Muntadher Sallal, Steve Schneider, Matthew Casey, Constantin Cătălin Drăgan · 9 authors
Online voting in the UK generally takes place without verifiability mechanisms, with providers that are trusted to provide ballot privacy and correctness of the result. However, replacing existing systems with verifiable voting systems with brand new algorithms and code presents a business risk to election providers. We present an approach for incremental change: adding a Selene-based verifiability layer to an existing online voting system. Selene is a verifiable e-voting protocol that publishes votes in plaintext alongside tracking numbers that enable voters to confirm that their votes have been captured correctly by the system. This results in a system where even the election authority running the system cannot change the result in an undetectable way. This gives stronger guarantees on the integrity of the election than were previously present. This gives an end-to-end verifiable system we call Verify My Vote (VMV). In addition, we outline how this approach supports further incremental changes towards the deployment of fully trustworthy online voting systems. The paper also describes the use of distributed ledger technology as a component of VMV to manage the verifiability data in a decentralised way for resilience and trust.
Prosecutor's Office of Moscow Region, Madina M. Dolgieva
ПРОТИВОДЕЙСТВИЕ ЛЕГАЛИЗАЦИИ ПРЕСТУПНЫХ ДОХОДОВ ПРИ ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИИ КРИПТОВАЛЮТЫРассматриваются рекомендации Группы по разработке финансовых мер борьбы с отмыванием денег и финансированием терроризма, которая с 2018 г. приступила к разработке обязательных правил регулирования криптовалютных бирж и обменников.На основе исследованных рекомендаций обосновывается вывод о необходимости включения в уголовный закон нормы об ответственности за неправомерный оборот криптовалюты, вследствие чего нормы
National economic growth is an aggregation of regional economic growth. Growth is also the main measure of development success. The existence of fiscal decentralization provides flexibility to local governments in regulating their regions and making policies that can support the potentials in their regions. This study aims to analyze and provide empirical evidence about the determinants of economic growth in 38 regencies/cities in East Java Province in 2010 to 2016 including Locally-generated Revenues (PAD), General Allocation Funds (DAU), Special Allocation Funds (DAK), Revenue Sharing Funds (DBH), Indirect Expenditures, Direct Expenditure, and Remaining Over Budget Financing (SiLPA). From the results of the Fixed Effect model, it was found that the PAD, DAU, DBH and Direct Expenditure had a positive significant effect on economic growth, while the DAK and Indirect Spending variable had no significant effect on economic growth. SiLPA also had no significant effect on economic growth. The last, simultaneously, PAD, DAU, DAK, DBH, Direct Expenditure, Indirect Expenditure and SiLPA had a significant effect on economic growth.
If the cloud is just someone else's computer, securing forensic evidence in case of a breach can be tricky. A blockchain-based distributed ledger could contribute to solve this problem, provided the required forensic information finds its way onto the blockchain. In this paper we sketch how blockchain technology and smart contracts apply to various processing models and their respective forensic challenges, and highlight how an accountability-based approach will be instrumental to the overall acceptability of the solution.
Solidity is an object-oriented and high-level language for writing smart contracts that are used to execute, verify and enforce credible transactions on permissionless blockchains. In the last few years, analysis of smart contracts has raised considerable interest and numerous techniques have been proposed to check the presence of vulnerabilities in them. Current techniques lack traceability in source code and have widely differing work flows. There is no single unifying framework for analysis, instrumentation, optimisation and code generation of Solidity contracts at the source code level. In this paper, we present SIF, a comprehensive framework for Solidity contract analysis, query, instrumentation, and code generation. SIF provides support for Solidity contract developers and testers to build source level techniques for analysis, understanding, diagnostics, optimisations and code generation. We show feasibility and applicability of the framework by building practical tools on top of it and running them on 1838 real smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum network.
