Smart contracts are blockchain-based programs that have developed with the emergence of Ethereum, one of the most well-known blockchains. Gas, paid in Ethers (i.e., the cryptocurrency in Ethereum), is required for the costs to upload and run smart contracts on Ethereum. As cost-inefficiently designed smart contracts result in unnecessary costs, it is vital to eliminate any gas-wasteful code fragments to optimize the deployment costs. In this study, we define five gas-wasteful patterns: 'Over-public variables', 'Redundant initial values', 'Loose packing', 'Non-base unit types', and 'Nonconstant variables', based on the state variables in Solidity, the most commonly used implementation language for smart contracts in Ethereum. We also propose improvement methods related to these patterns and a solution to identify and eliminate the patterns. Furthermore, we analyze 143 real-world contracts deployed on Ethereum and find that 56% of them include the above-mentioned patterns. We also upgrade 43 of the patternmatched contracts and demonstrate that their deployment costs are decreased on an average by 13.47%, and the most-reduced rate is 64%.
The cryptocurrency Artificial intelligence price emulator is a software programmed to collect cryptocurrency market data, analyze the data and predict the market price using the collected data. Computer emulators are programmed to mimic and copy behaviors or other software/hardware. The reason for emulation is to get to a particular result as quickly as possible. Machine learning is the ability of computers to read and process data while learning from the data with human interference or influence. This work focused majorly on how cryptocurrency market prices can be emulated using Artificial Intelligence with machine learning abilities. It also looked into the advantages of using the software for crypto investors. Some of which is the reduced time of research, reduction of risk, among others.
Cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, is a digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central bank. It is an emerging financial technology enabled by innovation, increasingly popular among global Internet users, and more interestingly, it challenges the existing financial and regulatory rules on the currency and payment systems of the world today. On the other side, certain cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, have been actively used as payment tools for illicit transactions. Both the “promising” and "challenging" faces of cryptocurrency trigger causes for concern for policy makers, not only from financial sector, but also legal and technological sectors. The decentralised nature of cryptocurrency creates unique problems for the government to regulate or impose any regulatory requirements. This article argues that, in order for Malaysia to remain at the forefront of financial and digital innovation, it is timely to look at the question on whether to formulate certain policy and regulatory framework on the use of cryptocurrency in Malaysian market. The answer can pave the way for Malaysian digital citizens to potentially grab the opportunities made possible by the cryptocurrency technology. For this purpose, the researchers seek to study the features of cryptocurrency and the experiences from policymakers in other jurisdictions in dealing with the matter.
This research intended to understand the factors affecting the acceptance of Bitcoin technology in Indonesia. It adopted the model of Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), which took into account four influencing factors. Those were performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions. The factors of gender and age were assumed to moderate the relations between those four factors and use and behavioral intention. The empirical data for those factors were collected by questionnaires from 49 respondents. The statistical significance of the relationships was evaluated by multivariate regression analysis. The result is a model that matches the data with R2 = 0,678. It demonstrates a high level of fitness. The analysis suggests that the performance expectancy factor and the social influence factor greatly affect the behavioral intention to use Bitcoin with the values of t-statistic of 3,835 (p-value = 0,000) for the former factor and 1,948 (0,059) for the latter factor. However, the social influence factor has less profound effect on the behavioral intention.
The paper is dedicated to the analysis the financing situation and level of decentralization in the municipalities in Poland and Turkey. The analysis covers years 2012–2016. Due to decentralisation reforms in both countries the basic level of subnational governments are municipalities. The decentralization process includes three categories: political, administrative, and fiscal. Because of above the municipalities in Poland and Turkey are various with the number of units, average municipal area, average municipality size, sources of the revenues and directions of money spending.
Collection of intelligence is one of the key elements to organize more sophisticated methods of attacks. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is a technique used by attackers for reconnaissance purposes to gather information about specific targets. The accessibility to critical information about emerging systems through OSINT leads exposure of vulnerabilities and exploitation of these vulnerabilities to form widespread attack. Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies that exposed the use of crypto currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. This research paper explains the use of OSINT to gather critical information about cryptocurrency miners such as Bitcoin Antminer and Ethereum Claymore and expose the vulnerabilities to exploit the configuration file of the miner manager. The research outcomes expose the vulnerability of the existing crypto currencies and use of OSINT for detection and analysis of cyberthreat in crypto currency market.
