This dissertation makes a case for the Shakespearean stage in the modern Anglo-American tradition as a distinctive laboratory for producing and navigating theories of emotion. The dissertation brings together Shakespeare performance studies and the newer fields of the history of emotions and cultural emotion studies, arguing that Shakespeare’s enduring status as the playwright of human emotion makes the plays in performance critical sites of discourse about human emotion. More specifically, the dissertation charts how, since the late nineteenth century, Shakespeare performance has been implicated in an effort to understand emotion as it defines and relates to the “human” subject. The advent of scientific materialism and Darwinism involved a dethroning of emotion and its expression as a specially endowed human faculty, best evidenced by Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Shakespeare’s poetic, formal expression of the passions was seen as proof of this faculty, and nowhere better exemplified than in the tragedies and in the passionate displays of the great tragic heroes. The controversy surrounding the tragic roles of the famous Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving illustrates how the embodied, human medium of the Shakespearean stage served as valuable leverage in contemporary debates about emotion. The dissertation then considers major Shakespearean figures of the twentieth century, including Harley Granville Barker, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Brook, whose “stages” similarly galvanize and reflect contestation and change in what William Reddy has called “emotional regimes” or Barbara Rosenwein “emotional communities.” For each of these figures, a specific emotional paradigm is at stake in staging Shakespeare and particularly Shakespearean tragedy. I engage with a range of sources, from performance reviews to popular psychology, to locate these canonical moments in Shakespearean performance history as flashpoints in a cultural history of emotion.
We live in an increasingly digital world, where Smart Cities have become a reality. One of the characteristics that make these cities smart is their ability to gather information and act upon it, improving their citizens lives. In this work, we present our system, Dignitas. A blockchain-based reputation system that allows citizens of a Smart City to assess the truthiness of information posted by other citizens. This assessment is based on a bet that reporters make, and all of those who agreed with him, that puts their gathered reputation at stake. This use of Reputation as a currency is a novel idea that allowed us to build an anonymous system. Using blockchain we were able to have multiple authorities, working with each other to make the system secure and thus avoiding centralized schemes. Our work was focused on developing our idea, a proof of concept, and testing the viability of our new solution.
Roben Castagna Lunardi, Henry Cabral Nunes, Vinicius da Silva Branco, Bruno Hugentobler Lipper · 6 authors
Blockchain emerged as a solution for data integrity, non-repudiation, and availability in different applications. Data sensitive scenarios, such as Health Care, can also benefit from these blockchain properties. Consequently, different research proposed the adoption of blockchain in Health Care applications. However, few are discussed about incentive methods to attract new users, as well as to motivate the system or application usage by existing end-users. Also, little is discussed about performance during code execution in blockchains. In order to tackle these issues, this work presents the preliminary evaluation of TokenHealth, an application for collaborative health practice monitoring with gamification and token-based incentives. The proposed solution is implemented through smart contracts using Solidity in the Ethereum blockchain. We evaluated the performance of both in Ropsten test network and in a Private instance. The preliminary results show that the execution of smart contracts takes less than a minute for a full cycle of different smart contracts. Also, we present a discussion about costs for using a Private instance and the public Ethereum main network.
Yi Zhong, Anmin Zhou, Lei Zhang, Jing Fan · 5 authors
As the root cause of illegal cyber activities, botnets are evolving continuously over the last two decades. Current researches on botnet command and control mechanism based on blockchain network suffer from high economic cost, single point of failure, and limited scalability. In this paper, we present DUSTBot, a novel P2P botnet model based on Bitcoin transactions to prepare for new cyber threats. Specifically, a covert, duplex, and low-cost command and control (C&C) channel in the Bitcoin network is presented in our work. DUSTBot uses the Bitcoin main network as the downstream channel while using the Bitcoin testnet as the upstream channel. Furthermore, the peer list exchange algorithm based on the Ethereum block hash proposed in this paper is effective against routing table poisoning attack and P2P botnet crawling. The robustness of DUSTBot against node removal is studied through constructing the botnet with a P2P simulator. We deploy the implementation of DUSTBot on cloud platforms to test its feasibility and performance. Moreover, the stealthiness of DUSTBot and the effectiveness of the proposed peer list exchange algorithm are evaluated. The results demonstrate the feasibility, performance, stealthiness, and robustness of DUSTBot. In the end, possible countermeasures are discussed to mitigate similar threats in the future.
