The Blockchain-Enabled E-Voting uses a digital-currency analogy where in eligible voters can cast a ballot anonymously using a computing environment. BEV employs an encrypted key, smart biometrics and tamperproof realtime personal ID verification. Blockchain enable the creation of tamper-proof audit trails for voting. The idea of adapting digital voting systems to make the public electoral process cheaper, faster and easier, is a compelling one in modern society which normalizes it in the eyes of the voters, removes a certain power barrier between the voter and the elected candidate, thus making it an effective way for casting vote in this generation of technology.
During the course of education the students achieve many certificates. Student produce these certificates while applying for jobs at public or private sectors, where all these certificates are needed to be verified manually. There can be incidents where students may produce the fake certificate and it is difficult to identify them. This problem of fake academic certificates has been a longstanding issue in the academic community. Because it is possible to create such certificates at low cost and the process to verify them is very complex, as they are manually needed to be verified. This problem can be solved by storing the digital certificates on the Blockchain. The Blockchain technology provides immutability and publicly verifiable transactions, these properties of Blockchain can be used to generate the digital certificate which are anti-counterfeit and easy to verify.
Beatrice W. Kadori, Benjamin M. Mwawasi, Paul Mwendac
<em>The issue of financing education, especially secondary education is a growing concern in the Kenyan education system. The government through the Ministry of Education (MoE) has employed financing strategies such as bursaries for the needy but bright students through National Constituency Development Fund (NCDF). The purpose of this study was to assess the role of National Constituency Development Fund (CDF) in enhancing access to secondary school education in Mombasa County. The study objectives were to; assess the role of NCDF of improving access rate in enhancing access to secondary school education in Mombasa County, examine the role of NCDF in provision of infrastructural facilities in enhancing access to secondary school education in Mombasa County and to assess role of NCDF in provision of instructional resources in enhancing access to secondary school education in Mombasa County. The study was based on Decentralization and economic Theory. The study adopted a descriptive research design. The target populations for the study was 32 public secondary schools in Mombasa County (15 schools in Mvita, 6 schools in Likoni, 6 schools in Changamwe and 5 schools in Kisauni Sub-Counties), 32 principals and 582 teachers from the schools in the four Sub-Counties totaling to 646 people. The results were analyzed by the application of descriptive statistics and presented in percentages, means, frequency distribution tables, and pie charts. The expected outcome of the study was the determination of the role of NCDF in enhancing access to secondary school education and other methods used to finance secondary education in Mombasa County. This study research found that</em>
There isn´t general consensus concerning the tools for evaluating of decentralization and public administration reforms. Comparison of impacts and tools for the evaluation of decentralization process is complicated mainly by a different arrangement of public administration, researching only partial aspects of decentralization or lack of key data. The aim of this paper is to legitimize the innovative approach of evaluation of the decentralization reforms through an analysis of subnational units´ staff. This consideration is based on correlation which suggests that countries with a higher degree of autonomy of subnational units usually have a wider bureaucratic apparatus of self-governments. In this context we answer whether the evaluation of Czech decentralization is relevant through an analysis of self-governmental staff and under which methodological preconditions. We worked with fragmented statistical unique and unpublished primary data about the self-governmental staff obtained from registers of the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Finance and the Czech Statistical Office.
The development of quantum computers has urged the cryptographic community to prepare cryptographic primitives for the eventual arrival of the post‐quantum world. To this end, the authors study the witness indistinguishability (WI) and witness hiding (WH) of proof systems against quantum adversaries. They give formal definitions of quantum WI (QWI) and quantum WH (QWH), present proof systems satisfying these definitions, and specify a condition under which QWI implies QWH. Regarding the non‐interactive proof systems, they prove that, even if a common reference string is used to generate polynomially many non‐interactive proofs, the QWI is still preserved, while quantum zero‐knowledge has no such beneficial property. To show the strength of QWI, they present two applications of them. First, they prove that the construction proposed by Feige et al . that transforms any non‐interactive bounded zero‐knowledge proof system to a general one is also feasible against quantum adversaries. Second, they construct a quantum‐secure signature scheme in the CRS model, which is existentially unforgeable against quantum adversaries and remains secure even if a common random string is used to sign polynomially many messages.
