Ryan Michael Burke, Brett Reardon, Stephen Happel, William J. Boyes
Evolved by way of an anonymous programmer, Bitcoin is a global cryptocurrency and a machine for virtual currency.The transactions take location immediately among the users minus any intermediaries.Bitcoin is an awesome mode of exchange whilst in comparison to traditional banks.Those transactions are verified through network nodes and recorded in a public dispensed ledger called blockchain.The price of bitcoins are volatile i.e. they could unpredictably boom or lower over a quick time period.They are taken into consideration excessivedanger assets whose transactions can simplest be refunded and not reversed.The bitcoin came into life in January 2009, with Satoshi Nakamoto mined the primary block of bitcoins ever.Given that then, some of supporters engaged in transactions and acquired bitcoins.International locations round the world started out accepting bitcoin as a legitimate mode of currency like the United States.However, some countries like Djibouti haven't legalized yet the usage of this foreign money due to some of reasons.The targets of this paper are to understand the awareness about the existence of bitcoins, to evaluate the perception of bitcoin as the future currency and to research the possibility of legalization of bitcoins in Djibouti.
Central banking in an age of digital currencies is a fast-developing topic in monetary economics. Algorithmic digital currencies such as bitcoin appear to be viable competitors to central bank fiat currency, and their presence in the marketplace may pressure central banks to pursue tighter monetary policy. More interestingly, the blockchain technology behind digital currencies has the potential to improve central banks' payment and clearing operations, and possibly to serve as a platform from which central banks might launch their own digital currencies. A sovereign digital currency could have profound implications for the banking system, narrowing the relationship between citizens and central banks and removing the need for the public to keep deposits in fractional reserve commercial banks. Debates over the wisdom of these policies have led to a revival of interest in classical monetary economics.
Juan José Echevarria, Jon Legarda, Janire Larrañaga, Jonathan Ruiz-de-Garibay
Device-to-Device (D2D) communication enables devices in proximity to establish a wireless direct link. However, these devices may be severely constrained in terms of memory, CPU, and processing resources. Hence, a D2D communication with a constrained device implies new challenges as it does not have the resources required to be secured with standard cryptography. We propose lwAKE for class 0 devices (RFC 7228), which uses one-way cryptographic functions and zero-knowledge proofs to provide mutual authentication and a secure key establishment. We specify the protocol using the High Level Protocol Specification Language and then verify the security properties using the model checkers OFMC and CL-AtSe. The significance of the protocol stands in a key reuse for any successive authentication. Experimental results show that this shortened authentication mode reduces the computational load greatly.
<em>The growth of national economy encourages a significant change in the financial sector, especially a means of payment. Starting from the barter, the means then changes to be the goods or commodities, and finally the metal and paper as a raw material of money. The form of money as a means of payment continuously changes namely in the form of checks and transfer form that allow payment through transferring funds from the account balances among financial institutions, especially the banks. The economic need continuously grows so that it shifts the ways of trade transactions from conventional to internet based one that is known as e-commerce. One of the International online payment means required in an e-commerce transaction is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an electronic coin that uses a system of peer-to-peer network that is open source. Bitcoin is not a virtual coin and not the legal means of payment in Indonesia. The legal means in Indonesia is the rupiah. It has been described in Article 1 section (2) of Act No. 7 of 2011 on Currencies that the the coin used for payment transactions in Indonesia is the rupiah.</em>
The aim of this paper is to explore the influence of strategic planning in improving the quality of education. The quality of education is directly linked to the effort expended in making arrangements or preparations of educational objectives and determining the requisite resources to facilitate the training, instruction or study that leads to the acquisition of skills or knowledge. Education at secondary sector is of particular importance because it seeks to augment the general intellectual skills acquired at primary level, which are also relevant to any productive occupation including subsequent education. In Kenya, the Decentralized Education Management Activity initiated by the Ministry of Education in 2012 in partnership with USAID embarked on capacity development among education managers at the district and school level to enable them prepare and implement strategic plans. This notwithstanding, education at secondary level continues to experience unique challenges which are more often attributed to deficiencies in planning. Lack of emphasis on careful planning and implementation of plans could have implications for institutions in the current competitive environment. This paper is based on literature search on educational administrators' perceptions of strategic plans, formulation, implementation and their effects on the quality of education. From literature, the vital role of strategic planning in enhancing quality of education is underscored; evidently, some schools have strategic plans in spite of the constraints in their formulation. Strategic planning is viewed as a tool that enables stakeholders to increasingly contribute to the school's strategic objectives which result in long-term sustainability and improvement in quality of education.