Nathaniel Aldred, Luke Baal, Graeham Broda, Steven Trumble · 5 authors
A blockchain is a distributed ledger forming a distributed consensus on a\nhistory of transactions. It is the underlying technology for the Bitcoin\ncryptocurrency, but there are many applications beyond the financial sector.\nWith built-in security and removal of the need for third party trust,\nblockchain has started to see some use within contract applications among other\nthings. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a\npermissioned-based blockchain third party consent management system, whose\npolicy can be decided by a government agency. We have constructed a proof of\nconcept implementation using Hyperledger Fabric to provide a service that\nallows end-users to control and consent to who manages their private\ninformation. We believe our solution meets the guiding principles of EU General\nData Protection Regulation or GDPR. While our performance and usability\nevaluation are limited, our solution design and its implementation meet the 7\nfoundational principles of privacy by design.\n
Blockchain software development is becoming more and more important for any modern software developer and IT startup. Nonetheless, blockchain software production still lacks a disciplined, organized and mature development process, as demonstrated by the many and (in)famous failures and frauds occurred in recent years. In this paper we present ABCDE, a complete method addressing blockchain software development. The method considers the software integration among the blockchain components—smart contracts, libraries, data structures—and the out-of-chain components, such as web or mobile applications, which all together constitute a complete DApp system. We advocate for ABCDE the use of agile practices, because these are suited to develop systems whose requirements are not completely understood since the beginning, or tend to change, as it is the case of most blockchain-based applications. ABCDE is based on Scrum, and is therefore iterative and incremental. From Scrum, we kept the requirement gathering with user stories, the iterative-incremental approach, the key roles, and the meetings. The main difference with Scrum is the separation of development activities in two flows—one for smart contracts and the other for out-of-chain software interacting with the blockchain—each performed iteratively, with integration activities every 2–3 iterations. ABCDE makes explicit the activities that must be performed to design, develop, test and integrate smart contracts and out-of-chain software, and documents the smart contracts using formal diagrams to help development, security assessment, and maintenance. A diagram derived from UML class diagram helps to effectively model the data structure of smart contracts, whereas the exchange of messages between the entities of the system is modeled using a modified UML sequence diagram. The proposed method has also specific activities for security assessment and gas optimization, through systematic use of patterns and checklists. ABCDE focuses on Ethereum blockchain and its Solidity language, but preserves generality and with proper modifications might be applied to any blockchain software project. ABCDE method is described in detail, and an example is given to show how to concretely implement the various development steps.
Carla Cristiane Sokulski, Rafael Vignoli de Moura, Gustavo Tadra Waldmann, Antônio Carlos de Francisco · 5 authors
The objective of this article is to identify the main characteristics of scientific research regarding the approach economic about bitcoins. This study is based on bibliometric research and network analysis, with the use of descriptive statistics in 84 articles found on the Web of Science database. The analysis used the programs VOSviewer and Excel. The main results show that Bouri, Bouoiyour, Dyhrberg and Selmi are the authors who published most articles and that the Université de Pau (France) and the University College Dublin (Ireland) are the institutions with most publications. The journal with most publications is Plos One, which presented a 3.057 impact factor. There are only three co-authoring networks with greater expressiveness, however, there are no links between them and the others. Despite the growing number of publications on the subject, the researchs is beginning, showing a wide field of exploration.
