Blockchain Papers

Yonathan A. Arbel, Shmuel I. Becher

No abstract is available for this record.

Maria A. Schett, Julian Nagele

Developing compiler optimizations, especially for new, rapidly evolving smart contract languages, can be onerous and error-prone, but is especially important for smart contracts, where deployment and execution directly translate to monetary cost and which cannot change once deployed. One common optimization technique is the use of peephole optimizations, replacement rules that are applied using pattern-matching. These rules are normally constructed using human expertise, which is both time-consuming and far from systematic in exploring opportunities for optimization. In this work we propose a pipeline to automatically populate the peephole optimizer of a smart contract compiler. We apply superoptimization to an existing code base to obtain sequences of instructions, which can be replaced by cheaper, observationally equivalent instructions. We then generate peephole optimization rules by extracting the underlying patterns of these optimizations. We provide a case study of our approach and a prototype implementation for bytecode of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the tool ppltr, which combines the superoptimizer ebso and the rule generator sorg. Then we evaluate our approach by generating and applying nearly 1k peephole optimization rules extracted from 2k optimizations obtained from deployed bytecode.

Divij Kishore Jain

No abstract is available for this record.

Mousa Ajouz, Adam Abdullah, Salina Kassim Mousa Ajouz, Adam Abdullah, Salina Kassim

Under the fiat standard, money is no longer backed by any assets, but rather it is backed by debt. The implication of such a system is the emergence of many socio-economic problems. Restoring the value of money has long been a controversial topic, hampered in part by the lack of theoretical and empirical evidences.

Agnieszka Modzelewska, Paulina Grodzka

Reluctance to pay taxes is a natural feature of man. Given the above, it is not surprising that taxpayers are constantly looking for all possible ways to avoid taxation. The legislator, realizing the above, introduces a number of regulations aimed at counteracting dishonest actions of taxpayers. In the context of cryptocurrencies, these are in particular solutions aimed at limiting anonymity in the circulation of cryptocurrencies. The taxpayers, taking advantage of the fact that trading in cryptocurrencies is very specific, complicated and partially anonymous, try to outsmart the tax authorities and pay no taxes on income from such transactions. Also, the fact that until January 1, 2019, there was no regulation regarding the taxation of cryptocurrencies, and the introduced regulation also raises many doubts, does not encourage taxpayers to honestly settle accounts with tax authorities. Tax authorities, on the other hand, do not have the tools that would enable them to counteract taxpayers’ dishonesty effectively, what leads to the depletion of tax liabilities.

A. Blinov

The article describes current trends in the global financial market development as well as the formation of fundamentally new, innovative financial resources within the peering economy, such as cryptocurrencies. Its capitalization reached almost 1/100 of global gross domestic product. The purpose of the study is to analyze both the status of cryptocurrencies in different countries, including the United States of America, Japan, People’s Republic of China, and the European Union and the peculiarities of the cryptocurrency circulation development, as well as the money functions they are able to perform. The author has formulated the dilemma of this market regulation at the national and global levels. One should consider that the long-term role of crypto units depends upon the resolution of such a dilemma. And there is no unified approach of states and international organizations to the status and prospects of cryptocurrency regulation in our days. This creates a unique field of opportunities for further development of such instruments as the big economic and market movements undulate in big swings that were due to a sequence of actions and reactions by policymakers, investors, business owners, and workers. Given that state control over the emission of fiat money in the world can only be ensured to the extent that they control the banking system, the study provides an analysis of the legal status of such financial engineering products as cryptocurrencies. The author also accents on the three-tier blockchain technology. Finally, the domestic component is thoroughly analyzed, i.e. the regulation field of such instruments in Ukraine. The draft Concept of State Regulation of Cryptocurrency Transactions is also explained. Keywords: cryptocurrency; blockchain; status of crypto units; financial regulation; functions of money.

Olena Liashenko, Tetyana Kravets, Y. Repetskiyi

Artificial neural networks are modern methods suitable for solving the problem of nonlinear dependency approximation, which is successfully applied in many fields. This paper compares the predictive capabilities of Back Propagation, Radial Basis Function, Extreme Learning Machine, and Long-Short Term Memory neural networks to determine which artificial intelligence algorithm is best for modeling the price of Bitcoin opening. The criterion for comparing network performance was the standard deviation, the mean absolute deviation, and the accuracy of predicting the direction of change of course. At the same time, in the study of time series, it is recommended to perform a comprehensive data analysis using appropriate networks, depending on the length of the series and the specificity of the database.

Enchuan Shao, Danusha Rajapaksa

No abstract is available for this record.

Hamed Ghoddusi, Mohammad Morovati, Nima Rafizadeh

No abstract is available for this record.

