ranged from USD3,75 trillion to USD12.5 trillion. Hence, it is of importance to discuss the legal aspects of the metaverse. This article is the first to elaborate the legal conundrums of the metaverse in a more proper manner. It includes discussion on the property law and intellectual property law, and whether the time has come to have “a virtual property law”. It also discusses some other legal aspects such as privacy and data protection, contract law and smart contracts, cybersecurity and cyberattacks, monetary and payment systems laws, and regulation of virtual assets (including securities and commodities laws), tax law, anti-money laundering and KYC, and criminal law. To give a more comprehensive view, some governance and ethical issues of the metaverse are also touched upon.
James A. Cunningham, Nigel Davies, Sarah Devaney, Søren Holm · 7 authors
In recent years we have seen the adoption of distributed ledger technology (DLT), originally the mechanism underpinning the operation of the Bitcoin crypto currency, across a wider range of technology sectors including healthcare. DLT allows for the design of informatics systems with the properties of immutability, security, and decentralization. One recent innovation in the space has been the specification and development of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are decentralized DLT-based records that represent ownership of a unique digital asset. The predominant current use case for NFTs has been in the representation and sale of digital artwork, however the features offered by NFTs, unique-ness, immutability, transferability, and verifiability, are directly applicable to the design of health informatics systems. In this paper we explore these properties and describe a reference architecture for using NFTs as a means of representing and transferring records of patient's consent for medical data use.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is a new, emerging technology that is expected to have deep and “disruptive” effects on our economies and societies. It offers a new paradigm for the way in which information is registered, stored, and transacted. Blockchain is actually only one example of distributed ledger technology, which constitutes a physically decentralized and secure database, in the sense data are not held in one central site, rather they are held and updated simultaneously across several sites, theoretically making it more difficult to hack (Weiss and Biermann, 2020). Blockchain allows generated information to be stored in “blocks,” each of which is “stamped” and linked to the previous one, creating an unchangeable record of transactions (Cagigas et al., 2021). The process is conducted and verified via a predefined network protocol or “consensus mechanism” that specifies how the system is ruled. This permissions architecture can be used to determine whether, and to what extent, the blockchain itself will be largely left under the control of a centralized entity or authority or whether access and control of the blockchain will be shared among all those interested in participating. For example, depending on the permissions granted, participation in the verification process can be open and free or restricted to a group of users. In addition, the information registered in the blockchain can be more or less openly shared. At the most general level, then, blockchains are secure, immutable, anonymous, and decentralized digital records (or ledgers) of user-verified digital transactions. The first well-known blockchain product to emerge was Bitcoin, in 2008, which utilizes the technology for its most familiar usage—“cryptocurrency.” Today, there are thousands of cryptocurrencies that have been launched with different degrees of success.1 Since cryptocurrency became well known, there has been a second spike in public consciousness about blockchain around non-fungible tokens (NFTs), where one-of-a-kind digital assets are bought and sold every day. These NFTs can be as trivial as a “signed Tweet,” one of which was sold via auction in March 2021 for almost US$3 million.2 Yet, only 1 year later, the same product was put up for sale again, the highest bid being only US$280, inevitably questioning its intrinsic price.3 As a result, blockchain is sometimes associated with crypto-criminality, money laundering, or questionable frivolities in the digital art market. Despite these better-known commercial applications, blockchain can also be applied to the public sphere: government, public policy, and public services. Indeed, in recent years, governments and international organizations around the world have started to deploy blockchain in a growing number of services, including digital identity management, health, food and agriculture, land registry, public procurement, defense, aviation, value chains, logistics, and more.4 So, while the early hype and possibilities of blockchain were grossly inflated (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016) and the “blockchain revolution” is still to come in the way that the portable computing, the internet, and cell phones did, there are significant implications to the technology, both as a target and as a tool of public policy and indeed as a possible new form of governance (Campbell-Verduyn, 2018). Among these implications are higher-order questions on the nature of money, law, and democracy—and even the state itself (Atzori, 2015). Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have been issued outside of the traditional financial sector and have become a means of financial exchange and wealth-storage beyond the reach of governments—and among their more radical proponents, that is a feature, not a bug. Hence, states are already examining the issue of regulating cryptocurrencies not only because of their potential for being used in illegal transactions and money laundering but also for their potential threat to financial stability (FSB, 2021). It may be attractive too for financial interests to “tame” crypto and turn it into just another investment vehicle. The implications for the nature of law were first forcefully put forward by Lawrence Lessig: “code is law” (Lessig, 1999, 2006). This refers to a species of “algorithmic governance” where the routines and assumptions embedded in computer codes “govern” human behavior (Noble, 2018; Pasquale, 2015). More importantly, the code, for example, in the form of a smart contract, can trump the “law” in the sense of legislation or rules determined by state authorities. For example, remote services can be contracted in one part of the world, paid for through an app such as Satoshipay, and governed by a smart contract. The legal and taxation regimes within which those contracting parties reside become irrelevant. In both the arch-examples of currency and law, we see the potentially radical disintermediation that is either lamented or celebrated by promotors of blockchain technologies. Blockchain can go further and deeper in upending our conventional concepts of democracy and the state. For example, for most purposes, government-issued ID (passports, driver’s licenses, and birth certificates) are considered the foundation of one’s formal and legal identity. Indeed, a pioneer public case is currently being developed in the European Union (EU) within the realm of self-sovereign identity (SSI), namely the European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework (ESSIF).5 Moreover, there are also private initiatives: through Blockchain Helix, people can establish digital identities that give them an immutable record of who they are. The “national” passport could be eclipsed by the digital ID, which can then be used for borderless transactions. The point of these innovations is sometimes difficult to grasp since they seem to be only “added layers” to existing, secure, and accepted forms of ID. All current forms of ID can be counterfeited, hence the lengths that governments go to protect the security, for example, of a passport. We can see the problem more clearly in the case of academic or professional credentials. As labor markets go global, the barriers to “proving” one’s university or training qualifications (e.g., degrees, certificates, and CVs) rise considerably with requirements for attestation from various “official” bodies. Blockchain potentially upends this. The upending is moderate, a mere tilt, if governments (e.g., the ESSIF above) build the blockchain architecture. The upending is radical if individuals no longer need government and if their digital ID is blockchain-solid and accepted anywhere. The digital ID would supplant the government passport or other state-sanctioned ID. The current value of “citizenship” would be further debased. Another example is governance processes, in both private and public spheres. The LiquidFeedback platform promises a “unique democracy software” to promote self-organization of units as small as an association or company or as large as municipalities. Bitnation goes further still and promises “a blockchain jurisdiction in which communities can be built, contracts made, disputes resolved, and agreements positively enforced through reputation. Within this jurisdiction, governance services such as peer-to-peer security, insurance and education can be accessed via third-party dapps.” You can even start your own “nation” if you like. Of course, this seems absurd—until we interrogate the core functionalities of the modern nation-state and consequently of “citizenship.” A contract between two parties who reside in the same “jurisdiction” is subject to adjudication and enforcement by that jurisdiction. When the parties are from different jurisdictions, the contract usually specifies which of the legal frameworks govern the agreement. Alternatively, there are provisions in international commercial law or treaties that will govern such agreements. Once again, blockchain upends this. A contract between parties in Montreal and Mumbai can be forged in blockchain, with its own self-executing provisions that have nothing to do with the jurisdictions within which the parties reside. Some analysts believe blockchain has libertarian and autarkic disintermediation in its DNA,6 but this has