G. V. Zubakov, Олег Дмитриевич Проценко, I.O. Protsenko
The presented study addresses the current problems in the implementation of the distributed ledger (blockchain) technology in supply chain management mechanisms in the context of the digital economy. Aim. The study aims to analyze the application of the blockchain technology in modern economic processes from the perspective of logistics. Tasks. The authors consider the possibility of using the blockchain technology in the supply chain management system and explore ways to use the findings of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) in the fieldof digital economy to organize information standardization processes within the supply chains of foreign and mutual trade. Methods. This study uses general scientific methods of cognition to examine approaches to the implementation of the blockchain technology in transport and logistics processes and to find opportunities for the implementation of smart contracts to ensure the traceability of the entire chain of commodity and information fl ws. Results. Implementation of the distributed ledger (blockchain) technology in the logistics processes of foreign and mutual trade increases the transparency of information fl ws and the speed of decisionmaking. This technology would allow the parties to negotiate directly, minimizing potential risks and the time required to approve a supply deal. Conclusions. The authors consider the possibility of using a systematic approach to the digitalization of transport and logistics processes and the subsequent standardization of information interaction at the B2B, B2G, and G2G levels, segmented by separate fields of transport and foreign trade and individual economic sectors. As a conclusion, the study assesses the prospects of the practical implementation of blockchain mechanisms in the creation of industrial platforms — digital platforms that provide integrated services for businesses and the government using a single window system.
Alen Jugović, Juraj Bukša, Alex Dragoslavić, David Sopta
Blockchain technology is a decentralized database which stores the registry of property and transactions using a peer-to-peer network, secured by cryptography, and over time, its history is locked into blocks of data which are cryptographically connected and secured. The blockchain technology was primarily designed for application in cryptocurrency transactions and related digital agreements. Due to its immutable and infallible record of all transactions within the network, the potential of this technology for broad application has been recognized. This paper analyzes the possible advantages of applying blockchain technology in logistics and maritime transport.
Marija Jović, Marko Filipović, Edvard Tijan, Mladen Jardas
This article presents a comprehensive review of the current and rising trends of blockchain technology usage in shipping industry. The definition and features of blockchain technology are provided, as well as the potential usage of blockchain technology in various areas (financial services, Internet of Things, medicine, government, etc.), in order to better understand its complexity and application. Furthermore, the major challenges of blockchain technology are shown, and the most prominent examples of blockchain applications in shipping industry are provided. The application and advantages of blockchain technology in seaports are demonstrated through several examples.
It has been proved that in the context of financial decentralization, existing mechanisms of territorial financial resources formation and use of need improvement.The purpose of the study is to identify the positive and negative effects of financial decentralization in Ukraine and to find effective sources of local budgets replenishment to increase the level of socio-economic development of the territories.The dynamics of local budget revenues are analyzed in terms of budgets of the united territorial communities. It has been found that local government general fund’s own revenue tends to increase, although the annual growth rate of local government general fund’s own revenue is somewhat slowing. The process of decentralization in Ukraine is characterized by a rapid increase in the total number of united territorial communities. The rate of united territorial communities’ budgets own revenues growth is the highest in comparison to other local budgets.The structure of own income of the united territorial communities is investigated. It is revealed that the income of the territorial communities is generated mainly by income from the personal income tax and by local taxes and fees.It was found that the amount of state support for the development of territorial communities and the development of their infrastructure is significant and has a steady upward trend. In the structure of state financing of local self-government in Ukraine subsidies for socio-economic development and for development of medicine in rural areas, and financing by the State Fund for Regional Development prevail.A number of measures are proposed that will contribute to the growth of financial support for the socio-economic development of the territories.
More details: https://shivarthu.reaudito.com/ Democracy is about fair and equal treatment of everyone in a country. But itbecomes unrealistic to achieve when political parties have their conflict of interest,and leaders don’t have the expertise to make evidence-based policies and neitherhave the skill and manpower for solving problems that surround our society andecosystem. The new fair democracy provides an elegant way of governance thatseparates the representative responsibility according to their specialization and cangrow into any complexity. The governance is divided into various departments, andeach department is supervised by representatives with expertise in the field. Votersneed to have enough knowledge about the departments and their problems, in orderto vote for the selecting representatives of a department. The selection process ofrepresentatives is difficult in and easy out, which allows only serious and utilitarianactors to hold the responsibility, weeding out frivolous ones.