Elena Voskresenskaya, Lybov Vorona-Slivinskaya, Lybov Achba

The study on issues of digital economy proved the current existence of the new “digital” economic reality. The traditional legal apparatus used for the statutory regulation of this new economic reality showed itself not only inefficient, but also significantly restraining the actively developing economic processes. In this regard, a plenty of practical and legal collisions occur related to the problems of identification of persons involved in civil-law transactions, property relations regarding digital economic turnover (for instance, relations concerning property rights in the field of distributed ledgers), registration of property rights and deals, regulation of banking line processes, formation of special protection models for relationships based on the use of digital technologies including issues of cybernetic and data security. The development of digital economy will inevitably influence legal principles and demand reconsidering some of doctrinal approaches to traditional legal models of regulating different types of economic activities. In this case, socially just changes in the legal regulation of economic activities should be primarily aimed at removing legal barriers that impede the development of digital economy, as well as at synchronizing legal rules with the technological features of economy’s functioning.

R.Suvitha N.Shanthi

E-voting is the process of conducting the voting process through online. The voters can cast their votes from different locations and these votes are collected and recorded electronically. Therefore, there is a need for a system to provide control and security to the whole procedure. Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology can be integrated to provide a decentralized system. Blockchain uses distributed ledger technology (DLT) to avoid forged voting option & non-repudiation and one time login of the user is also ensured. By integrating the above techniques, a secure user authentication for e-voting supported blockchain in p2p network is projected. This system would increase the safety by avoiding the forgery of votes. Similarly, the blockchain are often integrated to a spread of voting situations and a few alternative applications.

Prerna Gulati, Aditi Sharma, Kartikey Bhasin, Chandrashekhar Azad

No abstract is available for this record.

Georgios Kapnissis, Eleni-Ekaterini Leligou, Georgios K. Vaggelas

In the shipping industry, significant part of the documents exchange still have the traditional paper form, mainly due to security concerns, despite the size and modernization efforts of this market. We explore the adoption of the blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies to address document exchange in a fast and secure way.

Yan Zhuang, Lincoln Sheets, Xiyuan Gao, Yuanyuan Shen · 7 authors

Clinical trials are essential for discovering new treatments, but there are multiple challenges to patient recruitment, patient engagement, and cost containment. Virtual clinical trials (VCT) are an innovative approach that provides potential solutions by conducting home-based, rather than site-based, clinical trials. Virtual clinical trials are still the exception rather than general practice due to technical barriers. "Blockchain," a distributed ledger technology, is a perfect match for virtual clinical trials. Its peer-to-peer design, security settings, and data transparency meet the needs of many healthcare applications. The programmable "Smart Contract" feature makes blockchain more suitable and feasible for VCT by solving computational issues. Our previous work has shown the power of applying blockchain to clinical trial recruitment. This work develops a comprehensive blockchain framework, with simulations and case studies, including patient recruitment, patient engagement, and persistent monitoring modules.

Blaž Podgorelec, Muhamed Turkanović, Martina Šestak

No abstract is available for this record.

Fariha Anjum Hira, Siti Zaleha Abdul Rasid, Haliyana Khalid, Alam Md Moshiul · 8 authors

Disruptive technology, blockchain is propelling a technological intervention in healthcare due to its unique features and advantages. The healthcare industry is migrating to Health 4.0. Therefore, peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions in a decentralized and distributed manner makes blockchain more lucrative to serve the needs of the healthcare industry of today. The revolutionary system, blockchain has been discussed in the field of healthcare over the past five years. Hence, a systematic investigation of the existing body of knowledge concerning blockchain research in healthcare is essential. The motivation of this study is to support further studies based on the current research trend analysis via graphical visualization and bibliographic material analysis. Therefore, this study maps the expansion of scientific and academic research conducted concerning blockchain that is relevant to healthcare by utilizing a bibliometric analytic method to understand the state of the art. Bibliometric statistics were utilized to analyze current scientific articles published in the Scopus database from 2016 to 2019. In addition, an overview of the publication trends over the first three months of 2020 was undertaken to understand the research trend for the current year so far. The study serves the purpose of mapping research development trends in healthcare. The outcome discovered some beneficial insights such as the yearly trend of publications, top listed authors, institutes, countries, and publishers from around the world. Moreover, this article assists scholars in developing a theoretical framework to provide a primary source of reference for further studies regarding blockchain technology in the healthcare domain.

Sabir Hussain Awan, Sheeraz Ahmed, Asif Nawaz, Sozan Sulaiman · 8 authors

Blockchain is an emerging field of study in a number of applications and domains. Especially when combine with Internet of Things (IoT) this become truly transformative, opening up new plans of action, improving engagement and revolutionizing many sectors including agriculture. IoT devices are intelligent and have high critical capabilities but low-powered and have less storage, and face many challenges when used in isolation. Maintaining the network and consuming IoT energy by means of redundant or fabricated data transfer lead to consumption of high energy and reduce the life of IoT network. Therefore, an appropriate routing scheme should be in place to ensure consistency and energy efficiency in an IoT network. This research proposes an efficient routing scheme by integrating IoT with Blockchain for distributed nodes which work in a distributed manner to use the communicating links efficiently. The proposed protocol uses smart contracts within heterogeneous IoT networks to find a route to Base Station (BS). Each node can ensure route from an IoT node to sink then base station and permits IoT devices to collaborate during transmission. The proposed routing protocol removes redundant data and blocks IoT architecture attacks and leads to lower consumption of energy and improve the life of network. The performance of this scheme is compared with our existing scheme IoT-based Agriculture and LEACH in Agriculture. Simulation results show that integrating IoT with Blockchain scheme is more efficient, uses low energy, improves throughput and enhances network lifetime.