Open access
Organizational Leadership and Management Strategies
Spain's Transition to Democracy set the stage for the organization of a national healthcare system. The adoption of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 was a political milestone that led to the recognition of every citizen's right to healthcare and the right of autonomy of the various regions that make up the Spanish State. The most distinctive characteristic of the healthcare model set up in those early years of political transition was the decentralization of the healthcare system which transferred political and administrative power on matters of public health to the 17 autonomous communities. It took more than 20 years to complete this decentralization process. This evaluative analysis will examine the pros and cons of decentralization. Due to the economic crisis and the election of a conservative government, the National Healthcare System is being seriously questioned, its very sustainability in doubt as reform measures are being taken that are considered a threat by many institutions and organizations to public welfare.
Bitcoin was recently introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic currency in order to facilitate transactions outside the traditional financial system. The core of Bitcoin, the Blockchain, is the history of the transactions in the system maintained by all nodes as a distributed shared register. New blocks in the Blockchain contain the last transactions in the system and are added by nodes (miners) after a block mining process that consists in solving a resource consuming proof-of-work (cryptographic puzzle). The reward is a motivation for mining process but also could be an incentive for attacks such as selfish mining. In this paper we propose a solution for one of the major problems in Bitcoin : selfish mining or block withholding attack. This attack is conducted by adversarial or selfish nodes in order to either earn undue rewards or waste the computational power of honest nodes. Contrary to recent solutions, our solution, ZeroBlock, prevents block withholding using a technique free of forgeable timestamps. Moreover, we show that our solution is also compliant with nodes churn.
By Riikka Koulu. As cross-border online transactions increase the issue of cross-border dispute resolution and enforcement becomes more and more topical. Disputes arising from e-commerce are seldom taken into the public courts and therefore online dispute resolution (ODR) is becoming a mainstream solution for resolving them. Simultaneously, different applications and possibilities of blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies have caught the attention of both computer scientists and legal scholars, increasingly gaining momentum. However, the potential of blockchains reach further than their use as a currency: they can be used for the decentralised execution of programmable contracts known as smart contracts, completely without the need for intermediaries like e-commerce sites, credit card companies or courts. These possibilities have not previously been discussed in relation to dispute resolution. This article provides an introduction to this new technological possibility by examining self-executing smart contracts that utilise novel blockchain technologies. To demonstrate the logic behind smart contracts more concretely, a weather bet (i.e. a bet on what the weather is going to be in a given location) is translated into a programmable smart contract and then discussed in lines of code with further explanations. In addition to this, the author suggests that smart contracts could also be employed for the purposes of dispute resolution, which might provide a solution for the problem of enforcing ODR decisions. Instead of normative analysis, the article provides an introductory analysis of the legal implications that the blockchain technology has outside its application as virtual currency.
Suncica Dimitrijoska, Svetlana Trbojevik, Наташа Богоевска, Vladimir Ilievski
The Republic of Macedonia experienced a rapid growth in drug addiction after its independents in 1991. The complexity of the problem represents a serious challenge for all relevant factors involved in creation of policies as well as actors in delivery of health, education and social services. Provision of necessary service required appropriate amendments of relevant laws based on the adopted international legislation. The most significant legal changes were introduction of the principles of pluralisation of social protection (Law on Social protection, 2004), that enabled emerging of new private for profit and nonprofit actors as providers of services as well as introduction of the principle of decentralization, enabling establishment of services on local level. Additionally, a number of national and local strategies and programs were developed and adopted within the system of health and social protection. These changes contributed to an increase in the number of available services offering variety of treatments responding to the individual needs of beneficiaries. Despite the increase in offered service, the state has yet to respond to the ever rising problem of addicted children. So far, little has been done for this age group of addicts that requires specialized and adjusted service provision. Provided social services are facing the problem in the sustainability of the available services provided within the nongovernmental sector that is mainly financed from foreign funds.