Dmitry Gura, Yu. V. Dubenko, E. E. Dyshkant, A P Pavlyukova · 5 authors
Abstract The paper considers three technologies for obtaining data on the road surface -through video recording, thermal imaging and laser scanning for the purpose of monitoring, diagnostics and control of the road quality. An analysis of the first two methods showed their significant drawbacks, such as the inability to measure the geometric parameters of deformations (video recording) and the significant dependence of the measurement results on external conditions (thermal imaging). Laser scanning, on the contrary, has a number of advantages, including coordinate referencing, obtaining a three-dimensional model, its transformation and measurement of parameters. Laser scanning is widely used, but mainly for measuring the quantitative characteristics of objects. The paper discusses the application of the laser scanning method to determine the qualitative characteristics of the road surface - the presence or absence of defects, which include hollow spots, waves, cavities, chipping, bleeding, humps, cracks, vertical displacement of road plates, rutting, unevenness of patching, damage to the road surface, track, breach, destruction of the pavement edge, subsidence followed by a complex of repair work. For this, a ground-based laser scanning was performed, the results of which were processed using the Leica Cyclone 9.4 software. According to the scanning data, defects were detected in the form of soil subsidence, hollow spots and humps. The performed work revealed a drawback of the laser scanning method, which consists in the absence of automated detection and recognition of deformations. A number of measures have been proposed to improve this drawback, which slows down the randomness and quality of work in monitoring and diagnosing the road. Further prospects for research on this topic, in particular the multi-purpose use of scanning data, by creating a distributed ledger are also indicated.
Abstract Since the emergence of cyberspace there have been different legal principles evolving, such as functional equivalence and technology-neutrality, with the aim to ease the regulator´s challenge of coping with the new paradigm of virtual, digital and electronic. Currently our societies have reached the doorstep of another similar disruption: infrastructures decentralized on the basis of blockchain and distributed ledger technology, or so-called cryptoeconomics. It is time to turn to cyberspace-related principles for inspiration on how to solve similar concerns, such as applying existing regulation(s) to new technological disruption. This article looks at different understandings of the functional equivalence principle, its shortcomings and the guidance it provides to regulators and courts in dealing with the challenges related to technological innovation including that of cryptoeconomics.
Oluwakayode Onireti, Lei Zhang, Muhammad Ali Imran
Distributed systems are crucial to the full realization of the Internet of Thing (IoT) ecosystem as it mitigates the challenges of trust, security, and scalability associated with the traditional centralized approach. In this paper, we present an analytical modeling framework for Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT)-a consensus method for blockchain in IoT networks. We define the viable area for the wireless PBFT networks which guarantees the minimum number of replica nodes required for achieving the protocol's safety and liveliness. We also present an analytical framework for obtaining the viable area which we later utilize for power optimization. Results show that significant energy saving can be achieved with the utilization of the viable area concept in wireless PBFT networks. The proposed framework can serve as a theoretical guidance for practical PBFT based wireless blockchain network deployment.
Distributed consensus mechanisms have been widely researched and made popular with a number of blockchain-based token applications, such as Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Although these general-purpose platforms have matured for scale and security, they are designed for human incentive and continue to require currency reward and contract functions that are not requisite in machine communications. Redes Chain is a custom designed blockchain, built to support fully decentralized self-organization in wireless networks-without a cryptocurrency or contract dependency.
Since Bitcoin was first introduced i n 2008, many types of cryptocurrencies have been proposed based on blockchain. However, the performance of permissionless blockchains restricts the widespread of cryptocurrency. Recently, Libra was proposed by Facebook based on a permissioned blockchain, i.e. the Libra blockchain. The vision of Libra is to become a global currency supporting financial a pplications, but it is doubted whether the performance of the Libra blockchain is able to support frequent micropayment scenarios. In this paper, we propose a methodology to evaluate the performance of blockchain platforms and conducted an experimental study on the Libra blockchain. The results show that the Libra blockchain can only process about one thousand transactions per second at most, and the performance drops significantly a s t he number of validators increases. Although it outperforms permissionless blockchain platforms, the performance of the Libra blockchain is still unsatisfactory compared to other permissioned blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric and needs to make effective improvements in order to support global micropayment in the future.
