Blockchain Papers

Elisabeth Noble

No abstract is available for this record.

Darcy W E Allen, Chris Berg

Understanding the complexities of blockchain governance is urgent. The aim of this paper is to draw on other theories of governance to provide insight into the design of blockchain governance mechanisms. We define blockchain governance as the processes by which stakeholders (those who are affected by and can affect the network) exercise bargaining power over the network. Major considerations include the definition of stakeholders, how the consensus mechanism distributes endogenous bargaining power between those stakeholders, the interaction of exogenous governance mechanisms and institutional frameworks, and the needs for bootstrapping networks. We propose that on-chain governance models can only be partial because of the existence of implicit contracts that embed expectations of return among diverse stakeholders.

Fay Koster, Hans P. Borgman

Blockchain has been heralded as a technology that can transform entire sectors, including the public sector where blockchain applications are believed to bring a wide range of benefits. The public sector is lagging behind, however, in its actual adoption of blockchain technology, and our understanding of the factors that explain the slow adoption rate, is lacking. Based on seven case studies of blockchain projects at various adoption stages, this research contributes to our understanding of what factors influence blockchain adoption in the public sector. We use an extended TOE framework that includes an inter-organizational perspective. The findings show that adoption is influenced by the hype around—and resistance to—blockchain technology; by top management support, by (perceptions of) the regulatory environment; as well as by trust between blockchain partners, which is both an antecedent as well as a consequence of blockchain adoption.

Luis Luna, Erick Asiain, R. Garrido

This paper describes preliminary results on a Proportional plus Adaptive Disturbance Observer (P+ADOB) controller applied to velocity regulation tasks in a servo system. Adaptation law is obtained to estimate the servo system input gain, which is subsequently employed in the design of a Disturbance Observer. Compared with previous approaches, this feature relaxes the assumption on exact knowledge on the input gain, and only upper and lower bounds on this term are assumed known. A stability proof assuming constant disturbances allows concluding that the estimate of the input gain is bounded, and the velocity tracking error converges to zero. Real-time experiments illustrate the performance of the proposed controller.

Khin Mg Zin

The fiscal decentralization in Myanmar continues to deteriorate and pose a challenge the long lasting for the growth in the longer time horizon.The main objective of this paper is to observe the fiscal decentralization and rural infrastructure development: evidence from Myanmar and examine whether fiscal decentralization effect directly or indirectly on infrastructure by using an econometric model for the period 2011-2018.This study examines the budget decentralization's impact on infrastructure not only in the long run but also in the short run.The long and short run estimates are investigated using multiple regression method and fixed effects estimation method.Two variables including Revenue autonomy and the total number of miles of earth road construction were used in this analysis.The data was collected from the Ministry of Planning, Finance and Industry, Budget Department and the Department of Highways.Through the analysis findings show that Revenue autonomy positively causes the earth road construction.That's why this observation concluded that earth road construction causes Revenue autonomy and Revenue autonomy causes the earth road construction.There is a bidirectional causal relationship in both the earth road construction variable and Revenue autonomy variable and exists a long run relationship between Revenue autonomy and the earth road construction from multiple regression method and fixed effects estimation method.Therefore, Revenue autonomy policy needs to be coordinated with each other for curbing the earth road construction.