Blockchain technology is facing critical issues of scalability, efficiency and sustainability. These problems are necessary to solve if blockchain is to become a technology that can be used responsibly. Useful quantum computers could potentially be developed by the time that blockchain will be widely implemented for mission-critical work at financial and other institutions. Quantum computing will not only cause challenges for blockchain, but can also be harnessed to better implement parts of blockchain technologies including cryptocurrencies. We review the work that has been done in the area of quantum blockchain and hybrid quantum-classical blockchain technology and discuss open questions that remain.
The relationship between the development of financial technologies and the formation of the financial ecosystem has been investigated. It is proposed to divide the properties of the financial ecosystem into general and specific ones. The definition of the financial ecosystem has been clarified on the basis of identification of the institutional, functional and sectoral approaches to its understanding. The signs of classification of blockchains in the financial sphere are systematized.
Since the world’s first virtual currency was issued on the Bitcoin blockchain network in 2009, there has been a proliferation of various other private digital token offerings on blockchain networks—in particular, on the Ethereum blockchain. Milkau and Bott (2018) report that several governments are considering implementing digital currencies as a “complement to cash.” Blockchain technology holds great promise for innovative applications capable of facilitating any number of business operations, and several large companies including IBM, American Express, Toyota, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Walt Disney, Oracle, and Facebook have already invested heavily in the emerging technology. Crowdfunding is also a popular application of blockchain technology. Tech entrepreneurs have issued digital tokens for virtual currency as a means of circumventing the tedious regulations of the SEC governing the raising of capital. The regulatory status of these digital tokens and their associated trading platforms has been approached with a certain degree of ambiguity and controversy. This paper explores and explains the regulatory issues of fintech regarding digital tokens, making a valuable addition to the scarce literature on this topic.
Felipe Condon, Mohamed A. Ahmed, José Manuel Martínez, Young-Chon Kim
This paper proposes a blockchain-based energy trading platform for electric vehicles in smart campus parking lots. Smart parking lots are smart places capable of supporting both parking and charging services for electric vehicles. The electric vehicle owner may want to charge energy at a low price and sell it during peak hours at a higher price. The proposed system architecture consists of two layers: the physical infrastructure layer and the cyber infrastructure layer. The physical infrastructure layer represents all of the physical components located in the campus distribution power system, such as electric vehicles charging stations, transformers, and electric feeders, while the cyber infrastructure layer supports the operation of the physical infrastructure layer and enables selling/buying energy among participants. Blockchain technology is a promising candidate to facilitate auditability and traceability of energy transactions among participants. A real case of a parking lot with a realistic parking pattern in a university campus is considered. The system consists of a university control center and various parking lot local controllers (PLLCs). The PLLC broadcasts the electricity demand and the grid price, and each electric vehicle owner decides whether to charge/discharge based on their benefits. The proposed system is implemented on Hyperledger Fabric. Participants, assets, transactions, and smart contracts are defined and discussed. Two scenarios are considered. The first scenario represents energy trading between electric vehicles as sellers and the PLLC as a buyer, while the second scenario involves energy trading between electric vehicles as buyers and the PLLC as a seller. The proposed platform provides profits for participants, as well as enables balancing for the university load demand locally.
We consider a public blockchain realized in the mobile edge computing (MEC) network, where the blockchain miners compete against each other to solve the proof-of-work puzzle and win a mining reward. Due to limited computing capabilities of their mobile terminals, miners offload computations to the MEC servers. The MEC servers are maintained by the service provider (SP) that sells its computing resources to the miners. The SP aims at maximizing its long-term profit subject to miners' budget constraints. The miners decide on their hash rates, i.e., computing powers, simultaneously and independently, to maximize their payoffs without revealing their decisions to other miners. As such, the interactions between the SP and miners are modeled as a stochastic Stackelberg game under private information, where the SP assigns the price per unit hash rate, and miners select their actions, i.e., hash rate decisions, without observing actions of other miners. We develop a hierarchical learning framework for this game based on fully- and partially-observable Markov decision models of the decision processes of the SP and miners. We show that the proposed learning algorithms converge to stable states in which miners' actions are the best responses to the optimal price assigned by the SP.