This study examines the influence of monetary variables and cryptocurrency price. The paper applied Vector Autoregression (VAR) to analyze multivariate time series data. The data used in this study is time series data from January 2014 to December 2017. The findings indicate that there is no significant influence between inflation and the cryptocurrency prices in the first period. However, the results in the second period,decomposition variant had a significant relationship and experienced a fairly rapid increase of 1.59 per centand continued to increase until the tenth period. The interest rate variable on the price of cryptocurrency has the result of the Variant Decomposition in the first period does not have a significant relationship, while in the second period experienced a significant incline from 6.12 per centand continued to rise until the tenth period. Keywords: Cryptocurrency, bitcoin prices, inflation, money supply JEL Classification: E43; E44, E51
Abstract Cryptocurrencies are a sweltering topic in modern times of investment strategies. Since the cryptocurrency market is classified as an emerging market, in this paper a portfolio of emerging markets is compiled from the indices of four European Union (EU) countries and one cryptocurrency. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the incorporation of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency into the portfolio affects the performance of the portfolios of these countries. Moreover, by drawing an efficient frontier, the paper identifies where Bitcoin stands relative to other indices in the portfolio. The countries whose indices were used in the analysis are: Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Poland during the period from July 13, 2018 to June 07, 2019. The method used for an efficient frontier formation is Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). By applying this theory, the minimum variance portfolio at the efficient frontier was created for the portfolio with and without the cryptocurrency. The empirical analysis indicates that Bitcoin improves the effectiveness of the portfolio in emerging markets of the selected EU countries, where the expected risks of a portfolio that includes the cryptocurrency are smaller and with higher returns than those of portfolios without Bitcoin. From the Markowitz’s theory point of view, the results of the empirical analysis also indicate that Bitcoin is on the efficient frontier. Since all instruments on the efficient frontier according to the modern portfolio theory are efficient, it can be concluded that investments in such instruments depend on investor’s risk aversion.
Gaganjeet Singh Reen, Manasi Mohandas, S. Venkatesan
Electronic Health Records(EHR) are gaining a lot of popularity all over the world. The current EHR systems however have their fair share of problems related to privacy and security. We have proposed a mechanism which provides a solution to most of these problems. Using a permissioned Ethereum blockchain allows the hospitals and patients across the world to be connected to each other. Our mechanism uses a combination of symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography to ensure the secure storage and selective access of records. It gives patients full control over their health records and also allows them to grant or revoke a hospital's access to his/her records. We have used IPFS(inter planetary file system) to store records which has the advantage of being distributed and ensures immutability of records. The proposed model also maintains the statistics of diseases without violating the privacy of any patient.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Introduction: the paper is devoted to a new phenomenon in business activity in the conditions of IT development that contribute to the creation of secure contractual relations on the Internet on the basis of transactions executed through smart contracts. The author notes that the need for amendments that could fill the loopholes in the current legislation is obvious. And, first of all, it concerns Blockchain technology – the algorithm that mediates the safe development, conclusion and execution of smart contracts. Blockchain technology is considered in the paper as one of the safest means for concluding and executing smart contracts. The author argues that the study of the concept, legal nature and essence of smart contracts is relevant in the light of spreading their share in the total array of transactions in the world economy in conjunction with the changing domestic legislation governing the relevant sphere, as well as the international integration processes affecting the intensification of foreign economic activity of the Russian Federation. The smart contract concepts formulated by the Russian legislator in the process of upgrading the array of statutory regulation under conditions of economy digitalization are studied and compared. The features of conclusion and protection of the smart contract in the civil legislation of the Russian Federation are analyzed. In order to fully articulate the concept of the smart contract, reflecting its essence, functional purpose and legal nature, it is proposed to create a special law that would focus on the conclusion and implementation of “the smart contract” and the specification of the general norms of the civil code. At the same time, the norms of other special laws would supplement and correct the provisions fixed by this act depending on the sphere of managing and the legal regulation branch. The concept of the smart contract is formulated; its value for economic and contractual activity, and also the advantages and disadvantages of its application are established. The possible classifications of smart contracts are given.
Tumbler is a service provided for cryptocurrencies in cases when anonymity is endangered and the owner of virtual “coins” can be traced. Legality of cryptocurrency tumblers can be described as a “grey zone”, for the reason that not even cryptovalues are legalized and “mixing” in tumblers is a special treatment of it. In this paper author by analytical method, by descriptive method and by comparative method explores and displays the all open questions of cryptocurrency tumblers, conducting their legality, legalization and especially potential criminalization in the future. Finally, the author concludes that legality, legalization and criminalization are firmly connected, interdependent and legislators worldwide should de lege ferenda pay extreme caution during tumbler legalization, especially for the purpose of later criminalization.