not stopped some governments from embracing the technology as the “next big thing” in governance and policy platforms; Dubai, for example, has a blockchain strategy that it claims will make it the “happiest city on earth.”7 This is part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Emirates Blockchain Strategy 2021, which aims to transform 50% of government transactions to blockchain.8 Its plan comprises a national system built around a unique digital ID for each citizen/resident, which they can then use to access government documents and services. The EU has a blockchain strategy, which includes the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure that is a joint effort of the EU states, Norway, Liechtenstein, and the European Commission.9 The overarching intent is to provide “legal certainty” and avoid “regulatory fragmentation.” Estonia has been the pioneer in digital governance, embracing e-government as early as 1997. It was the first government to use blockchain technology in 2012 with its Succession Registry, maintained by the Ministry of Justice. The blockchain platform now includes the following registries: health care, property, business, succession, digital court system, surveillance tracking information system: official state announcements, and the state gazette. Anarchists, drug cartels,10 financial institutions, and some governments (from the Baltics to Arab emirates) have embraced blockchain, but the policy research community is alarmingly late to the party. Debate and analysis on blockchain have been dominated by computing science and fintech, and more recently by legal scholars, even though the implications for policy science and public policy are potentially staggering. Even if we think of the implications only in terms of blockchain as a “tool” (something to be used in the delivery of public services) for public policy or as a “target” (threats to be managed), the list of services that could be disrupted by blockchain is significant. It is only in the recent period that the lack of attention to blockchain from the policy research community has started to change. This attention to blockchain can be quantified: a systematic review of the academic literature on blockchain in the public sector shows a sharp increase from 2015 onward (Cagigas et al., 2021). In parallel, there has been a significant increase in the number of policy documents on blockchain produced by international policy organizations, including the EU,11 the OECD,12 the United Nations (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and UNWOMAN), and the World Bank.13 From the perspective of government and policy, blockchain is being used as a tool, for example, in the following activities: Record-keeping (health records, land registries, and vehicle registration); identity attestation (passports, ID cards, birth certificates, marriage, and divorce) Payments and remittances (Rodima‐Taylor & Grimes, 2019) Central Bank Digital Currencies, mostly known by their acronym CBDCs (although very few are currently considering using blockchain in their final pilots14) Secure and transparent delivery of cash benefits and tokens Smart contracts Supply chain management (tracking) Traceability systems (food safety and conflict minerals) (Muirhead & Porter, 2019) Insurance contracts And, as regards policy targets (threats) associated with blockchain, the following lead the concern: Money laundering (e.g., Financial Action Task Force) Financial services regulation (and experimentation) Carbon footprint of cryptocurrency “mining” Cyber-threats and cyber-warfare Tax evasion It is now timely to bring together a collection of articles by leading international experts that focus on what blockchain might mean for the economy and society, the regulatory dilemmas it presents, and possible policy solutions. The articles selected for this special issue all focus on core characteristics or promises of blockchain technology from a societal perspective and contemplate the regulatory challenges and dilemmas therein. For example, at the most generic level, blockchain technology is expected to be disruptive, meaning it is expected that, after initially taking root in simple, specific applications, it will increasingly replace previous technologies and bring about profound changes in the ways in which processes are completed, bringing about increased efficiencies and greater transparency and data security. However, these potential advantages must be considered alongside blockchain’s high-energy consumption needs, processing speed and cost. Blockchain thus presents trade-off dilemmas for policymakers seeking to promote economic growth, innovation, and sustainability. At higher and more abstract levels, we should also contemplate the potential impact of blockchain on our received notions of state sovereignty, citizenship, and governance. A key question for policymakers today is how can and should blockchain be regulated? De Filippi et al. (2022) pose the question of how policy can be designed to regulate and legalize a technology like blockchain that is “alegal” by design. The