Аnzhela Kuznyetsova, A. O. Pelekhatyy

The purpose of the work is to identify trends and outline the problems of local budget revenues in Ukraine in the context of financial decentralization. Emphasis is placed on the need to form a systematic vision of the role of budget policy in ensuring the development of territories, determining the basis for the formation and implementation of local budgets in the context of ensuring the self-sufficiency of territorial communities formed as a result of decentralization. The scientific article presents the results of the analysis of the development of local budgets in Ukraine in the conditions of formation and functioning of united territorial communities. Research and calculations were conducted for the periods 2008-2018 and 2013-2019, which helps to identify trends and changes in the formation of local budgets due to fiscal innovations in 2014, the analysis of own revenues and transfers per capita in the regions of Ukraine. Emphasis is placed on the budget policy of territorial development in Ukraine at the present stage to increase the role of local governments in the budget sphere, providing them with expanded functions and achieving the ability to ensure the development of the territory through efficient use of available resources and use and search for additional opportunities. The main problems that remained unresolved in the context of decentralization reforms and intensified as a result of changes were identified. There is an inflated level of redistribution of gross domestic product through the public finance sector and a low level of institutional capacity of management to effectively manage financial resources, which is characterized by the risk of declining economic development and slowing down the activity of economic entities. The high level of dependence of local budgets of territories on financial support from the state budget and the problem of inefficient distribution of powers between different levels of government are argued. Emphasis is placed on the growth of disparities in the financial capacity of territories in the context of reforms of administrative and financial decentralization. As a result of the analysis of relevant indicators, the constant change of "rules" of subventions to local budgets is justified, which negatively affects the development of territories and is accompanied by the inability of local governments to effectively strategic planning of their own development. It is established to strengthen the financial capacity of developed regions, cities of regional significance and areas around such cities, deepening the depression of rural areas far from powerful "growth points" due to decentralization changes. The role of taxes as the main sources of revenue to local budgets (personal income tax, excise tax on fuel and excise tax on the sale of excisable goods, local taxes and fees) by business entities is substantiated.

Adugna Gebrie Jember, Wenhe Xu, Chao Pan, Xiongwen Zhao · 5 authors

With the development and expansion of smart grid systems, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) has become a new type of energy interaction based on Internet of Electric Vehicles (IoEVs). By leveraging the charging/discharging capabilities of EVs, V2G can be implemented in smart grid to enable intelligent energy transactions and reduce the unbalance of supply and demand. However, the implementation of interaction between the existing V2G technology and IoEVs faces the problems of high-complexity energy transaction management, insufficient computing capability, poor scalability, and lack of incentive mechanisms. The three-tier bi-directional energy transaction management strategies based on game and contract theory have been proposed. Firstly, the optimal pricing and EV discharging strategy is obtained based on the non-cooperative Stackelberg game and the energy-price equilibrium. Secondly, in order to optimize the utility of EAG, the information asymmetry incentive mechanism based on contract theory is proposed. This mechanism can effectively stimulate EVs to contribute to V2G energy transaction and further improve social benefits considering the energy transmission loss and battery life cycle degradation. To reduce the communication as well as processing latency and improve the efficiency of energy transaction management, edge computing has been incorporated. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed scheme significantly outperforms other existing schemes under various scenarios.

Guorui Yu, Guangliang Yang, Tongxin Li, Xinhui Han · 7 authors

Abstract Web-based cryptocurrency mining attacks, also known as cryptojacking, become increasingly popular. A large number of diverse platforms (e.g., Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS) and devices (e.g., PC, smartphones, tablets, and even critical infrastructures) are widely impacted. Although a variety of detection approaches were recently proposed, it is challenging to apply these approaches to attack prevention directly. Instead, in this paper, we present a novel generic and accurate defense solution, called “MinerGate”, against cryptojacking attacks. To achieve the goal, MinerGate is designed as an extension of network gateways or proxies to protect all devices behind it. When attacks are identified, MinerGate can enforce security rules on victim devices, such as stopping the execution of related JavaScript code and alerting victims. Compared to prior approaches, MinerGate does not require any modification of browsers or apps to collect the runtime features. Instead, MinerGate focuses on the semantics of mining payloads (usually written in WebAssembly/asm.js), and semantic-based features. In our evaluation, we first verify the correctness of MinerGate by testing MinerGate in a real environment. Then, we check MinerGate’s performance and confirm MinerGate introduces relatively low overhead. Last, we verify the accuracy of MinerGate. For this purpose, we collect the largest WebAssembly/asm.js related code with ground truth to build our experiment dataset. By comparing prior approaches and MinerGate on the dataset, we find MinerGate achieves better accuracy and coverage (i.e., 99% accuracy and 98% recall). Our dataset will be available online, which should be helpful for more solid understanding of cryptojacking attacks.