Roberto Frota Décourt, Usman W. Chohan, Maria Letizia Perugini
Esta investigación verifica si el efecto lunes que se encuentra en los mercados de acciones y letras del Tesoro también se produce en el mercado de Bitcoin, que difiere profundamente de otros mercados porque nunca se cierra. Una posible explicación para el efecto lunes es que la negociación del lunes ocurre después de uno o más días sin ninguna transacción. Se usó la prueba t-Student para verificar si los retornos diarios promedio de cada día de la semana son significativamente diferentes de otros días y encontramos que los retornos del lunes son significativamente más altos que en otros días. Después de eso, estimamos un modelo de regresión para confirmar que el retorno promedio del lunes es positivo y superior al promedio de otros días y se confirmó.
Crptocurrency is a type of digital currency that using decentralized method for validating transaction. In the same time, the user of the Bitcoin is protected using hash algorithm. The value of Bitcoin is increased sharply in 2017 that creates much attention from investors. The objective of this study is to develop the mathematical model evaluate growth of Bitcoin exchange rate. The data selected in this study are starting from 1st January 2017 until 10th December 2017. This study validates the normality distribution of data using graphical and numerical method. Graphical method indicates the first difference of data distribution is a non-normal distribution. Then, Shapiro-Wilk statistical test confirmed that first difference of data distribution deviate from normal distribution. The non-normal distribution occurs because of the presence of outliers. Next, this study validates the mathematical modeling fordata trend using quadratic formula. Result indicates that the growth of Bitcoin exchange rate in moving towards non-equilibrium point. This concludes that the growth of the Bitcoin exchange rate is in unstable region. The contribution of this study is to help investors to understand the nature of Bitcoin exchange rate. This study performed analysis that helps investors to develop more efficient investment portfolio in gaining better profit and reducing loss
Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies. However, the economic effect of transaction channels on the system has not been explored much until now. We study the economics of Bitcoin transaction channels, and present a framework for an economic analysis of the lightning network and its effect on transaction fees on the blockchain. Our framework allows us to reason about different patterns of demand for transactions and different topologies of the lightning network, and to derive the resulting fees for transacting both on and off the blockchain. Our initial results indicate that while the lightning network does allow for a substantially higher number of transactions to pass through the system, it does not necessarily provide higher fees to miners, and as a result may in fact lead to lower participation in mining within the system.
El Bitcoin, cuya dimension como criptomoneda se esta multiplicando desde su creacion en 2009, debe ser objeto de una regulacion legal urgente, a fin de evitar los problemas juridicos que puedan derivar de su alegalidad, ya que esta realidad digital esta siendo objeto de transmision entre particulares sin una normativa especifica que la regule.
Dec 28, 2017·Вісник Житомирського державного технологічного університету. Серія: Економічні науки // THE JOURNAL OF ZHYTOMYR STATE TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY. SERIES: ECONOMICS
Олександр Михайлович Петрук, Оксана Сергіївна Новак
The research deals with the issue of reflection in accounting cryptocurrencies and the ways of solving it through determining the economic essence of such currencies. The purpose of the research is the analysis such economic phenomenon as cryptocurrency and formation of appropriate methodological approaches to its accounting reflection, that requires the identification of the object, the study of the methods of its assessment, the clarification of reflection on the appropriate accounts, the determination of place in reporting.The author generalizes the existed achievements of domestic and foreign researchers about the issues of accounting cryptocurrencies, differentiates between the concept of «cryptocurrency» and «electronic money», and proves that according to a set of features cryptocurrencies do not meet the requirements of the definition of «money», that is why, cryptocurrencies cannot be reflected into the enterprise balance sheet under article «Funds and their equivalents».Using the functional approach to the definition of cryptocurrency as the accounting object and the methods of comparison and analogy, the paper substantiates the order of its reflection as a variety of financial investments applying the special methods of accounting, such as assessment, accounts, and reporting.
In the Ecuadorian national sphere, tourism has enjoyed sustainable tourism initiatives by the Ministry of Tourism and states that Ecuador must convert each of its tourist sites into destinations of excellence, in this argument it is important to observe the rights of nature and of the environment within the framework of good living, so that emphasis should be placed on how to contribute from cantonal Autonomous Decentralized Governments to the development of tourism in coastal areas. The objective of this study is to identify fundamentals associated with sustainable tourism development in areas of the Ecuadorian coast, where environmental impacts caused by tourism activity are inferred, in this sense, it is observed that the tourism management carried out on the beaches of the Ecuadorian coast has negative effects important regarding the organization and equipment that have led to the disorderly and expansive use in these sites. Based on the results of the research, gaps related to the management of sustainable tourism are detected, contributing to the coming conception of a model for tourism management in coastal cantons, which will improve the strategic planning of tourist orientation of the same and the decision making of the local actors involved in the development proposed by the country.