public, permissionless version of blockchain was explicitly designed to be decentralized, anonymous, and beyond the control of government. Some of the uses to which it was consequently put were clearly illegal, but many are “alegal” in the sense that they are simply beyond the scope of government to regulate or even “see” and have a self-regulatory, non-state bounded character of simple facticity. Blockchain is neither legal nor illegal, it just is or at least it “just was” in the moment of its creation/design by Satoshi Nakamoto (possibly a person, possibly a pseudonym). It was a completely new economic and payment system that had not existed before and thus was beyond law. The article shows, with a brief example of the attack on The DAO (a decentralized investment fund deployed as a smart contract on Ethereum in 2016), how far beyond normal legal or governmental interventions it was. However, policymakers are not entirely impotent—they can still regulate intermediaries, commercial operators, or mining pools and establish arbitration regimes, and indeed governments in the USA and in Europe have imposed anti-money laundering regulations and blacklists. De Filippi et al. (2022) register the limits of these approaches and instead argue for the creation of “regulatory sandboxes” (already used by the financial industry) that would permit leading and regulatory and from regulatory that would still regulatory The article by and (2022) on another core question to of policy and public distributed ledger technology, and other systems are to be is on specific and such as and rather governance, or conventional transparency and of and even if they are not they are embedded in frameworks that their they are subject to public their can be and on & The of technologies in may to more public services but also to such with a technology that in of digital security. and (2022) focus on the following can public In the case of institutions, what is the way public with technologies or their we a architecture or a The the use of potentially the public sector and how this may in government. then several policy with a to protect in government even if some of the used to do et al. 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Dijital tarihin akışına yön veren blok zinciri teknolojisi sanat tasarım ve ekonomi gibi birçok alanda yankı uyandırmıştır. Kripto ekonomi ağında geliştirilen NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) varlık birimi ile tasarımcılar ve sanatçılar etki alanlarını genişletmişlerdir. Dijital eserlerin değer kazanması ve sahiplik haklarının lisanslanabilmesi, bilgi çağında sanat ve tasarımın dijital baskınlığının bir göstergesi olmuştur. Bu gelişmeler dijital sanata dair yeni tartışmaları gündeme getirmiştir. Eserin dijital varlığı ile fiziksel varlığı arasındaki kıyas bazı sanat eserlerinin sadece dijitalde var olabilmeleri adına fiziksel varlıklarının yakılarak yok edilmesi gibi durumlarla sonuçlanmıştır.Teknolojinin doğru amaçlarla kullanılabilmesi için öncelikle altyapısının doğru anlaşılması gerektiği göz önünde bulundurularak, NFT teknolojisinin anlaşılabilmesi adına araştırmada blok zinciri teknolojisine ayrıntılı bir şekilde yer verilmiştir. Teknolojideki bu kritik gelişmelerin altyapısının anlaşılması kripto sanat alanında atılacak adımların daha nitelikli olması ve yeni kripto koşullara uyum sağlanabilmesi açısından önemlidir. Araştırma, dijital çağın sunduğu olanakların doğru kullanımı ve bu doğrultuda yaşanan gelişmelerin odağında biçimlendirilmiştir. Bu kapsamda kripto sanat eserlerinin anlamsal değeri Beeple’ın Everydays: The First 5000 days isimli eseri üzerinden sanat eleştirmenleri ve sanatçıların yorumları ışığında değerlendirilmiştir. Araştırmada, lisanslanarak eşsiz birer dijital varlığa dönüştürülen sanat eserleri fiziksel varlıkları üzerinden irdelenmiş, varlıkların dijital ve fiziksel varoluşları adına ortaya koyulan eserler ve projeler değerlendirilmiş, sonuç kısmında doküman ve metin analizi yapılmıştır. Bu şekilde bir dijital varlığın kendini gerçeklemesi için fiziksel varlığından kurtulunması düşüncesi ve vandallık arasındaki fark ortaya koyulmuştur.
Developing secure smart contracts remains a challenging task. Existing approaches are either impractical or leave the burden to developers for fixing bugs. In this paper, we propose the first practical smart contract compiler, called HCC, which automatically inserts security hardening checks at the source-code level based on a novel and language-independent code property graph (CPG) notation. The high expressiveness of our developed CPG allows us to mitigate all of the most common smart contract vulnerabilities, namely reentrancy, integer bugs, suicidal smart contracts, improper use of tx.origin, untrusted delegate-calls, and unchecked low-level call bugs. Our large-scale evaluation on 10k real-world contracts and several sets of vulnerable contracts from related work demonstrates that HCC is highly practical, outperforms state-of-the-art contract hardening techniques, and effectively prevents all verified attack transactions without hampering functional correctness.