C.K.M. Lee, Yunzhang Huo, Shuzhu Zhang, Kam K.H. Ng

Smart manufacturing is the core of the modern production and manufacturing industry as it moves towards digitalization. The successful implementation of smart manufacturing needs the support of information technology, data technology, and operational technology, among which edge computing, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence can play significant roles facilitating the development of smart manufacturing. In this research, a smart manufacturing system is proposed considering the integration of edge computing and blockchain technology. The introduction of edge computing can balance the computational workload and provide a more timely response for terminal devices. Blockchain technology can be utilized to promote both the device-level data transmission and the manufacturing service transaction. Moreover, regarding the computational task assignment in smart manufacturing systems, a mathematical model is proposed, and further solved using a swarm intelligence-based approach. Numerical experiments show that the introduction of the edge computing mechanism in smart manufacturing can significantly improve the processing time, especially with a large number of tasks.

Xinyang Deng, Tianhan Gao

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is considered as an important part of intelligent transportation system (ITS). Depending on the interconnection between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs), VANETs can provide a variety of application services for drivers and passengers. Due to the necessary service cost, many applications have to face the problem of how to charge vehicle for the services. This paper, which relies on blockchain technology, takes park toll management system and electronic toll collection system (ETC) as scenarios. Two payment schemes, V-R transaction and V-Rs transaction, are then proposed. The security and performance analysis show that the proposed schemes are efficient and robust.

Frimpong Atta Junior Osei

Blockchain originally emerged as the technological innovation that powered new forms of digital currency like Bitcoin. However, recent years have seen leaders in banking, finance, government, and many more organizations giving this new innovation more attention than ever before. This reputation has been attributed to its properties of allowing data to be shared across a large network of untrusted entities without relying on a trusted third party. Blockchain provides advantage for non-repudiation and integrity of secured data storage resulting in a more transparent process. This paper critically analyzes whether a blockchain is ideally the application technical solution for a specific scenario. Moreover, we compare the differences between a 'permissionless' blockchain such as bitcoin, and a 'permissioned' blockchain such as hyperledger, commonly preferred by established institutions like banks and compare their features with that of a centralized database. We then provide a structured methodology to determine the efficient solution to solve a specific application problem. With our methodology, we explore three use cases payments, supply chain management, and decentralized autonomous organizations and conclude this article with an outlook for further opportunities.

Chloé Hébant, Duong Hieu Phan, David Pointcheval

No abstract is available for this record.

Ying Miao, Qiong Huang, Meiyan Xiao, Hongbo Li

Cloud storage systems provide a flexible, convenient and friendly way for users to outsource data. However, users lose control of their data once outsourcing them to the cloud. Public auditing was introduced to ensure data integrity, in which a third-party auditor (TPA) is delegated to execute auditing tasks. In general, TPA generates and sends challenge information to the cloud server (CS), which proves data possession accordingly. However, the TPA may not perform public auditing protocol honestly or may even collude with CS to deceive users. Some existing public auditing schemes utilize blockchain to resist against the malicious TPA. However, the CS may guess the challenge messages and there is a risk that users' information may be leaked to the TPA during the process of auditing. In this paper, we propose a decentralized and privacy-preserving public auditing scheme based on blockchain (DBPA), in which a blockchain is utilized as an unpredictable source for the generation of (random) challenge information, and the auditor is required to record the audit process onto the blockchain. Due to the characteristics of blockchain, users can check the audit results publicly. Moreover, zero-knowledge proof is used in DBPA to protect user's privacy during the audit process so that the response information returned by the CS does not leak information about user's data. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that DBPA is secure and efficient.

Zongyang Zhang, Weihan Li, Haitao Liu, Jianwei Liu

With the continuous development and popularity of blockchain technology, anonymity of cryptocurrency has attracted wide attention. Zcash is an altcoin of Bitcoin aiming to protect blockchain anonymity. Its anonymity is highly guaranteed by zero-knowledge proofs. However, it is still practicable to decrease Zcash's anonymity. In this paper, we provide a refined empirical analysis of Zcash anonymity. We improve current address clustering methods and increase the clustering rate by 9%. We also analyze the whole process of distributing mining reward and identify 87.5% addresses and 25.7% transactions. Besides, we simplify Zcash transaction network and then pick out nodes (edges) which play important roles in network connectivity. We show that these nodes are mostly mining pools. In particular, users participating in shieldedpool are mostly founders, miners and mining pools, although shieldedpool itself is designed for protecting anonymity of users with high privacy requirements. Our results, to an extent, are opposite to the original intention of Zcash.

K. O. KYSLA, Yu. O. FOMENKO

No abstract is available for this record.