Blockchain since its inception in 2008 is being gaining a wide publicity. It is in early phase and its adoption is a general concern. There is a need of more interdisciplinary research to understand the barriers, enablers and diffusion of this technology. This paper reviews on the key applications of blockchain technology along with its benefits. Smart Vehicle Management, Agriculture, Healthcare, Cryptocurrency and Waste Management are the potential Areas for research in this technology. The research would be further carried out to build a prototype model for waste management using this technology.
This research aims to : (1) Analyzing the financial performance of districts/cities in the Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta Province; (2) Analyzing the phenomena of fiscal illusions that occur in the finance of districts / cities in DIY Province. This research is based on secondary data, namely the Local Goverment Budget and Local Gross Domestic Product data sourced from the Ministry of Finance DJPK and BPS. The analytical tool used is financial independence ratio analysis, fiscal decentralization degree and panel data regression analysis. Based on the results of the analysis, it is known that the average independence ratio of the Regency / City of DIY Province is 30,38% and has a pattern of consultative relations with the central government. In the degree of fiscal decentralization, it is known that the Regency / City average is 17,35%. This means that the capacity of regional governments to manage regional finance is still lacking. In addition, there is a phenomenon of fiscal illusion in the financial performance of the Regency / City Regional Government of the DIY Province.
Sosyal medya, insanları alış veriş alışkanlıklarından yatırım kararlarına kadar birçok ticari niyetleri üzerinde yüksek etki düzeyi olduğu güncel birçok çalışmada araştırılmaya başlanmıştır ve bu ilişki ortaya konmuştur. Bu ilişki üzerine inşa edilerek geliştirilen güncel analiz yöntemleri yatırım araçlarının gelecek değerlerini tahmin ederek yatırım kararları almada bir destek mekanizması olarak kullanılması çok cazip bir konudur. Bu sebeple bu ilişki yatırımcı ve analistlerden akademisyenlere kadar güncel bir ilgi konusu olmuştur. Bu çalışmanın amacı da sosyal medya ile yatırım kararları arasındaki ilişkiyi metinsel ve finansal analiz aracılığı ile görmeye çalışmaktır. Bu çalışmada Twitter üzerinden metin madenciliği ile veri çekilmiş ve sentiment(duygu) analizi ile yorumların olumlu ya da olumsuz olma durumu incelenmiştir. Sentiment analizinden elde edilen sayısal değerler ile güncel ve küresel bir yatırım aracı olan Bitcoin fiyatları arasındaki ilişkinin varlığını sorgulamak adına Granger Nedensellik analizi gibi finansal analizler kullanılmıştır.
The main objective of the paper is to provide an answer to the question whether new technologies such as blockchain that enter various spheres of public life are safe for users and what impact they have on national legislations. Cryptocurrencies, which are based on blockchain technology, can be used as a means of payment, investment or capital accumulation. Therefore, blockchain becomes more and more popular. The main research method used in the paper consists of the analysis of legislation and jurisprudence as well as linguistic and purposive interpretation which affects the functioning of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The introductory part of the paper contains a general historical outline and basic principles related to blockchain technology. Real and potential threats posed by the discussed technology are also discussed in the paper as well as the question whether governments or, more broadly, the international community, offer sufficient level of protection against risks related to the use of new technologies such as blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Using blockchain to streamline logistic activities or to speed up transactions is useful in itself, but in the hands of private entities the technology may pose a risk of losing funds if not properly secured. The financial market is and should be supervised and controlled by the state which is the guarantor of economic freedom. Another vital question is whether legislators keep up with the advances in technology. It seems that the development of blockchain technology triggers development of new legal regulations. The more blockchain technology enters everyday life, the more legal documents appear in the form of case law, legal provisions, opinions etc. The role of these documents is to regulate, define and specify new technologies as they appear.
