Steffen Baumann, Richard Stone, Esraa Abdelall, Varun A. Srikrishnan · 7 authors
The adoption of blockchain shows a variety of benefits owing to an incorruptible digital ledger and a decentralized database. This has eliminated the need for a gatekeeper to oversee all associated transactions. Blockchain, the underlying technology behind Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, has found use in many industries besides finance, such as healthcare, where it is used for verifying medical licensing and credentialing, for tracking medical equipment (or consumables) from production to usage, and in cases associated with high levels of privacy and security. Patient data is collected using a plethora of patient-generated data devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled wearables, health trackers, and home use medical devices. As a result, the data is siloed amongst several applications and/or vendors’ proprietary solutions. Of all this data, only some of it is transmitted to Electronic Medical Records. This produces the risk that not all data collected will be reviewed at the point of care due to the abundance of data collected. This article explains the areas within healthcare where blockchain could address data usability challenges and analyzes new ways in which patient health data can be collected to address the increasing number of challenges associated with the amount of data being generated over time. It also describes the drivers behind this data collection trend, the associated challenges and the subsequent ramifications. It concludes with a review of previous studies on data usability challenges and the means by which blockchain can be used to overcome these challenges.
M. Wilferd Roshan, Mostafa Mozafari, Hanieh Mirzayi
Bitcoin, one of the realities is the economic system in contemporaneously, which, despite the opportunities, threats and risks it poses to the economic system of countries. At the moment, Bitcoin be considered, as the most used and most valuable virtual currency in the real world. Bitcoin is actually an internet innovation and with similar functions of paperless money or government money, a tool for transferring or storing value is considered with a decentralized nature, which has become widespread in the cyberspace and allows users to do so the entire process of publishing, processing and deals is made by users' networks and without any intermediary. There are many discussions about the nature of bitcoin. Indeed, bitcoin can be considered as a currency, capital or commodity? Extending the welcome to bitcoin has made it possible to examine Bitcoin's various dimensions and its use in the economic system on the agenda of research centers, jurisprudence centers, legislative assembly and central banks of many countries of the world That Iran is no exception. A look on the Bitcoin studies indicate that many experts believe Bitcoin can head certain functions in the real world that traditional cash and e-money play in the economy .Therefore, it does not contradict with Sharia law and Islamic principles, so as virtual currency accepted But the problems and challenges faced in this regard That must be The reliability and confidence in the exchanges by setting proper rules and strict monitoring
For the medical industry, there are problems such as poor sharing of medical data, tampering, and leakage of private data. In view of these problems, a blockchain-based electronic medical record access control research scheme based on the role-based access control model is proposed in this article. First, the appropriate access control strategy is adopted to solve the leakage problem of the user’s medical privacy information during the access process. Then, the information entropy technology is used to quantify the medical data, so that the medical data can be effectively and maximally utilized. Using the distributed general ledger characteristics of blockchain and its inherent security attributes, data islands can be eliminated, data sharing among medical systems can be promoted, access records can be prevented from being tampered with, and medical research and precise medical treatment can be better supported. Through this research, not only can user’s medical privacy information protection be realized during the service process but also patients can manage their own medical data autonomously, which is beneficial to privacy protection under the medical data sharing.
Portfolio management is essential for any investment decision. Yet, traditional methods in the literature are ill-suited for the characteristics and dynamics of cryptocurrencies. This work presents a method to build an investment portfolio consisting of more than 1500 cryptocurrencies covering 6 years of market data. It is centred around Topological Data Analysis (TDA), a recent approach to analyze data sets from the perspective of their topological structure. This publication proposes a system combining persistence landscapes to identify suitable investment opportunities in cryptocurrencies. Using a novel and comprehensive data set of cryptocurrency prices, this research shows that the proposed system enables analysts to outperform a classic method from the literature without requiring any feature engineering or domain knowledge in TDA. This work thus introduces TDA-based portfolio management of cryptocurrencies as a viable tool for the practitioner.