Governing emerging technologies is one of the most important issues of the twenty-first century, and primarily concerns the public, private, and social initiatives that can shape the adoption and responsible development of digital technologies. This study surveys the emerging landscape of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) governance and maps the ecosystem of emerging platforms within industry and public and civil society. We identify the major players in the public, private, and civil society organizations and their underlying motivations, and examine the divergence and convergence of these motivation and the way they are likely to shape the future governance of these emerging technologies. There is a broad consensus that these technologies represent the present and future of economic growth, but they also pose significant risks to society. Indeed, there is also considerable confusion and disagreement among the major players about navigating the delicate balance between promoting these innovations and mitigating the risks they pose. While some in the industry are calling for self-regulation, others are calling for strong laws and state regulation to monitor these technologies. These disagreements, are likely to remain for the foreseeable future and may derail the optimal development of governance ecosystems across jurisdictions. Therefore, we propose that players should consider erecting new safeguards and using existing frameworks to protect consumers and society from the harms and dangers of these technologies. For instance, through re-examining existing legal and institutional arrangements to check whether these cater for emerging issues with new technologies, and as needed make necessary update/amendments. Further, there may be cases where existing legal and regulated systems are completely outdated and can't cover for new technologies, for example, when AI is used to influence political outcomes, or crypto currency frauds, or AI-powered autonomous vehicles, such cases call of agile governance regimes. This is important because different players in government, industry, and civil are still coming to terms with the governance challenges that these emerging technologies pose to society, and no one has a clear answer on optimal way to promote these technologies, at the same time limit the dangers they pose to users.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed how sharing of biological and biomedical data facilitated researchers, medical practitioners, and policymakers to tackle the pandemic on a global scale. Despite the growing use of electronic health records (EHRs) by medical practitioners and wearable digital gadgets by individuals, 80% of health and medical data remain unused, adding little value to the work of researchers and medical practitioners. Legislative constraints related to health data sharing, centralized siloed design of traditional data management systems, and most importantly, lack of incentivization models are thought to be the underpinning bottlenecks for sharing health data. With the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union (EU) and the development of technologies like blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), it is now possible to create a new paradigm of data sharing by changing the incentivization model from current authoritative or altruistic form to a shared economic model where financial incentivization will be the main driver for data sharing. This can be achieved by setting up a digital health data marketplace (DHDM). Here, we review papers that proposed technical models or implemented frameworks that use blockchain-like technologies for health data. We seek to understand and compare different technical challenges associated with implementing and optimizing the DHDM operation outlined in these articles. We also examine legal limitations in the context of the EU and other countries such as the USA to accommodate any compliance requirement for such a marketplace. Last but not least, we review papers that investigated the short-, medium-, and long-term socioeconomic impact of such a marketplace on a wide range of stakeholders.
nalele ÈtiinÈifice ale UniversitÄÅ£ii âAlexandru Ioan Cuzaâ din IaÈi, seria ÅtiinÅ£e Juridice reprezintÄ o publicaÅ£ie de tradiÅ£ie în domeniul dreptului. Paginile revistei cuprind munca de cercetare a cadrelor didactice, profesorilor invitaÅ£i, cercetÄtorilor Åi doctoranzilor din cadrul FacultÄÅ£ii de Drept a UniversitÄÅ£ii âAlexandru Ioan Cuzaâ din IaÅi. Anul 1955 marcheazÄ momentul inaugural al Revistei, numerele ulterioare conservând impulsul imprimat iniÈial în continuitate pânÄ Ã®n contemporaneitate. Analele UniversitÄÅ£ii âAlexandru Ioan Cuzaâ, seria ÅtiinÅ£e Juridice conÈin analiza unor chestiuni punctuale de drept, subscrise celor patru puncte cardinale ale taxonomiei juridice â drept public, drept penal Èi ÈtiinÈe penale, drept privat, drept internaÈional Èi european â dublate de recenzii Èi comentarii de jurisprudenÈÄ.