In this paper I discuss how blockchains potentially could affect the way credit risk is modeled, and how the improved trust and timing associated with blockchain-enabled real-time accounting could improve default prediction. To demonstrate the (quite substantial) effect the change would have on well-known credit risk measures, a simple case-study compares Z-scores and Merton distances to default computed using typical accounting data of today to the same risk measures computed under a hypothetical future blockchain regime.
After the meteoric rise in price, and subsequent public interest, of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, a developing body of work has begun examining its impact on society. In recent months, as Bitcoin's price has rapidly declined, uncertainty and distrust have begun to overshadow early enthusiasm. In this late-breaking work, we investigated one of the largest and most important Bitcoin online communities, the r/Bitcoin Reddit forum. A vocal subgroup of users identify themselves as "true Bitcoiners", and justify their continued devotion to Bitcoin. These subreddit participants explained and justified their trust in Bitcoin in three primary ways: identifying characteristics of beneficial versus harmful Bitcoin users, diminishing the importance of problems, and describing themselves as loyal to Bitcoin over time.
Tarun Chitra, Monica Quaintance, Stuart Haber, Will Martino
While many distributed consensus protocols provide robust liveness and consistency guarantees under the presence of malicious actors, quantitative estimates of how economic incentives affect security are few and far between. In this paper, we describe a system for simulating how adversarial agents, both economically rational and Byzantine, interact with a blockchain protocol. This system provides statistical estimates for the economic difficulty of an attack and how the presence of certain actors influences protocol-level statistics, such as the expected time to regain liveness. This simulation system is influenced by the design of algorithmic trading and reinforcement learning systems that use explicit modeling of an agent's reward mechanism to evaluate and optimize a fully autonomous agent. We implement and apply this simulation framework to Kadena's Chainweb, a parallelized Proof-of-Work system, that contains complexity in how miner incentive compliance affects security and censorship resistance. We provide the first formal description of Chainweb that is in the literature and use this formal description to motivate our simulation design. Our simulation results include a phase transition in block height growth rate as a function of shard connectivity and empirical evidence that censorship in Chainweb is too costly for rational miners to engage in. We conclude with an outlook on how simulation can guide and optimize protocol development in a variety of contexts, including Proof-of-Stake parameter optimization and peer-to-peer networking design.
Stellar is one of the top ten cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization. It adopts a variant of Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), named federated Byzantine agreement (FBA), which generalizes the traditional BFT algorithm to make it more suitable for open-membership blockchains. To this end, FBA introduces a quorum slice concept, which consists of a set of nodes. In FBA, a node can complete one consensus round when it receives specific messages from nodes in a quorum slice appointed by the node. In this study, we analyze FBA, whose security is highly dependent on the structure of quorum slices, and demonstrate that it is not superior to the traditional BFT algorithm in terms of safety and liveness. Then, to analyze the security of the Stellar consensus protocol (SCP), which is a construction for FBA, we investigate the current quorum slices in Stellar. We analyze the structure of quorum slices and measure the influence of each node quantitatively using two metrics, PageRank (PR) and the newly proposed NodeRank (NR). The results show that the Stellar system is significantly centralized. Thereafter, to determine how the centralized structure can have a negative impact on the Stellar system, we study the cascading failure caused by deleting only a few nodes (i.e., validators) in Stellar. We show that all of the nodes in Stellar cannot run SCP if only two nodes fail. To make matters worse, these two nodes are run and controlled by a single organization, the Stellar foundation.
Chris Elsden, Tom Feltwell, Shaun Lawson, John Vines
This paper presents a qualitative study of the recent integration of a UK-based, digital-first mobile banking app - Monzo - with the web automation service IFTTT (If This Then That). Through analysis of 113 unique IFTTT 'recipes' shared by Monzo users on public community forums, we illustrate the potentially diverse functions of these recipes, and how they are achieved through different kinds of automation. Beyond achieving more convenient and efficient financial management, we note many playful and expressive applications of conditionality and automation that far extend traditional functions of banking applications and infrastructure. We use these findings to map opportunities, challenges and areas of future research in the development of 'programmable money' and related financial technologies. Specifically, we present design implications for the extension of native digital banking applications; novel uses of banking data; the applicability of blockchains and smart contracts; and future forms of financial autonomy.