Abstract The purpose of this research is to identify the development of e-commerce technology in the business world, and the benefits of the application of e-commerce in the online business. The method used in this research was the descriptive method to present a complete overview of the situation related to some variable situations examined. The result of this research is to give clear identification of how far the development of e-commerce technology in the world of online business, as well as the benefits provided by the application of e-commerce in the world of online business. In the end, bitcoin gives mutual connection to expand the business of E-commerce.
The construction industry will continue to be a key driver of economic growth for any country. It is one of the biggest industries in the world which contributes heavily to the economic development of a country. However, the productivity and the effectiveness of the industry have often been called into a question. Therefore, a number of different modelling tools and software have introduced to upgrade the standards of the construction industry. This review seeks to identify how blockchain can address the project management perspectives of the construction industry with respect to the guidelines mentioned in the Project Management Body of Knowledge. Five major criterions namely purchase management, contract management, asset and inventory management, finance management and subcontractor management were selected for the analysis using the PMBOK guidelines. For that, literature review using articles in ScienceDirect which appeared the context "blockchain in construction", "blockchain and project management", "application of blockchain" were referred. It is identified that the blockchain technology can assist financial management without involving third parties, subcontractor management by linking derivable and payment schemes, contract administration by using smart contracts, inventory and asset management by tracking and tracing material movements and purchase management by linking key stakeholders in supply chains.
Payment channel with penalizing double-spending has been widely applied in cryptocurrencies for achieving fast payment. However, current payment channel solutions suffer at least one of the following problems: 1) large overheads and communication costs are incurred to thwart double-spending; 2) payees must be defined before building payment channels; 3) a single payment channel does not support multiple payees; 4) no formally theoretical proofs are provided for the security of payment channels (as an open problem mentioned in CCS'15). In this paper, we fill these gaps by introducing a new fast payment protocol named super payment channel. We provide detailed construction based on digital signatures and accountable assertions with formal security proofs. We also implement our proposed protocol in different circumstances and demonstrate that our proposed protocol incurs a small overhead compared to ordinary Bitcoin transactions.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The blockchain is a shared, distributed database with a cryptographic algorithm to insure the security, safety and immutability of the data. In the present paper, we will do an analysis of possible theoretical use cases of distributed ledger technologies for information sharing in journalism and the current practical applications, which is seen by certain journalists as a technology that could revive an industry in crisis (Quinn, 2019), making "creators migrate to platforms that provide greater intellectual property". (Webb, 2019, p. 59)
The article carries out a critical analysis of the scientific definitions of the fiscal space as an economic category. The approaches to interpretation of the concept of «fiscal space» are systematized; the resource-expenditure, targeted, quantitative and effective approaches are allocated. The essence, advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches are substantiated. The necessity and relevance of transferring the concept of «fiscal space» to the local level is proved, which is connected with the reform of inter-budgetary relations, financial decentralization, formation of united territorial communities, and necessity for ensuring their ability to function. The author’s own definition of the fiscal space of territorial community is proposed as a totality of economic processes and financial interactions of the community’s economic entities, localized within its limits, which are the result of an active fiscal policy to increase the tax potential of the territory and strengthen the target orientation of the local budget expenditures aimed at improving the life of the territorial community and its level of financial viability. The main features of the fiscal space of territorial community and the properties of fiscal space as an economic system are allocated. It is defined that the fiscal space is formed by three elements of public finance: budget revenues, expenses, and debt. It is argued that the fiscal space of the territorial community is feasibly to consider as a combination of the tax potential and the potential for costs reduction without compromising the public interest in order to strengthen their target orientation.
Anum Nawaz, Tuan Nguyen Gia, Jorge Peña Queralta, Tomi Westerlund
The edge and fog computing paradigms enable more responsive and smarter systems without relying on cloud servers for data processing and storage. This reduces network load as well as latency. Nonetheless, the addition of new layers in the network architecture increases the number of security vulnerabilities. In privacy-critical systems, the appearance of new vulnerabilities is more significant. To cope with this issue, we propose and implement an Ethereum Blockchain based architecture with edge artificial intelligence to analyze data at the edge of the network and keep track of the parties that access the results of the analysis, which are stored in distributed databases.