Alexandra Pogosyan

It can be argued that cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain technology and have a wide range of advantages for customers. It has become a way of sharing value, investing or even earning money. Unfortunately, cryptocurrency is currently used for money laundering and financing terrorism. Governments of many countries are faced with the range of issues that need to be resolved, such as determining the essence of cryptocurrency, tracking operations and activities of cryptocurrency exchanges, taxation and many others. Moreover, there is a variety of challenges for the market, cryptocurrencies volatility in particular, which is necessary to consider.

Renato Mangano

The market for cryptocurrencies is interspersed with cases of loss, theft and fraud and a new transnational practice in bankruptcy law is emerging whereby cryptocurrency exchanges compensate the injured users on a collective basis. This paper will argue: first, that this trend has transplanted into Asia and Europe the US idea according to which bankruptcy law can be employed to avoid mass litigation; secondly, that this trend has transcended the debate about the characterization of digital assets, including the concerns of those scholars who maintain that digital coins cannot be objects of property; and thirdly that – since this practice follows the pattern of so-called restorative justice and since cryptocurrencies are highly volatile – injured users, as creditors of the exchanges, ought to be satisfied in kind, i.e. incryptocurrencies themselves.

V.N. Terentyev, Military Educational Institution of Logistics named after General of the Army A.V. Khrulyov

Военная академия материально-

Jerzy Kur, Marian Guzek

The aim of the paper is an evaluation of the doctrinal foundations of the derivatives and cryptocurrencies as well as their empirical implementation results. The neoliberal policy is based on two elements: a libertarian idea of the minimal state and monetarism of Milton Friedman.

Jiaqi Ma

On October 25, 2019, senior Chinese officials conveyed the significance of blockchain to all sectors of society through the 18 th Collective Study of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Blockchain is the distributed ledger that maintains a growing list of chronological blocks linked by cryptographic techniques. It is a combined innovation of peer-to-peer networks, cryptography, consensus protocols, smart contracts, etc., which offers tamper-resistance and traceability characteristics to solve trust issues (1-2).

Fabio Della Valle, Miquel Oliver

Supply chain management is considered one of the main sectors of development for blockchain technology. This study provides solid contributions to understanding blockchain innovation and presents some main features and guidelines for how to boost blockchain implementation in industry. As explorative research, this paper presents a grounded theory analysis based on 18 expert interviews. The pool of interviewees is composed of academics and business and institutional representatives with relevant technological knowledge on blockchain and innovation management. Renowned worldwide experts provided us with powerful input to run this analysis and with a general overview of the current situation. Blockchain development of course impacts supply chains, but currently, the analysis shows that it does not seem to be a disruptive technology. In accordance with C.M. Christensen, blockchain presents all the features to be a sustaining innovation rather than disruptive. For this reason, as outcomes, we present five enablers that can foster prompt adoption in industry.

George Bissias, Brian Neil Levine

Blockchain systems are designed to produce blocks at a constant average rate. The most popular systems currently employ a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm as a means of creating these blocks. An unfortunate limitation of all deployed PoW blockchain systems is that the time between blocks has high variance. For example, Bitcoin produces, on average, one block every 10 minutes. However, 5% of the time, Bitcoin's inter-block time is at least 30 minutes.