Apr 29, 2019·The 3rd International Workshop on Integrating Edge Computing, Caching, and Offloading in Next Generation Networks (INFOCOM workshop IECCO 2019), At Paris, France
Edge computing is a novel paradigm designed to improve the quality of service for latency sensitive cloud applications. However, the state-of-the-art edge services are designed for specific applications, which are isolated from each other. To better improve the utilization level of edge nodes, public resource sharing among edges from distinct service providers should be encouraged economically. In this work, we employ the payment channel techniques to design and implement EdgeToll, a blockchain-based toll collection system for heterogeneous public edge sharing. Test-bed has been developed to validate the proposal and preliminary experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the time and cost efficiency of the system.
Dhyanendra Jain, Ashu Jain, Amit Pandey, Jogender Kumar
Abstract Bitcoin is one of the crypto currencies and is most unpredictable currencies. In the world of crypto currencies, the value of a coin can unpredictably upgrade or degrade. In this study, the model has been trained to predict the value of Bitcoin in USD at any given time stamp. For this prediction, three algorithms of machine learning - Linear Regression (LR), Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Neural Network Regression (NNR) have been used. The model is trained using the collected dataset. After the collection of data set, we first applied SVR algorithm, then we used LR and then NNR to calculate the error compared to the actual value. Root mean squared error (RMSE) is used as the predictive measure. Out of the three algorithms, LR was found out to be more accurate for predicting the value of bitcoin.
Organizations with high motivation for growth and cost-effective operation efficiencies, are always trying to bring new technologies to their operations. These organizations are very sensitive to change and value driven thus constant change is the only law for them to achieve their goals and to be in the market. When Bitcoin jumps into the market, the whole world wanted to own it but now after Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency bubble, there are significant shift towards Blockchain related products, services, solution developments, researches and use-case studies. From technical-financial opportunist, to evangelist, to researchers, to Tech enterprises, to financial institutions, to governments, the whole world is behind Blockchain and now it has the technological spot light. Blockchain has left behind all other technologies as far as research initiatives, investments and financial funding are concern. There are substantial research growth on, how Blockchain can be useful in specific area? Objectives of this paper are to highlight some facts about Blockchain that were misinterpreted and misrepresented due to this sudden shift. In this research article, authors are presenting comprehensive literature review of Blockchain Technologies and its applications in various sectors. Our research supports that Blockchain is revolutionizing and disrupting organizations across all industries. Blockchain is really a next big technological invention after Internet. In Blockchain Code is the law and Smart Contracts are the new way of doing business.
Dirk van Bokkem, Rico Hageman, Gijs Koning, Luat Nguyen · 5 authors
With the advancement of technology and subsequently the age of digital information, online trustworthy identification has become increasingly more important. With respect to the various data breaches and privacy regulations, the current identity solutions are not fully optimized. In this paper, we will take a look at several Self-Sovereign Identity solutions which are already available. Some of them are built upon blockchain technology as this already provides decentralised persistent data and consensus. We will explore the emerging landscape of Self-Sovereign Identity solutions and dissect their implementations under multiple aspect criteria to determine the necessity of blockchain technology in this field. We conclude that blockchain technology is not explicitly required for a Self-Sovereign Identity solution but it is a good foundation to build up on, due to various technical advantages that the blockchain has to offer.
Bitcoin blockchain technology is a distributed ledger of nodes authorizing transactions between anonymous parties. Its key actors are miners using computational power to solve mathematical problems for validating transactions. By sharing blockchain's characteristics, mining is a decentralized, transparent and unregulated practice, less explored in HCI, so we know little about miners' motivations and experiences, and how these may impact on different dimensions of trust. This paper reports on interviews with 20 bitcoin miners about their practices and trust challenges. Findings contribute to HCI theories by extending the exploration of blockchain's characteristics relevant to trust with the competitiveness dimension underpinning the social organization of mining. We discuss the risks of collaborative mining due to centralization and dishonest administrators, and conclude with design implications highlighting the need for tools monitoring the distribution of rewards in collaborative mining, tools tracking data centers' authorization and reputation, and tools supporting the development of decentralized pools.