Muhammad Amir Husairi Che Rani, Ahmad Dahlan Salleh
Bitcoin is the most popular virtual currency and ranked higher than other cryptocurrencies.Emerging as a decentralized currency in the focus of transforming the worldwide monetary system, bitcoin is confronted with legitimacy constrain, lack of regulation and becomes the ideal means of payment for illegal activities.Generally, this article will focus on discussions on the mechanism of bitcoin operations as well as the relevance of bitcoin in functioning as a medium of exchange, unit of value and store of value based on Shariah perspective.In addition, this article also lists some fatwas and views of Islamic scholars related to the status of bitcoin according to Shariah as well as analyzes the uncertainty and usury elements to determine the status of bitcoin as means of payment in sales contract according to Shariah perspective.The outcome of this discussion explains the arguments, reasons and the ruling of bitcoin usage as means of payment according to Shariah.
Rini Sovia, Musli Yanto, Arif Budiman, Liga Mayola · 5 authors
Abstract The value of bitcoin currency is very volatile, hard to guess for every hour, so many of the bitcoin traders suffer losses because they are wrong in managing their bitcoin assets. Changes in the price of bitcoin itself are influenced by many things such as the closing of the bitcoin market in a country, the occurrence of hacker attacks on the bitcoin blockchain and the emergence of new coins that use technology similar to bitcoin. But when a stable market situation changes the price of bitcoin is purely influenced by market forces. By implementing an artificial neural network using backpropagation method, it will be able to predict the price of bitcoin by giving a form of predictive results that are strengthened with a fairly good value of accuracy. This research begins by determining prediction variables with target values that can be determined based on previous bitcoin prices. This artificial neural network process is able to conduct training and testing of data based on network patterns that have been formed, then the results of training and testing of the network will be analysed again, so that at the last stage the best network patterns will be used in the prediction process.
Sana Sabah Sabry, Nada Mahdi Kaittan, Israa Majeed
As the Bitcoin keeps increasing in value compared to other cryptocurrencies, more attention has been given to Blockchain Technology (BT) which is the infrastructure behind the Bitcoin, especially on its role in addressing the problems of the classical centralized system. As a digital currency, Bitcoin is dependent on the decentralized cryptographic tools and peer-to-peer system. The digital currency implements a distributed ledger using Blockchain when verifying any type of transaction. In this paper, the aim is to describe how digital currency networks such as Bitcoin provides a “trust-less” platform for users to embark on money transfers without necessarily depending on any central trusted establishments such as payment services or financial institutions. Furthermore, this work comprehensively overviewed the basic principle that underly BT, such as transaction, consensus algorithms, and hashing. This study also provided a novel classification for blockchain types according to their system architecture and consensus strategy. For each type, our contribution was provided with an example which clearly describes the blockchain features and the transaction steps. Our classification intended to help researchers understand and choose the blockchain for their application. The paper ends with the discussion of the differences between each type
Abstract The paper proposes the exploration, identification and development of a Java solution for extracting the sentiment related to the cryptocurrencies phenomenon, from the content of the posts of certain popular social networks. Detecting the positive, neutral or negative character of the sentiment is adopted as a relevant method of establishing the nature of the human perception on the topical issue defined by cryptocurrencies.
The success and popularity of Bitcoin mainly focuses the underlying blockchain technology which is totally immutable distributed ledger, highly secured by its P2P network consensus named Proof of Work (PoW). One of the worst threats to a Proof-of-Work based cryptocurrency is 51% attack. If one or more dishonest network peer gains more than 50% of resource such as processing power, then they will become the majority decision maker in the network. It is already proved that mixing of two or more existing protocol that is called hybrid protocol can make the network enough resistive to this attack. The recent implementations of hybrid protocols have other limitations and problems that they are facing and striving to resolve. But their main weakness is in distribution of block mining reward to the investors. From the perspective of an investor, an investor invests his hard-earned money in a cryptocurrency for making proper profit from his investment. The main source of this profit is the block reward which is generated and given to the miner on successful mining of a block. So, to ensure this profit is given to proper user on proper time interval, the consistency of block generation time interval is a vital factor. The voting system, ticket system etc. are not time controlled and over all block reward generation interval will not show a uniform distribution of profit. Another big issue is diversifying the peers by creating special committee and groups of validators the concept of P2P network is violated. In this paper we will describe a step by step process to implement a Hybrid PoW-PoS based consensus protocol. In our proposed system, the PoW mining process is only used to regulate the block generation time. The actual block generation is done by the same user with PoS consensus mechanism. There is no voting or validating committee. The entire network will validate each block. This is the major difference with other discussed system. The system will not only be able to tackle the 51% attack, it provides a uniform distribution of mining reward to the stake holders and investors by maintaining a precise block generation interval with difficulty adjustment in PoW mining and probability calculation for stake holders according to their matured staking balance. We will not only show how to make the system non-vulnerable to this attack but also describe in detail about how to validate the transactions and blocks in different stage of creating the block chain.