Max Hoffmann, Michael Klooß, Markus Raiber, Andy Rupp

Abstract Black-box accumulation (BBA) is a building block which enables a privacy-preserving implementation of point collection and redemption, a functionality required in a variety of user-centric applications including loyalty programs, incentive systems, and mobile payments. By definition, BBA+ schemes (Hartung et al. CCS ‘17) offer strong privacy and security guarantees, such as unlinkability of transactions and correctness of the balance flows of all (even malicious) users. Unfortunately, the instantiation of BBA+ presented at CCS ‘17 is, on modern smartphones, just fast enough for comfortable use. It is too slow for wearables, let alone smart-cards. Moreover, it lacks a crucial property: For the sake of efficiency, the user’s balance is presented in the clear when points are deducted. This may allow to track owners by just observing revealed balances, even though privacy is otherwise guaranteed. The authors intentionally forgo the use of costly range proofs, which would remedy this problem. We present an instantiation of BBA+ with some extensions following a different technical approach which significantly improves efficiency. To this end, we get rid of pairing groups, rely on different zero-knowledge and fast range proofs, along with a slightly modified version of Baldimtsi-Lysyanskaya blind signatures (CCS ‘13). Our prototype implementation with range proofs (for 16 bit balances) outperforms BBA+ without range proofs by a factor of 2.5. Moreover, we give estimates showing that smart-card implementations are within reach.

Ilham Maulana Saud, Eka Asterina, Gisti Fairuz Trisha

Research aims : To analyze the effect of local taxes, regional retribution, special allocation fund, and area size on the allocation of capital expenditure with economic growth as a moderating variable in the regency/city Governments in Indonesia from 2016 to 2017. Design/Methodology/Approach : This study used secondary data obtained through the website of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Finance, and Audit Board of the Republic of Indonesia. Based on the purposive sampling method, a sample of 565 regencies/cities in Indonesia was obtained. The hypothesis testing in this study used Moderated Regression Analysis. Research findings : Based on the results of the study, it could be concluded that partially the local tax variables, special allocation fund, and area had a positive and significant effect on capital expenditure allocation. In contrast, regional retribution variables did not affect capital expenditure allocation, and economic growth could moderate the effect of local tax on capital expenditure allocation, but unable to moderate the effect of regional regional on capital expenditure allocations. Theoretical contribution/Originality : This research proved the theory of fiscal federalism in the relationship to fiscal decentralization, such as local taxes, economic conditions, public services, and public welfare. Moreover, this study enriched the literature on the application of the theory of stewardship in government agencies. Practitioner/Policy implication : Regional governments in regencies/cities in Indonesia are expected to explore the potential of their regions better so that they can improve the steward function to the community. Research limitation/Implication : The research period was relatively short; due to the availability of data only from 2016 to 2017, many research data were outliers. Future research is expected to renew the observation period and change the intervening model, as well as add other variables related to capital expenditure, such as General Allocation Funds (DAU), Revenue Sharing Funds (DBH), population numbers, Budget Surplus (SILPA) and others.

Bojan Radojević, Lazar Lazić, Marija Cimbaljević

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed numerous, lasting adverse effects on the global tourism industry. At the same time, it exposed the competitive advantages that existing smart tourism infrastructure could provide for addressing urgent health issues and providing meaningful smart services. This paper initially provides examples of smart geospatial services based on COVID-19 pandemic-related data, such as algorithms for measuring social distancing through CCTV and proximity contract tracing protocols and applications. Indeed, smart destinations, as an evolutionary step of smart cities, very quickly became a practical and research framework in various other disciplines, from leisure and service-oriented to technical and geospatial domains. However, various technologies employed and interests of different stockholders create a constant need for rescaling of smart data to facilitate their usability in providing optimized smart tourism services. One of the pressing concerns is the functional alignment of geospatial data with tourism-related data. Thus, we aim to pinpoint the growing importance of smart geospatial services, by pointing to the main downturn of the current smart destination issue with geospatial data resolutions, and, by building upon the relations of the geospatial layer of data with the tourism-specific layer. To this end, we pinpoint two further research directions - reinvestigating spatial and temporal resolution as a core of data smartness and the need for contextual (tourism-oriented) scaling of smart technology. This could be of keen interest in post-pandemic tourism, where smart geospatial services will be of pressing concern, but also it still an issue to be resolved in further smart destination development.

