Introduction. In the context of budget decentralization in Ukraine, local governments are trying to make effective use of their powers and financial potential of the territorial community in order to increase local budget revenues and funding of services at the local level. The purpose is to find out the essence of the financial potential of territorial communities and to analyze its current state in the context of existing and potential sources of financial resources that can be used by local governments for the realization of their goals and perspectives. Methods. To achieve goal, a system of general scientific and special methods of research was used: analysis, synthesis and generalization - in the processing of literary, statistical, legislative and Internet sources on the topic of research; methods of systematizing and generalizing data, comparing and detailing were used when conducting analysis of local budget revenues; graphical, tabular and visualization methods were used for visual representation of the processed data; abstract-logical method was used for summarize the material presented and formulate conclusions. Results. It has been found out that financial potential of a local community is a collection of available and potential sources of financial resources that local governments can attract through budgetary, investment, credit and grant mechanisms to ensure the effective functioning of the community. It is proved that budgetary funds is gradually increasing and prevail in the structure of financial resources of local self-government bodies in Ukraine. Despite the positive dynamics, local budget revenues have not yet become the basis of financial independence of territorial communities, and tax revenues make up 88% of the structure of local budget own revenues. Possibilities of attracting private sector investment funds on the basis of public-private partnership as a potential source of financial resources of territorial communities are analyzed. It has been found out that the sources of growth of the financial potential of local self-government are credits and grants, which provide financing for infrastructure projects for the development of territorial communities. It is proved that the specific reserve of resource provision of territorial communities is human capital, with the participation of which the formation, distribution and use of financial resources of the community takes place. Emphasis is placed on revenues from the disposal of municipal waste as an inexhaustible financial resource of territorial communities. Proposals for increasing the efficiency of utilization of the financial potential of territorial communities at the present stage of development have been developed. Conclusions. The subject of further scientific exploration is the search for and in-depth study of ways to effectively use the financial potential of local communities to improve the quality and accessibility of public services at the local level.
Milan Rapajić, Milivoje Lapčević, Violeta Miladinović
Since the introduction of property taxation in Serbian legislation, the tax system has been the subject of reforms a number of times for the purpose of its harmonization it with European Union standards. Initial changes were almost unnoticiable, while the latest modifications in the law attracted considerable interest of the tax policy creators, financial experts, as well as the taxpayers themselves because they introduced a new method of determining the tax basis which has increased the overall tax liabilities at annual level. Bearing in mind that the property tax generates local revenue and that local governments are in constant need for additional resources, the methodology of determining the tax liability should be based on the principle of equity and equality in order to ensure an ultimately efficient tax collection. In this paper, the authors will attempt to analyze both positive and negative aspects of improving the property tax system through a number of years, as well as to propose some solutions for the future reform of this system. By means of fiscal decentralization, this revenue plays an important role in financing local expenditure, while its abundance directly secures a larger autonomy of local self-government units, making them less dependable on the funds coming from the state budget.
Diana Elizabeth Román Yrigoín, Meza Maúrtua, Marco Antonio
In this investigation the legal and economic nature of cryptocurrencies is reviewed, with particular emphasis on bitcoin, in order to determine the tax impact of the corporate and personal income tax and the value added tax in the operations of buying and selling bitcoins, the ones in which they are used as a mean of payment and in the bitcoin mining service in Peru. In this context, we detail the legal devices that tax the operations with cryptocurrencies mentioned above with the Income Tax and the Value Added Tax, as well as the need for a special tax regulation in Peru for cryptocurrency operations.
The boom of cryptocurrencies as a mechanism of payment and investment has reached Peru, but our country lacks a legal regulation regarding the legal and fiscal consequences of operations with Bitcoins or other kinds of cryptocurrencies. In this article, the author elaborates a legal-fiscal analysis applicable to Bitcoin-related operations in Peru: mining, exchanges for goods and services, and exchanges for other kinds of currency. The first part of this article questions the legal nature of criptocurrencies based on the Peruvian legislation in force, while also taking into account the experiences of foreign legal systems. Thus, in the second part, the author describes the fiscal implications of criptocurencies in Peru.
This paper interprets the principles of good governance and corporate governance in the context of distributed ledger technologies, namely blockchain, analyzing specifically how these principles apply to a blockchain-enabled energy market. With blockchain, governance becomes decentralized and automated, creating a new, tech- nical bureaucracy. However, a programmed decision tree does not inevitably produce a digitized democracy and a functional marketplace. While blockchain governance decisions have been predominantly technical, they increasingly embroil legal, moral, cultural and even philosophical considerations. As a result, governance is increasingly recognized as a critical challenge in the future development of blockchain-enabled marketplaces. Future, multidisciplinary research by lawyers, engineers, political scientists and philosophers should venture further into develop- ing good governance principles for blockchain, focusing on equity and inclusion.