The 51% attack is a technique which intends to fork a blockchain in order to conduct double-spending. Adversaries controlling more than half of the total hashing power of a network can perform this attack. In a similar way, n confirmation and selfish mining are two attack techniques that comprise a similar strategy to the 51% attack. Due to the immense attacking cost to perform the 51% attack, it was considered very unlikely for a long period. However, in recent times, the attack has befallen at a frequent pace, costing millions of dollars to various cryptocurrencies. The 51% attack strategy varies based upon the adopted consensus mechanism by a particular cryptocurrency, and it enables attackers to double-spend the same crypto-coin, restrict transactions, cancel blocks, and even have full control over the price of a cryptocurrency. A crypto-coin with a low hashing power is always jeopardized by the 51% attack due to the easily attainable hashing. In this paper, we analyze the real impact of the 51% attack, revealing serious weaknesses in consensus protocols that made this attack possible. We discuss the five most advanced protection techniques to prevent this attack and their main limitations. We conclude that in most cases, security techniques fail to provide real protection against the 51% attack because the weaknesses are inherited from the consensus protocols.
Data owners upload large files to cloud storage servers, but malicious servers may potentially tamper data. To check integrity of remote data, Proof-of-retrievability (PoR) schemes were introduced. Existing PoR protocols assume that data owners and third-party auditors are honest and audit only the potentially malicious cloud server to check integrity of stored data. In this article, we consider a system where any party may attempt to cheat others and consider collusion cases. We design a protocol, Cumulus, that is secure under such adversarial assumptions and use blockchain smart contracts to act as mediator in case of dispute and payment settlement. We use state channels to reduce blockchain interactions in order to build a practical audit solution. The security of the protocol has been proven in Universal Composability (UC) framework. Finally, we illustrate several applications of our basic protocol and evaluate practicality of our approach via a prototype implementation for fairly selling large files over the Ethereum platform. We evaluate the prototype and show that our scheme has comparable performance.
Data owners upload large files to cloud storage servers, but malicious servers may potentially tamper data. To check integrity of remote data, Proof of Retrievability (PoR) schemes were introduced. Existing PoR protocols assume that data owners and third-party auditors are honest and audit only the potentially malicious cloud server to check integrity of stored data. In this paper we consider a system where any party may attempt to cheat others and consider collusion cases. We design a protocol that is secure under such adversarial assumptions and use blockchain smart contracts to act as mediator in case of dispute and payment settlement. We use state channels to reduce blockchain interactions in order to build a practical audit solution. We implement and evaluate a prototype using Ethereum as the blockchain platform and show that our scheme has comparable performance.
Blockchain also known as a distributed ledger technology stores different transactions/operations in a chain of blocks in a distributed manner without needing a trusted third-party. Blockchain is proven to be immutable which helps for integrity and accountability, and, to some extent, confidentiality through a pair of public and private keys. Blockchain has been in the spotlight after successful boom of the Bitcoin. There have been efforts to leverage salient features of Blockchain for different applications and use cases. This paper present a comprehensive survey of applications and use cases of Blockchain technology. Specifically, readers of this paper can have thorough understanding of applications and user cases of Blockchain technology.
Recent studies have found that the log-volatility of asset returns exhibit roughness. This study investigates roughness or the anti-persistence of Bitcoin volatility. Using the multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis, we obtain the generalized Hurst exponent of the log-volatility increments and find that the generalized Hurst exponent is less than $1/2$, which indicates log-volatility increments that are rough. Furthermore, we find that the generalized Hurst exponent is not constant. This observation indicates that the log-volatility has multifractal property. Using shuffled time series of the log-volatility increments, we infer that the source of multifractality partly comes from the distributional property.