Jan Jürjens, Simon Scheider, Furkan Yıldırım, Michael Henke
Abstract A significant challenge in bootstrapping a jointly used infrastructure such as Data Spaces is to incentivize the participants to invest in setting up the infrastructure. In this chapter, we investigate this challenge and possible solutions, focusing on an approach called “Tokenomics.” The incentivization scheme should be utilized by governance frameworks, in which the participants of Data Spaces remain capable of action and independent through automated, effective, and fair decision-making processes. Also, potential participants should be motivated to participate in the establishment and further development of the system, while on the other hand, undesirable behavior should be penalized. In combination with distributed ledger technology (DLT) and machine-readable, legally compliant smart contracts, participant behavior can be affected in such a way that both data quality and quantity are improved for the whole Data Space. To derive possible design options for Tokenomics approaches, we examine different token frameworks and their impact on participants. The investigation of the frameworks is carried out taking into account five significant domains: technical, behavior, inherent value, coordination, and pseudo-archetypes. Furthermore, we investigate which token designs provide smaller or larger incentives in order to join or maintain a DLT-based ecosystem.
May Alhajri, Carsten Rudolph, Ahmad Salehi Shahraki
Wearable fitness devices are widely used to track an individual’s health and physical activities to improve the quality of health services. These devices sense a considerable amount of sensitive data processed by a centralized third party. While many researchers have thoroughly evaluated privacy issues surrounding wearable fitness trackers, no study has addressed privacy issues in trackers by giving control of the data to the user. Blockchain is an emerging technology with outstanding advantages in resolving consent management privacy concerns. As there are no fully transparent, legally compliant solutions for sharing personal fitness data, this study introduces an architecture for a human-centric, legally compliant, decentralized and dynamic consent system based on blockchain and smart contracts. Algorithms and sequence diagrams of the proposed system’s activities show consent-related data flow among various agents, which are used later to prove the system’s trustworthiness by formalizing the security requirements. The security properties of the proposed system were evaluated using the formal security modeling framework SeMF, which demonstrates the feasibility of the solution at an abstract level based on formal language theory. As a result, we have shown that blockchain technology is suitable for mitigating the privacy issues of fitness providers by recording individuals’ consent using blockchain and smart contracts.
Domain-specific Microservice Reference Architectures (MSRA) have become relevant study objects in software technology. They facilitate the technical evaluation of service designs, compositions patterns and deployment configurations in realistic operational practice. Current knowledge about MSRA is predominantly confined to business domains with modest numbers of users per application. Due to the ongoing massive digital transformation of society, people-related online services in e-government, e-health and similar domains must be designed to be highly scalable at entire nation level at affordable infrastructure cost. With ZVAX, we present such a service in the e-health domain. Specifically, the ZVAX implementation adheres to an MSRA for pandemic-related processes such as vaccination registration and passenger locator form submission, with emphasis on selectable levels of privacy. We argue that ZVAX is valuable as study object for the training of software engineers and for the debate on arbitrary government-to-people services at scale.
A smart contract, in form, is represented as a piece of computer program code involving related commercial transactions and algorithms. Essentially, this is the computerization of the pre-agreed contract between the participants. This special contract agreement is automatically verified and executed once preset conditions are triggered. Smart contracts are not only used in the field of financial transactions, but also include many aspects of social life. Although smart contract technology has unique advantages, it is still in the early stages of development, and many problems remain to be solved. First, this article briefly summarizes the development process of blockchain, and then focuses on the research progress of blockchain 2.0-smart contracts. Second, the related concepts of smart contracts are presented, and the working mechanism of smart contracts and the difficulties faced by smart contracts are elaborated. Finally, in response to these problems and dilemmas, the corresponding solutions and ideas are summarized, and the future challenges and development trends of smart contracts are analyzed and judged.