Cryptocurrencies are a mean of executing online transactions. They use a variety of cryptographic techniques to secure and verify these transactions, which are functionally supported by the Blockchain platform. Blockchain is a continuously growing, distributed ledger of files that contains all transactions between users of cryptocurrencies in a verifiable and permanent manner. It consists of blocks that are connected and secured cryptographically. Cryptocurrencies use algorithms to produce pairs of public and private keys. These pairs, cryptographically merged with a message between the participants, are the building blocks of the relevant transactions. Bitcoin uses the ECDSA algorithm to produce the above-mentioned keys. The purpose of our work is to present some useful motifs for the domain parameters of base point (P) and the order (n) of the subgroup produced by it, while choosing the elliptic curve and the Galois field on which we formulate the algorithm, in order to obtain safer private keys. The results of the research are experimental due to the limited infrastructure, but explanatory for the purpose of our work. The resulting conclusions highlight the value of the proper selection of the structural parameters of these algorithms and possible alternatives to the curve, field and domain parameters that can be used.
Shihan Bao, Yue Cao, Ao Lei, Philip Asuquo · 7 authors
Research into the established area of the intelligent transportation system is evolving into the Internet of Vehicles, a fast-moving research area, fuelled in part by rapid changes based on cyber-physical systems. It needs to be recognized that existing vehicular communication systems are susceptible to privacy vulnerabilities which require addressing. A practical challenge is that many vehicular communication applications and services make use of basic safety messages that contain the identity of the vehicle, location, and other personal data. A popular way of dealing with this privacy issue is to utilize a pseudonym change scheme to protect the vehicle's identity and location. However, many such schemes suffer that the cost grows and the certificate management difficulty raises with the number of pseudonyms generated and stored, casting doubt of the economic feasibility of that approach. We propose a decentralized blockchain-based solution for pseudonym management that overcomes these limitations. This scheme consists of pseudonym distribution and a shuffle operation, allowing the reuse of existing pseudonyms to different vehicles. The results reported here, including those from our simulations, demonstrate that the proposed scheme can reuse existing pseudonyms and achieve a better degree of anonymity at a lower cost than existing schemes.
The article is devoted to the identification of the higher education development trends on the basis of the key analytical documents analysis of the following international organizations in higher education: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (ОЕCD), World Bank, European University Association. UNESCO documents are focused on the autonomy of higher education institutions and academic freedom. Autonomy means that degree of self-governance necessary for effective decision making by institutions of higher education regarding their academic work, standards, management and related activities consistent with systems of public accountability, especially in respect of funding provided by the state, and respect for academic freedom and human rights. However, the nature of institutional autonomy may differ according to the type of establishment involved. Autonomy is the institutional form of academic freedom and a necessary precondition to guarantee the proper fulfilment of the functions entrusted to higher-education teaching personnel and institutions. The World Bank Analytical reports are emphasized on the financial autonomy as an integral part of the higher education financing system. The OECD reports are devoted to the university autonomy in the context of financing, quality assessment and management of higher education institutions. The tendencies of the development of higher education systems in Europe are defined. They are increasing of the role of higher education in ensuring the competitiveness of countries in the world economic community; increasing of the universities competition in market economy and controlling over the public financial resources effective using; increasing demands for higher education quality; decentralization of higher education institutions management; development of the institutional autonomy and academic freedom; the interconnection of institutional autonomy, accountability and responsibility for the quality of higher education; the educational paradigm changing in terms of learning and teaching recognition as key institutional priorities.
Cryptocurrency has been called “a fraud” by some and “the next internet” by others. However, since the first Bitcoin was mined in 2009, the growth of the cryptocurrency market capitalization has been exponential—surpassing $800 billion at the beginning of 2018. Not surprisingly, the regulations governing these digital pieces of property have lagged the economic growth. In this Article, I attempt to answer the question: should 26 U.S.C. § 1031 apply to an exchange between cryptocurrencies?\nThis Article argues that the Internal Revenue Service’s decision to classify cryptocurrency as property, combined with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s hesitancy to classify all forms of cryptocurrency as securities, paves the way for taxpayer use of the like kind exchange between cryptocurrency. A future IRS ruling stating such would be in line with both past IRS and federal court rulings. The IRS has been liberal in the allowance of like kind exchanges in the past – doing so here would reduce the amount of complexity for the IRS and the taxpayer, while increasing revenues over time. Although the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 disallows like kind exchanges of personal property starting in 2018, this Article is relevant for transactions that predate the 2018 tax reform.
This article is about the process of globalisation supported by cryptocurrencies. It discusses the influence of cryptocurrencies on three major aspects: the political, economic and social spheres. The section on the political sphere highlights the way the authorities of some countries react towards cryptocurrencies. The evolving legal status of cryptocurrency in different regions is described. The section on the economic sphere enumerates examples of cryptocurrencies used on the financial markets. It shows how cryptocurrency might be used by the business sector. The social sphere section illustrates the major kinds of internet societies which are created around cryptocurrencies and what tools are facilitating cryptocurrency transfers. Many examples of important cryptocurrencies are used. The analysis of statistical data and literature have been used in order to evaluate the topic. The study provides additional evidence proving that cryptocurrencies have a significant impact on the process of globalisation.