Christoph Kinkeldey, Jean‐Daniel Fekete, Tanja Blascheck, Petra Isenberg
We present BitConduite, a visual analytics tool for explorative analysis of financial activity within the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency worldwide and a phenomenon that challenges the underpinnings of traditional financial systems - its users can send money pseudo-anonymously while circumventing traditional banking systems. Yet, despite the fact that all financial transactions in Bitcoin are available in an openly accessible online ledger - the blockchain - not much is known about how different types of actors in the network (we call them entities) actually use Bitcoin. BitConduite offers an entity-centered view on transactions, making the data accessible to non-technical experts through a guided workflow for classification of entities according to several activity metrics. Other novelties are the possibility to cluster entities by similarity and exploration of transaction data at different scales, from large groups of entities down to a single entity and the associated transactions. Two use cases illustrate the workflow of the system and its analytic power. We report on feedback regarding the approach and the the software tool gathered during a workshop with domain experts, and we discuss the potential of the approach based on our findings.
In fifth-generation (5G) networks and beyond, communication latency and network bandwidth will be no longer be bottlenecks to mobile users. Thus, almost every mobile device can participate in distributed learning. That is, the availability issue of distributed learning can be eliminated. However, model safety will become a challenge. This is because the distributed learning system is prone to suffering from byzantine attacks during the stages of updating model parameters and aggregating gradients among multiple learning participants. Therefore, to provide the byzantine-resilience for distributed learning in the 5G era, this article proposes a secure computing framework based on the sharding technique of blockchain, namely PiRATE. To prove the feasibility of the proposed PiRATE, we implemented a prototype. A case study shows how the proposed PiRATE contributes to distributed learning. Finally, we also envision some open issues and challenges based on the proposed byzantine- resilient learning framework.
This paper proposes SilentDelivery, a secure, scalable and cost-efficient protocol for implementing timed information delivery service in a decentralized blockchain network. SilentDelivery employs a novel combination of threshold secret sharing and decentralized smart contracts. The protocol maintains shares of the decryption key of the private information of an information sender using a group of mailmen recruited in a blockchain network before the specified future time-frame and restores the information to the information recipient at the required time-frame. To tackle the key challenges that limit the security and scalability of the protocol, SilentDelivery incorporates two novel countermeasure strategies. The first strategy, namely silent recruitment, enables a mailman to get recruited by a sender silently without the knowledge of any third party. The second strategy, namely dual-mode execution, makes the protocol run in a lightweight mode by default, where the cost of running smart contracts is significantly reduced. We rigorously analyze the security of SilentDelivery and implement the protocol over the Ethereum official test network. The results demonstrate that SilentDelivery is more secure and scalable compared to the state of the art and reduces the cost of running smart contracts by 85%.
Smart contract technology is reshaping conventional industry and business processes. Being embedded in blockchains, smart contracts enable the contractual terms of an agreement to be enforced automatically without the intervention of a trusted third party. As a result, smart contracts can cut down administration and save services costs, improve the efficiency of business processes and reduce the risks. Although smart contracts are promising to drive the new wave of innovation in business processes, there are a number of challenges to be tackled.This paper presents a survey on smart contracts. We first introduce blockchains and smart contracts. We then present the challenges in smart contracts as well as recent technical advances. We also compare typical smart contract platforms and give a categorization of smart contract applications along with some representative examples.