In the evolving context of distributed ledger technologies, the standardization of smart contracts is necessary. Smart contracts are tamper-proof computer programs. Due to their security and flexibility, it is possible to exploit smart contracts in a wide variety of use cases. In particular, it could be possible to automate legally recognized contracts by leveraging smart contracts. To this extent, some standards regarding the proper management of smart contracts are surging. However, there are still many technological misconceptions regarding smart contracts. This study describes smart contracts from multiple perspectives and identifies and clarifies some of the most common misconceptions regarding smart contracts. This study also provides some guidelines and insights on the proper management of smart contracts. This study can be a valuable resource for future standards on smart contracts.
The article discusses about the smart contract, its concept and legal nature, as well as the place of smart contracts in the Technology Law, which means a discussion on the important issues covered by this topic. At the same time, smart contracts are com- pared to the usual standard contract, where their pros and cons are discussed. The importance and necessity of both types of contracts in relation to the current reality will also be discussed. At the same time, the article discusses about the revolutions – from where they begin and how long the world has passed before today's reality, why blockchain is considered as the fourth-generation revolution and how important it is to develop and implement it. The article also discusses about the types of contracts, which means how a standard contract can be divided, in the other words, we talk about consensual and real contracts. The definitions of each of them and their need related to the smart contracts are analyzed in the article. Therefore, we use the relevant chapters and articles of civil law to be able to explain what is meant and to what extent it is possible to follow the same norms in the case of the smart contract.
In order to comply with specific regulations (eIDAS, Payment Services Directive, Anti-Money Laundering Directive) and reduce risk profiles, financial service providers increasingly collect large amounts of information from their customers. The increasing opportunities and technical means for data collection afforded from digitalisation raise legal concerns related to proportionality, necessity, and data minimization. However, the concerns go beyond just GDPR compliance and legislative balance, as distinct architectures and technological deployments potentially impact rights, freedoms, and ethics. This paper will address the issue by examining aspects of digital identity, especially those that have proposed the use of a permissioned distributed ledger or blockchain as architecture for know your customer and onboarding evidential frameworks, using specific hashing schemes that derive unique identifiers from the combination of specific personal data points. Evidence is appended to a data structure, for the purpose of auditing and/or record keeping, potentially ensuring an immutable record of events is maintained. After elaborating on the notion of identity in the digital sphere and the applicability of the GDPR to such a data structure, the discussion will be developed to critically assess the current trend towards using the financial institutions’ customers’ mobile devices as interfaces to the distributed data structure and the legal and sociological implications of this technological development. The potential impact of the analysis goes beyond digital identity within the finance sector, positioning the discussion towards approaches for e-governance and the regulation of digital identity in a way that human dignity is preserved and the risks of creating a ubiquitous “digital avatar” are adequately addressed by the law.
S. Kate Devitt, Jason Scholz, Timo Schless, L Lewis
Abstract Artificial intelligences (AI) will increasingly participate digitally and physically in conflicts yet there is a lack of trusted communications with humans for humanitarian purposes. For example, in disasters and conflicts messaging and social media are used to share information, however, international humanitarian relief organisations treat this information as unverifiable and untrustworthy. Furthermore, current AI implementations can be brittle, with a narrow scope of application and wide scope of ethical risks. Meanwhile, human error can cause significant civilian harms even by combatants committed to compliance with international humanitarian law. AI offers an opportunity to help reduce the tragedy of war and better deliver humanitarian aid to those who need it. However, to be successful, these systems must be trusted by humans and their information systems, overcoming flawed information flows in conflict and disaster zones that continue to be marked by intermittent communications, poor situation awareness, mistrust and human errors. In this paper, we consider the integration of a communications protocol (the ‘Whiteflag protocol’), distributed ledger ‘blockchain’ technology, and information fusion with artificial intelligence (AI), to improve conflict communications called “Protected Assurance Understanding Situation & Entities” (PAUSE). Such a trusted human-AI communication network could provide accountable information exchange regarding protected entities, critical infrastructure, humanitarian signals and status updates for humans and machines in conflicts. Trust-based information fusion provides resource-efficient use of diverse data sources to increase the reliability of reports. AI can catch human mistakes and complement human decision making, while human judgment can direct and override AI recommendations. We examine several realistic potential case studies for the integration of these technologies into a trusted human-AI network for humanitarian benefit including mapping a conflict zone with civilians and combatants in real time, preparation to avoid incidents and using the network to manage misinformation. We finish with a real-world example of a PAUSE-like network, the Human Security Information System (HSIS), being developed by USAID, that uses blockchain technology to provide a secure means to better understand the civilian environment.