Yijun Yu, Danny Barthaud, Blaine Price, Arosha K. Bandara · 6 authors
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are increasingly expected to operate in spaces populated by humans while avoiding injury to people or damaging property. However, incidents and accidents can, and increasingly do, happen. Traditional investigations of aircraft incidents require on-board flight data recorders (FDRs); however, these physical FDRs only work if the drone can be recovered. A further complication is that physical FDRs are too heavy to mount on light drones, hence not suitable for forensic digital investigations of drone flights. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptive software architecture, LiveBox, to make drones both forensic-ready and regulation compliant. We studied the feasibility of using distributed technologies for implementing the LiveBox reference architecture. In particular, we found that updates and queries of drone flight data and constraints can be treated as transactions using decentralised ledger technology (DLT), rather than a generic time-series database, to satisfy forensic tamper-proof requirements. However, DLTs such as Ethereum, have limits on throughput (i.e. transactions-per-second), making it harder to achieve regulation-compliance at runtime. To overcome this limitation, we present a self-adaptive reporting algorithm to dynamically reduce the precision of flight data without sacrificing the accuracy of runtime verification. Using a real-life scenario of drone delivery, we show that our proposed algorithm achieves a 46% reduction in bandwidth without losing accuracy in satisfying both tamper-proof and regulation-compliant requirements.
With the recent trend on blockchain, many users want to know more about the important players of the chain. In this study, we investigate and analyze the Ethereum blockchain network in order to identify the major entities across the transaction network. By leveraging the rich data available through Alethio's platform in the form of RDF triples we learn about the Hubs and Authorities of the Ethereum transaction network. Alethio uses SANSA for effcient reading and processing of such large-scale RDF data (transactions on Ethereum blockchain) in order to perform analytics e.g. finding top accounts, or typical behavior patterns of exchanges' deposit wallets and more.
In this study, a methodology is presented where a hybrid system combining an evolutionary algorithm with artificial neural networks (ANNs) is designed to make weekly directional change forecasts on the USD by inferring a prediction using closing spot rates of three currency pairs: EUR/USD, GBP/USD and CHF/USD. The forecasts made by the genetically trained ANN are compared to those made by a new variation of the simple moving average (MA) trading strategy, tailored to the methodology, as well as a random model. The same process is then repeated for the three major cryptocurrencies namely: BTC/USD, ETH/USD and XRP/USD. The overall prediction accuracy, uptrend and downtrend prediction accuracy is analyzed for all three methods within the fiat currency as well as the cryptocurrency contexts. The best models are then evaluated in terms of their ability to convert predictive accuracy to a profitable investment given an initial investment. The best model was found to be the hybrid model on the basis of overall prediction accuracy and accrued returns.
Overview:Industries that rely on digital payments (especially micro-transactions) and complex contracting between parties stand to gain the most from the arrival of blockchain technology. In addition, the ability to authenticate a work as it passes from one buyer to the next, and to generate unique digital works, will be a boon to those industries where scarcity is valued. We conclude that the creative industries would benefit greatly from this new economic infrastructure – possibly more than any other segment of the economy. However, the embryonic blockchain-enabled creative economy has a difficult road ahead. Old industry incumbents and new technology platforms alike have failed to demonstrate a willingness to embrace an open and accessible ‘internet of value’ (as blockchain is known). Without concerted efforts to coordinate practitioners and stakeholders (arts organisations, creative firms, funding bodies, collecting societies and others), including shared digital infrastructures and open standards, these benefits may never be realised. We propose what we are calling an ‘industry utility’ approach to cultural policy. An industry utility is a shared infrastructure built to support and grow a segment of the economy. In this scenario, Australia’s cultural institutions would cooperate in the development and use of a shared blockchain infrastructure for the creative industries. We provide some initial ideas on what that might look like for creative practitioners and show how such an approach would position Australia as a leader in the creative economy.Highlights:An overview of distributed ledger technology, including smart contracts.Examples of the way experimentation is already taking place with these technologies in the cultural and creative industries (weighted towards the music and screen sectors where most developments have occurred to date).Consideration of the role that Australia’s cultural institutions might play in the development of a creative industries blockchain economy.
This paper proposes the use of a blockchainbased structure in order to store evidences in a digital forensics investigation. The traditional chain of evidence is augmented with properties of immutability and traceability, thanks to a cryptographic process. The blockchain is constructed by forensics experts by adding evidences through the process. Since the blockchain is immutable, it can be shared among the different parties involved in a prosecution in order to review the chain of evidence and build their case. Furthermore, the blockchain structure can be applied to other forensics fields, like drugs, firearms, NDA. This blockchain is called a Digital Evidence Inventory (DEI) and is part of a wider framework encompassing a Forensics Confidence Rating (FCR) structure, in order to give experts the ability to rate the level of confidence for each evidence and a Global Digital Timeline (GDT) to order evidence through time. The whole framework is called ‘Aldiana’.