Abstract Background With the advent of precision medicine, pharmacogenomics data is becoming increasingly critical to patient care. These data describe the relationship between a particular variant in the genome and the response to a drug by the patient. As utilizing this kind of data becomes more integral to medical treatment decisions, appropriate storage and sharing of this data will be critical. A potential way of securely storing and sharing pharmacogenomics data is a smart contract with the Ethereum blockchain. This is an open-source blockchain platform for decentralized applications. A transaction-based, state machine, the “world” of Ethereum maintains user accounts and storage in a network state. Immutable pieces of code called “smart contracts” may be deployed to the Ethereum network and run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine when called by a user or other contract. The 2019 iDASH (Integrating Data for Analysis, Anonymization, and Sharing) competition for Secure Genome Analysis challenged participants to develop time- and space-efficient smart contracts to log and query gene-drug relationship data on the Ethereum blockchain. Methods We designed a smart contract to store and query pharmacogenomics data (gene-drug interaction data) in Ethereum using an index-based, multi-mapping approach allowing for time and space efficient storage and query. Our solution to the IDASH competition ranked in the top three at a workshop held in Bloomington, IN in October 2019. Although our solution performed well in the challenge, we wanted to improve its scalability and query efficiency. To that end, we developed an alternate “fastQuery” solution that stores pooled rather than raw data, allowing for significantly improved query time for 0-AND queries, and constant query time for 1- and 2-AND queries. Results We tested the performance of both of our solutions in Truffle (v5.0.31) using datasets ranging from 100 to 1000 entries, and inserting data at 25, 50, 100, and 200 observations at a time. On a private, proof-of-authority test network, our challenge solution requires approximately 70 seconds, 500 MB of memory, and 80 MB of disk space to insert 1000 entries (200 at a time); and 400 ms and 5 MB of memory to query a two-AND query from 1000 entries. This solution exhibits constant memory for insertion and querying, and linear query time. Our alternate fastQuery solution requires approximately 60 seconds, 500 MB of memory, and 80 MB of disk space to insert 1000 entries (200 at a time); and 83 ms and 5 MB of memory to query a two-AND query from 1000 entries. This solution exhibits constant memory for insertion and querying, linear query time for 0-AND queries, and constant query time for 1- and 2-AND queries in a database of up to 1000 entries. Conclusion In this study we showed that pharmacogenomics data can be stored and queried efficiently on the Ethereum blockchain. Our approach has the potential to be useful for a wide range of datasets in biomedical research; while we focused on gene-drug interaction data, our solution designs could be used to store a range of clinical trial data. Moreover, our solutions could be adapted to store and query data in any field where high-integrity data storage and efficient access is required.
Michael Mirkin, Yan Ji, Jonathan Pang, Ariah Klages-Mundt · 6 authors
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin secure vast amounts of money. Their operators, called miners, expend resources to generate blocks and receive monetary rewards for their effort. Blockchains are, in principle, attractive targets for Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks: There is fierce competition among coins, as well as potential gains from short selling. Classical DoS attacks, however, typically target a few servers and cannot scale to systems with many nodes. There have been no successful DoS attacks to date against prominent cryptocurrencies. We present Blockchain DoS (BDoS), the first incentive-based DoS attack that targets PoW cryptocurrencies. Unlike classical DoS, BDoS targets the system's mechanism design: It exploits the reward mechanism to discourage miner participation. Previous DoS attacks against PoW blockchains require an adversary's mining power to match that of all other miners. In contrast, BDoS can cause a blockchain to grind to a halt with significantly fewer resources, e.g., 21% as of March 2020 in Bitcoin, according to our empirical study. We find that Bitcoin's vulnerability to BDoS increases rapidly as the mining industry matures and profitability drops. BDoS differs from known attacks like Selfish Mining in its aim not to increase an adversary's revenue, but to disrupt the system. Although it bears some algorithmic similarity to those attacks, it introduces a new adversarial model, goals, algorithm, and game-theoretic analysis. Beyond its direct implications for operational blockchains, BDoS introduces the novel idea that an adversary can manipulate miners' incentives by proving the existence of blocks without actually publishing them.
While sharing files in a peer-to-peer (P2P) system significantly increases both the speed of retrieving the contents and the robustness of the system, tracing the access of files is not straightforward, even in the case of private P2P networks. In fact, a participant that has uploaded a file to a P2P network is not necessarily involved in its download. Additionally, due to the nature of the P2P network it is possible for a participant to already have all the fragments of a file, even before requesting it. This work tries to address the problem of tracing file access in a private P2P file sharing network through the use of blockchains to improve quality of service and auditability. To this end, the proposed solution combines three elements: (1) A distributed hash table network that is used to distribute encrypted files with redundancy amongst the partner peers; (2) Shamir's secret sharing scheme to split the secret keys of each file; (3) A blockchain network to distribute and manage the secret shares amongst the partner peers. In fact, the latter makes access to a file undeniable to every node of the network. The solution is relevant for consortia that manage a shared data pool on base of P2P technology with unrestricted access to files but where access to a file has to be recorded due to legal or billing reasons.