This piece explores algorithmic governance as a strength and a vulnerability in the experience of building participatory communities known as "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations". The Cypherpunks were terrified of surveillance. They envisaged the combination of cryptography and computer technology fundamentally altering the nature of trust and reputation and built cryptographically secure blockchain-based infrastructure to counter this threat. Now, not just on chain transactions are being tracked but every move of participants in blockchain communities. Reputation in blockchain systems could become the new algorithmic authoritarianism if mis-used for social control. This piece analyzes the ways in which decentralization efforts can be a threat to themselves by exploring the question, 'Are "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" (DAOs) the next panopticon of algorithmic governance or a different panacea, and what does this mean for human autonomy in "autonomous" systems?'. By employing ethnographic methods and case study analysis, this piece provides an important qualitative contribution to the early dynamics of the aspirations and problems of decentralized, autonomous organizations.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
Smart contracts have gained popularity with the emergence of blockchain technology, although the concept behind them has been studied since the 1990s. The automation of contracts signed in real life is an interdisciplinary subject and draws attention not only in the scope of technology but also in areas like business area and legal area. With the aim of providing clear understanding, accuracy and security of information in the process of creating a smart contract, many tools have been developed, either to avoid vulnerabilities or to allow anyone to contribute in writing a contract. In view of this scenario and seeking to further facilitate the general understanding of a smart contract, this paper aims to study the representation of smart contracts as state diagrams. It summarizes, through a systematic mapping, the many ways to visually represent smart contracts as state diagrams, emphasizing their states and transitions. An experiment was also carried out in order to show how state diagrams can facilitate the understanding of a contract. The results show that state diagrams do help understanding smart contracts.
Smart contracts are programs that manage interactions between many users. Recently, Solidity smart contract have become a popular way to enforce financial agreements between untrusting users. However, such agreements do not eliminate trust, but rather redirects trust into the correctness of the smart contract. This means that each user must verify that a smart contract behaves correctly, regardless of how other users interact with it. Verifying a smart contract relative to all possible users is intractable due to state explosion. This thesis studies how local symmetry can be used to analyze smart contracts from a few representative users. \n \nThis thesis builds on the novel notion of participation, that gives explicit semantics to user interactions. From participation, a topology is obtained for how users interact during each transaction of a smart contract. Local symmetry analysis shows that most users are interchangeable within a topology, and therefore, most users are locally symmetric. This motivates local bundle abstractions that reduce contracts with arbitrarily many users to sequential programs with a few representative users. It is shown that local bundle abstractions can be used to ameliorate state explosion in smart contract verification, and to accelerate counterexample search in bounded analysis (e.g., fuzzing and bounded model checking). We implement local bundle abstraction in SmartACE, and show order-of-magnitude improvements in time when compared to a state-of-the-art smart contract verification tool.
Abstract Blockchain technology is a distributed data recording system developed to monitor and secure all encrypted transactions with the shortest identification. Blockchain technology made a name for itself in 2008. However, the real development of this technology has been realized with use of smart contracts in Blockchain technology. In the cryptocurrency world, a smart contract can be defined as an application or program running on the Blockchain. They operate as digital deals that have to comply with certain rules. These rules are predetermined by computer codes and then copied and implemented by the servers in the entire network. The use of the word “smart” as a term in smart contracts comes from the fact that it is not made manually and is realized digitally. In this study, it is aimed to contribute to future studies in the transformation of smart contracts into real “smart” contract structures by applying artificial intelligence algorithms.