Open access
Business, Innovation, and Economy
Diverse Applied Research Studies
Geography and Environmental Studies in Latin America
Bitcoin, 2009 yılında ortaya çıkan ve ardından sayısız kripto para biriminin dolaşıma girmesine zemin hazırlayan yenilikçi bir dijital para birimidir. Bitcoin; sahip olduğu market kapitalizasyonu, gün geçtikçe artan işlem adeti ve hacmi, zaman içinde daha stabil hale gelen piyasa değeri ile daha fazla birey tarafından kullanılan bir varlık haline gelmiştir. Bitcoin teknik olarak, "blok zinciri" adı verilen tüm işlemleri kapsayan ve kullanıcının bilgisayarının bir işlemin geçerliliğini doğrulamasına izin veren bir altyapı kullanır. Finansal anlamda ise Bitcoin, paranın değişim aracı olma, hesap birimi olma, vadeli işlemlerde ödeme aracı olma ve servet biriktirme aracı olma gibi temel fonksiyonlarını bir şekilde yerine getiren bir varlıktır. Bitcoin aynı zamanda, paranın basılması sürecinde madencilik ( mining ), paranın bireysel ve kurumsal hesaplarda korunumunu sağlayan e-cüzdan uygulamaları, teknik altyapıya odaklanan ve/veya para biriminin değeri üzerine teknik analiz hizmeti sağlayan finansal hizmetler, paranın işlem görmesini sağlayan ve diğer para birimleri ile takasını sağlayan bir borsa işlevi gören değişim aracıları, para biriminin mal ve hizmetlerin alım satımında bir ödeme aracı olarak kullanılmasına imkan veren ödeme işlemcileri ve bu hizmetlerin birden fazlasını sunan şirketlerini içeren yeni bir ekonomi oluşturmuştur. Bu yeni ekonomi fırsatları da beraberinde getirmiş ve risk sermayesi yatırımlarını kendine çekmektedir. Bu çalışma, Bitcoin ve ona bağlı olarak oluşan alt-sektörlerin oluşturmuş olduğu yeni ekonomi hakkında bilgi vermeyi amaçlamaktadır. Bununla birlikte çalışma, bu yeni ekonominin geleceğine dair bir perspektif geliştirme amacını taşımaktadır ve bu konuda yapılacak ileriki çalışmalar için bir öncül çalışma olarak kullanılabilecektir.
<em>In the article considered the implementation problem an effective organizational and economic mechanism (algorithm) and ensuring the safety of the process of decentralization of management of natural resources is considered as an organized transfer of powers from the sphere of state management to water, land, forest and mineral resources to territorial communities.</em> <em>The concept of the mechanism of ensuring the security of the decentralization process in the system of management of natural resources with the participation of local communities is proposed.</em>
Shelly Grossman, Ittai Abraham, Guy Golan-Gueta, Yan Michalevsky · 7 authors
Callbacks are essential in many programming environments, but drastically complicate program understanding and reasoning because they allow to mutate object's local states by external objects in unexpected fashions, thus breaking modularity. The famous DAO bug in the cryptocurrency framework Ethereum, employed callbacks to steal $150M. We define the notion of Effectively Callback Free (ECF) objects in order to allow callbacks without preventing modular reasoning. An object is ECF in a given execution trace if there exists an equivalent execution trace without callbacks to this object. An object is ECF if it is ECF in every possible execution trace. We study the decidability of dynamically checking ECF in a given execution trace and statically checking if an object is ECF. We also show that dynamically checking ECF in Ethereum is feasible and can be done online. By running the history of all execution traces in Ethereum, we were able to verify that virtually all existing contract executions, excluding these of the DAO or of contracts with similar known vulnerabilities, are ECF. Finally, we show that ECF, whether it is verified dynamically or statically, enables modular reasoning about objects with encapsulated state.
Bitcoin is promoted as decentralized cryptocurrency by using pseudonym to achieve anonymity. Unfortunately, numerous seminal works have demonstrated that Bitcoin only offers weak anonymity in practice. Indeed, the practical technologies of clustering and flow analysis are much effective for tracing Bitcoin transaction and thereby revealing the owner involved. Otherwise said, user's privacy in Bitcoin has been sadly degenerated to be linkable. In this paper, we propose a completely decentralized scheme that can provide full anonymity in Bitcoin. The idea behind the output is to exploit a secure escrow address, which is consensual by all the involved users. The escrow address is generated from the trick of cryptographically secure distributed key generation and can then be used for mixing transactions in Bitcoin. Our protocol is secure against malicious adversaries. The users can jointly perform the protocol and successfully accomplish the transaction without the help of any (trusted) third party and no extra fees. Besides, our proposal is completely compatible with the current Bitcoin architecture.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Strategic interactions between competitive entities are generally considered from the perspective of complete revelation of benefits achieved from those interactions, in the form of public payoff functions and/or beliefs, in the announced games. However, there exist strategic interplays between competitors where the players have a choice to strategise under the availability of private payoffs, in similar competitive settings. In this contribution, we propose a formal framework for a competitive ecosystem where each player is permitted to defect from publicly optimal strategies under certain private payoffs greater than announced payoffs, given that these defections have certain acceptable bounds in the long run as agreed by all players. We call this game theoretic construction an Intention Game. We formally define an Intention Game, and notions of participational equilibria that exist in such interactions that permit public defections. We compare Intention Games with conventional strategic form games, and demonstrate a type-theoretic construction of Intention Games. In a partially honest setting, we give Intention Game instances of a Cournot competition, secure interactions between mobile applications, an Internet services' data sourcing competition between Internet service providers through content delivery networks, and a Bitcoin mining competition. We give a use of Intention Games to determine player participation in a cryptographic protocol. Finally, we demonstrate the possibility of a dual model of the Intention Games framework.