The present chapter will look at the possible application of smart contracts in the intellectual property arena in general, but it will specifically discuss mostly copyright solutions, although a few uses apply to different areas of protection. This presents a few challenges, at the time of writing many of the proposals that will be discussed have not yet been implemented, or are in a prototype level, and as such we may have to assume their viability based on nothing other than a few examples that have not been fully tested. Similarly, legal discussions about the blockchain and smart contracts tend to be surrounded by considerable hype, often fuelled by commercial interests, and it is often difficult to separate facts from sales pitches. This is why this work will try to take a more sceptical approach to the phenomenon.
Although, the growth in the cryptocurrency market slowed down after the meteoric rise in late 2017, the market is still enjoying steady capital inflow. This has made the study of market dynamics between the cryptocurrencies and equity market indispensable. In this paper, the study of the volatility spillovers and correlation between the two has been undertaken by considering five Asian stock indices and four cryptocurrencies ranging from November 2014 to December 2018, to cover three phenomena- Leverage effect, Volatility spillovers and Time varying correlation using EGARCH, Diagonal BEKK and DCC tests respectively. Firstly, the EGARCH test reveals the absence of leverage effect in the returns of cryptocurrenices. Secondly, the multivariate GARCH test shows, out of all the cryptocurrencies taken, the past innovations in Bitcoin affect the future volatility of the equity market returns the most. Lastly, the DCC model reveals evidence of time varying correlation between the markets and Bitcoin. Keywords: Cryptocurrencies; Asian equity market; Volatility spillovers; Dynamic conditional correlation JEL Classifications: G12, G14, G17, C15, C32 DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijefi.8624
Van Minh Hao, Nguyen Huynh Huy, Bo Dao, Thanh-Tan Mai · 5 authors
Predicting cryptocurrency price movements is a challenging task due to the highly stochastic nature of the market. This paper exploits features from social media, combining with the historical price to build an accurate model for predicting trending of the Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency these days. The novelty of this work is introducing a new feature called 'interaction' which helps improve the model's performance significantly. Our approach shows a very promising result, which outperforms other recent works by a large margin.
Blockchain, a distributed and democratically-sustained public register of the transactions of the digital currency "Bitcoin", proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto a pseudonym of a hided developer in 2009, has been the driver of a huge number of initiatives devoted to develop and implement a peer-to-peer distributed database, and with no central authority created as an open source software. Expansion of Bitcoin, as well as other digital currencies, has been due to lower transaction costs, high security protocols and lack of inflation with respect to fiat money and no need of a clearing entity or a central bank. Although, environmental issues related to the use of this currency and, in particular, in the energy consumes, have been raised by the scientific community, but no signals of limiting factors have been detected until now. The hidden in the wings blockchain technology has been recognized the driver of innovation in various fields, contributing to create a more sustainable world. The purpose of this paper is to describe both the recent trends in the applications of the blockchain technology in the cryptocurrencies market and the new projects considering the environmental sustainability (energy consumption, materials depletion) and social impacts. The contribute of blockchain in reducing and accelerating bureaucracy and incentivizing environmentally friendly behaviour, has been discussed. Although the environmental issues related to the energy consumed in Bitcoin mining may scare companies in adopting the new technology, there is no evidence of limiting factors or carrying capacity of the entire system. In future the development of a less energy intensive alternative for validating the blocks to stack in the distributed database, would render the blockchain the ideal candidate for the applicability of sustainability paradigms in the economic, environmental and social sectors.
Mélanie Clément‐Fontaine, Roberto Di Cosmo, Bastien Guerry, Patrick Moreau · 5 authors
Software is a hybrid object in the world research as it is equally a driving force (as a tool), a result (as proof of the existence of a solution) and an object of study (as an artefact). This specific status means we need to define strategies, tools and procedures which are adapted to the various issues it raises. These include the citation of contributions to software design and production, the reproducibility of research results involving software and the wider usage and long-term sustainability of the software heritage created. This opportunity note by the Committee for Open Science's Free Software and Open Source Project Group describes the issues at stake and formulates actionable recommendations.