Subject of Research. The paper considers the process of generating reports in electronic learning systems. The aim is to optimize learning process management in generating reports using blockchain technologies. The paper analyzes existing learning management systems and their tools for generating and analyzing reports. Blockchain technology is reviewed in terms of educational opportunities. Method. The process of generating reports in the learning management system is presented as a mathematical model. It has been proven that the use of blockchain technology simplifies this process, since blockchain tools automatically register network events. A model for generating reports in the learning system using blockchain transactions has been developed. The model is implemented in a test version of the Ethereum blockchain using the smart contract mechanism. A smart contract records heterogeneous data of learning events to the blockchain without using special data structures. The blockchain stores data in a unified registry and registers event timestamp and event author’s address by itself. Event data is available through the geth console oriented for the Ethereum blockchain. Main Results. A method of learning process documenting using blockchain technology has been developed. The method does not require any special data model for storing learning events data, as well as special mechanism for recording event timestamp and event author’s address. Practical Relevance. Research results show that blockchain application provides for optimization of the learning process management.
Blockchain technology and, in particular, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies offer us information that has never been seen before in the financial world. In contrast to fiat currencies, all transactions of crypto-currencies and crypto-tokens are permanently recorded on distributed ledgers and are publicly available. As a result, this allows us to construct a transaction graph and to assess not only its organization but to glean relationships between transaction graph properties and crypto price dynamics. The ultimate goal of this paper is to facilitate our understanding on horizons and limitations of what can be learned on crypto-tokens from local topology and geometry of the Ethereum transaction network whose even global network properties remain scarcely explored. By introducing novel tools based on topological data analysis and functional data depth into Blockchain Data Analytics, we show that Ethereum network (one of the most popular blockchains for creating new crypto-tokens) can provide critical insights on price strikes of crypto-tokens that are otherwise largely inaccessible with conventional data sources and traditional analytic methods.
Oscar Avellaneda, Alan Bachmann, Abbie Barbir, Joni Brenan · 9 authors
The technology category now widely known as “decentralized identity” and more narrowly as “self-sovereign identity” didn’t even exist four years ago. At that time, the cutting edge of digital identity technology consisted of Internet- scale federated identity protocols such as OpenID Connect and user-centric data sharing protocols such as User-Managed Access (UMA). Then along came Bitcoin and a surge of interest in blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT). Although the initial uses of this technology focused primarily on cryptocurrency, it didn’t take long for the digital identity community to begin applying it to digital identity scenarios.
Orăștean Ramona, Mărginean Silvia Cristina, Raluca Sava
Abstract Since 2012, there has been growing interest in bitcoin scientific research from different fields, including computer science and engineering, economics, business and finance, law and regulatory. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate bitcoin literature based on the structures and networks of science, as a first step in the research of this new phenomenon. Analysing the growing scientific literature on bitcoin published between 2012 and 2019, we provided useful insights on academic research in this field regarding publication year, type and category, authors, journals and citations. The source of the 887 documents which support the study was Web of Science Core Collection. Using VOSviewer software we have designed bibliometric maps based on text and bibliographic data. Our study provides a knowledge area map that identifies and evaluates the links between authors and countries distribution, the conceptual structure of the field, the structure and connections of most cited papers and journals. Resuming our findings, we note a concentration of the interest on some keywords (bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain) and on some influential authors (with more than 100 citations per article). As a pure expression of digital economy, the research on bitcoin as an economic concept counts only 33.5% from the total contributions in the field.