Цель работы – проанализировать современные тенденции и состояние международного рынка ведущих криптовалют и оценить возможные перспективы их дальнейшего развития и интеграции в мировую финансовую систему.
 Результаты исследования. Ретроспективно прослежена история происхождения и становления Биткоина (Bitcoin), рассмотрены некоторые особенности «Блокчейн» («Blockchain»). Проанализированы положительные и отрицательные стороны работы с криптовалютами. Рассмотрена ближайшая по капитализации к Биткоину криптовалюта Эфир (Ethereum) и проанализированы основные различия между ними. На основе проведенного исследования сформирован прогноз о наиболее вероятном направлении развития рынка криптовалют на ближайшее будущее и о возможности их интеграции в мировую финансовую систему.
 Теоретическое значение исследования. Настоящее исследование и его результаты будут способствовать решению глобальной научной задачи – формированию научно-обоснованного мнения академической науки к новому феномену в экономике – криптовалютам и их роли в мировой финансовой системе.
 Оригинальность/ценность/научная новизна исследования. Работа является одной из немногих, посвященных новому явлению в экономике – криптовалютам; представлены авторские прогнозы о возможных направлениях дальнейшего развития рынка криптовалют.
 Перспективы дальнейших исследований. Настоящая работа открывает возможность дальнейших исследований в области рынка криптовалют, его дальнейшего развития и интеграции в мировую финансовую систему.
 Тип статьи – эмпирическая.
The improvement of monetary systems is a topical and controversial issue in contemporary economic science. The article examines the main problems of bitcoin. The focus is on disclosing the economic essence, reasons and results of bitcoin, as well as problems of practical use in Russia. It presents the author's interpretation of the financial aspect of bitcoin and its effect on the financial situation of the individual layers of users. In conclusion, it proposes to implement cryptocurrencies in Russia as an important instrument of economic management and economic growth. Keywords: market society, bitcoin, users, results
Open access
2 source records
Economic and Technological Developments in Russia
Economic, Social, and Public Health Issues in Russia and Globally
Transparency is crucial in security-critical applications that rely on authoritative information, as it provides a robust mechanism for holding these authorities accountable for their actions. A number of solutions have emerged in recent years that provide transparency in the setting of certificate issuance, and Bitcoin provides an example of how to enforce transparency in a financial setting. In this work we shift to a new setting, the distribution of software package binaries, and present a system for so-called "binary transparency." Our solution, Contour, uses proactive methods for providing transparency, privacy, and availability, even in the face of persistent man-in-the-middle attacks. We also demonstrate, via benchmarks and a test deployment for the Debian software repository, that Contour is the only system for binary transparency that satisfies the efficiency and coordination requirements that would make it possible to deploy today.
Santiago Bragagnolo, Henrique Rocha, Marcus Denker, Sté́phane Ducasse
Smart contracts are embedded procedures stored with the data they act upon.Debugging deployed Smart Contracts is a difficult task since once deployed, the code cannot be reexecuted and inspecting a simple attribute is not easily possible because data is encoded.In this technical report, we present SmartInspect to address the lack of inspectability of a deployed contract.Our solution analyses the contract state by using decompilation techniques and a mirror-based architecture to represent the object responsible for interpreting the contract state.SmartInspect allows developers and also end-users of a contract to better visualize and understand the contract stored state without needing to redeploy, nor develop any ad-hoc code.
A mathematical model for smart contracts for deployment of the initial coin offering (ICO), widely used on the Ethereum platform, is proposed. The analysis of dependence of the network capacity on such parameters as the transaction buffer size, the average transaction processing time, is performed. Evaluations are obtained of which parameters have the greatest impact on the capacity of Ethereum within the developed model.
We present the first formalisation of a blockchain-based distributed consensus protocol with a proof of its consistency mechanised in an interactive proof assistant.