Abstract Smart contracts are software codes based on the Blockchain technology which are involved in the field of information technology. The Blockchain smart contract is still in the contractual scope in nature, although its origin and automatic performance functions are different from existing contracts, but it can be identified as a typical unnamed contract. Therefore, at the legal level, a smart contract is a new form of contract that can automatically and automatically perform all or part of the contract. While discussing the technical aspects of smart contracts, we cannot ignore the relevant issues at the legal level. Smart contracts are developments and innovations in the form of traditional contracts. Smart contracts exist in electronic form and automatically fulfill contracts through software that is accurately encoded on the Blockchain. How to create smart contracts according to law and evaluate the legal effect of smart contracts are the main research issue of this paper.
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have been widely deployed and used in our daily life. Although there are numerous works in the literature surveying technical challenges and security issues in blockchains, very few works focused on the anonymity guarantees provided in cryptocurrencies. In this work, we conduct a systematic survey on anonymity in cryptocurrencies with a clear categorization for the different tiers of anonymity offered in the various cryptocurrencies as well as their known weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We also study the techniques that have been used to achieve each tier of anonymity. Finally, we asses the current techniques, and present a forecast for the technological trends in this field.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The study of connectedness is key to assess spillover effects and identify lead-lag relationships among market exchanges trading the same asset. By means of an extension of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) econometric connectedness measures, we examined the relationships of five major Bitcoin exchange platforms during two periods of main interest: the 2017 surge in prices and the 2018 decline. We concluded that Bitfinex and Gemini are leading exchanges in terms of return spillover transmission during the analyzed time-frame, while Bittrexs act as a follower. We also found that connectedness of overall returns fell substantially right before the Bitcoin price hype, whereas it leveled out during the period the down market period. We confirmed that the results are robust with regards to the modeling strategies.
Peilin Zheng, Zibin Zheng, Jiajing Wu, Hong‐Ning Dai
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have received extensive attention recently. Massive data has been stored on permission-less blockchains. The analysis of massive blockchain data can bring huge business values. However, the absence of well-processed up-to-date blockchain datasets impedes big data analytics of blockchain data. To fill this gap, we collect and process the up-to-date on-chain data from Ethereum, which is one of the most popular permission-less blockchains. We name such well-processed Ethereum data as XBlock-ETH, which consists of transactions, smart contracts, and cryptocurrencies (i.e., tokens). However, it is non-trivial to partition and categorize the collected raw Ethereum data to the well-processed datasets since the whole processing procedure requires sophisticated knowledge on software engineering as well as big data analytics. Moreover, we also present basic statistics and exploration for each of the well-processed datasets. Furthermore, we also outline the possible research opportunities based on XBlock-ETH, with the data and code released online.
With the introduction of the term blockchain in 2008, it's interest has been increasing in the community since the idea was coined. The reason for this interest is because it provides anonymity, security and integrity without any central third party organisation in control of data and transaction. It has attracted huge interest in research areas due to its advances in various platforms, limitations and challenges. There are various Distributed Ledger Technologies that demonstrates their special features which overcome limitations of other platforms. However, implementations of various distributed ledger technologies differ substantially based on their data structures, consensus protocol and fault tolerant among others. Due to these variations, they have a quite different cost, performance, latency and security. In this paper, working and in-depth comparison of major distributed ledger technologies including their special features, strengths and weaknesses is presented and discussed by identifying various criteria.
In electronic ticketing system, the malicious behavior of scalpers damages the customer's interest and disturbs the normal order of market. In order to solve the problem of scalpers, we took two steps. Firstly, we established the electronic ticketing system based on the consortium blockchain (CB-ETS). By establishing CB-ETS, we can make the ticketing market develop better in a controlled environment and be managed by the members in the consortium blockchain. Secondly, we put forward a kind of taxation mechanism for suppressing scalpers based on CB-ETS. Together with the regulatory mechanism, our scheme can effectively reduce the scalpers' profits and further inhibit scalpers. Through the above two steps, the scheme can effectively resist the malicious behavior of scalpers. Among them, in the process of transferring tickets, we optimized the transfer mechanism to achieve a win-win situation. Finally, we analyzed the security and efficiency of our scheme. Our scheme realizes the anonymity through the mixed currency protocol based on ring signature and guarantees the unforgeability of tickets by multi-signature in the process of modifying the invalidity of tickets. It also could resist to Dos attacks and Double-Spending attacks. The efficiency analysis shows that our scheme is significantly superior to relevant works.
Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui penerapan penggunaan Teknik Token Economy terhadap motivasi belajar siswa serta untuk mengetahui pengaruh penggunaan Teknik Token Economy terhadap motivasi belajar siswa SD di Kecamatan Tamalate Kota Makassar. Pendekatan yang digunakan kuantitatif Jenis penelitian True-Experimental Design. Desain penelitian adalah Desain Matching Pretest-Posttest Control Group Design. penelitian sampel acak (Therandomized pretest-posttest control grouf design. Populasi adalah keseluruhan siswa SD Di Kecamatan Tamalate Kota Makassar berjumlah 46 Sekolah Dasar sedangkan sampel dalam penelitian ini adalah siswa kelas IV SD Inpres Maccini Sombala Kota Makassar. Hasil pengukuran motivasi belajar siswa menggunakan angket sebelum dan setelah pembelajaran dengan menerapkan Teknik Token Economy menunjukkan perbedaan yang signifikan. Kesimpulan dari penelitian ini adalah penggunaan Teknik Token Economy memberikan pengaruh terhadap motivasi belajar siswa dalam mata pelajaran matematika kelas IV SD Inpres Maccini Sombala Kota Makassar.
J.R. James, Daniel Hawthorne, Katherine Duncan, Aaron St. Leger · 6 authors
Power grids around the world have experienced a growing number of malicious cyber attacks. This paper provides an overview of recent use of the Hyperledger Fabric distributed operating system to prototype use of a permissioned blockchain consensus algorithm to trust shared state estimation and control data and another effort to alter local sensor data to destroy the integrity of the shared data. The paper also provides justification for an experiment to prototype use of Babble, a peer-to-peer network plugin using the hashgraph consensus algorithm, to share the state estimation and control data through transactions recorded in a hashgraph. A key claim of the hashgraph documentation, which is unsubstantiated without a proper academic analysis, is that the algorithm is asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (ABFT). Also, while the Hyperledger Fabric implementation supports thousands of transactions per second, the hashgraph algorithm documentation claims orders of magnitude more. Our experiment seeks to measure the hashgraph transaction speed and determine its suitability for improving the resilience of wide area control of the smart grid. The previous resilience research of the Anomaly Detection of Cyber Physical Systems (ADCPS) team includes research into inadvertent cyber and physical failures as well as malicious attacks. We conclude with some speculations concerning the potential impact of fast, fair, and secure sharing of data across a network of blockchains potentially interfaced using hashgraph distributed ledger technology (DLT).
In leakage resilient cryptography, there is a seemingly inherent restraint on the ability of the adversary that it cannot get access to the leakage oracle after the challenge. Recently, a series of works made a breakthrough to consider a postchallenge leakage. They presented achievable public key encryption (PKE) schemes which are semantically secure against after-the-fact leakage in the split-state model. This model puts a more acceptable constraint on adversary’s ability that the adversary cannot query the leakage of secret states as a whole but the functions of several parts separately instead of prechallenge query only. To obtain security against chosen ciphertext attack (CCA) for PKE schemes against after-the-fact leakage attack (AFL), existing works followed the paradigm of “double encryption” which needs noninteractive zero knowledge (NIZK) proofs in the encryption algorithm. We present an alternative way to achieve AFL-CCA security via lossy trapdoor functions (LTFs) without NIZK proofs. First, we formalize the definition of LTFs secure against AFL (AFLR-LTFs) and all-but-one variants (ABO). Then, we show how to realize this primitive in the split-state model. This primitive can be used to construct AFLR-CCA secure PKE scheme in the same way as the method of “CCA from LTFs” in traditional sense.