Mohammad Madine, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Ibrar Yaqoob · 7 authors

Patients are becoming aware of the importance of taking secure control and managing access over their medical data, thereby leading to the rise in the adoption of personal health record (PHR) systems. However, today's PHR systems fall short in providing secure and trustable data sharing and access facilities to patients when they are in emergency situations or temporarily incapacitated. Also, the existing PHR systems are centralized and vulnerable to the single point of failure problem. Integrating PHR systems with blockchain technology can help to overcome such limitations. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based PHR architecture that employs smart contracts to implement multi-party authorization (MPA) and threshold cryptographic schemes to automate secure and trustable medical data sharing and access in PHR systems. Moreover, we mitigate the limited storage and computation capabilities of blockchain by using InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage and reputation-governed trusted oracles into the proposed architecture. MPA and threshold cryptographic schemes allow the patient to split and share a secret key with a set of trusted parties, such as the healthcare regulatory agency, guardians, and hospitals, in such a way that they can collectively decide on sharing medical data on behalf of patients. We present algorithms along with their full smart contract function implementation details. We evaluate the robustness and performance of our solution by performing correctness verification and cost analysis. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed approach in terms of security, generalization, and limitation aspects to find out its feasibility and practicality. We make our smart contract code publicly available on GitHub.

Eduardo Francisco, Luís Tiago Ferreira, Carlos Silva, Joaquim Braga

The electric vehicle (EV) market is evolving fast with an expected high penetration of EV in the coming years. These EVs are dependent on charging infrastructure and since most charging will happen at home this will bring challenges to the low-voltage distribution network. The main challenge addressed in this study is the available grid capacity and what could be done to prevent the massive request of residential buildings grid connection reinforcements, which represents significant costs to consumers, large waiting times, which are not compatible with the rising necessities for charging EV and a general oversizing of the distribution network, which will drive the already low utilisation factors even lower. The presented solution for this challenge is to introduce a flexible power grid connection, which takes advantage of smart charging technology and the applications of flexible power contracts to allow the charging of 5–7 times more EV in the common garages of residential buildings without any building grid connection reinforcement and for a fraction of the cost. The distribution system operator (DSO) will represent a key role in the implementation of this solution, not only regarding the technical aspects but also regarding the onboarding of the consumers.

Aggelos Kiayias, Dionysis Zindros

No abstract is available for this record.

G. V. Mahesh Nath

No abstract is available for this record.

Craig Cameron

Cryptocurrency is a method of remunerating employees (‘cryptoremuneration’). However, crypto-remuneration has not been examined within the existing regulatory framework governing labour. This article explores the regulation of crypto-remuneration in Australia, specifically how labour, taxation and superannuation laws (state regulation), as well as the parties themselves (self-regulation) may regulate cryptocurrency as a method of reward for labour. It is argued that the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) and associated state legislation prohibits the payment of wages in cryptocurrency, and treats crypto-remuneration as a non-monetary benefit. The impact of regulation on how the parties may structure the remuneration package in the contract of employment is examined. Regulatory, price volatility and operational risks of crypto-remuneration are identified, as well as recommendations to stakeholders that can manage these risks.

Nashirah Abu Bakar, Sofian Rosbi, Kiyotaka Uzaki

The aim of this study is to develop a reliable forecasting method for cryptocurrency namely XRP Ripple Cryptocurrency. The daily price of Ripple cryptocurrency collected from 1st October 2019 until 30th November 2019. This study implemented a forecasting method of simple moving average and the weighted moving average. The mean absolute percentage error for the simple moving average is 2.75%. Meanwhile, the mean absolute percentage error for weighted moving average is 2.25%. Therefore, the weighted moving average is more reliable forecasting method for predicting the price of Ripple cryptocurrency. The finding of this study helps investors to develop an investment portfolio with lower risk and higher returns.