The subject of this paper is the constitutional and legal regulation of local self-government system in the Republic of Macedonia, territorial division, the process of reforming and building this system since the independence of the Republic of Macedonia from the former federation of Yugoslavia. With the intention of functioning and materialization according to democratic principles, since the independence of Macedonia the system of local self-government has undergone through continuous reform process. These reforms first of all are mostly related to the territorial division of local self-government units, seeking the most appropriate model which would be appropriate to the general developments of Macedonia. In this paper is analyzed the role and the constitutional and legal position of local self-government units, in this case the municipality, as the only unit of local self-government, its legal status, competences, representative and executive bodies, financing and the process of decentralization. It is also analyzed the model of organization of local self-government in the city of Skopje, as a capital of the Republic, in the form of community of municipalities in the city and the impact of the Ohrid Agreement on the regulation and functioning of local self-government in Macedonia.
This paper presents a comprehensive framework for the assessment of reliability and risk implications of post-fault Demand Response (DR) to provide capacity release in smart distribution networks. A direct load control (DLC) scheme is presented to efficiently disconnect DR customers with differentiated reliability levels. The cost of interrupted load is used as a proxy for the value of the differentiated reliability contracts for different customers to prioritize the disconnections. The framework tackles current distribution system operator (DSO)’s corrective actions such as network reconfiguration, emergency ratings and load shedding, also considering the physical payback effects from the DR customers’ reconnection. Sequential Monte Carlo simulation (SMCS) is used to quantify the risk borne by the DSO if contracting fewer DR customers than required by deterministic security standards. Numerical results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed DR scheme, when compared to the current DLC scheme applied from the local DSO. In addition, as a key point to boost the commercial implementation of such DR schemes, the results show how the required DR volume could be much lower than initially estimated when properly accounting for the actual risk of interruptions and for the possibility of deploying the asset emergency ratings. The findings of this work support the rationale of moving from the current prescriptive deterministic security standards to a probabilistic reliability assessment and planning approach applied to smart distribution networks, which also involves distributed energy resources such as post-contingency DR for network support.
The implementation of regional autonomy within the framework of decentralization is a complex and continuous work . In the early stages of decentralization , there is a transfer of various types of authority from the center to the various institutions , especially institutions subnational governments . After the transfer of authority will then be followed by the transfer of financing , documents and facilities . After the completion stages passed , does not mean the work has been completed . It appears a series of new challenges related to the ability of isntitusi who obtained the transfer of authority to manage it properly . Without good management , decentralization is precisely that for democracy , effectiveness , efficiency and fairness can not be achieved . It would appear the sources of inefficiency , ineffectiveness and new injustices in areas that can be a trigger for a second series of multidimensional crisis
The problem of revocation in anonymous authentication systems is subtle and has motivated a lot of work. One of the preferable solutions consists in maintaining either a whitelist LWof non-revoked users or a blacklist LBof revoked users, and then requiring users to additionally prove, when authenticating themselves, that they are in LW(membership proof) or that they are not in LB(non-membership proof). Of course, these additional proofs must not break the anonymity properties of the system, so they must be zero-knowledge proofs, revealing nothing about the identity of the users. In this paper, we focus on the RSA-based setting, and we consider the case of non-membership proofs to blacklists L = LB. The existing solutions for this setting rely on the use of universal dynamic accumulators; the underlying zero-knowledge proofs are bit complicated, and thus their efficiency; although being independent from the size of the blacklist L, seems to be improvable. Peng and Bao already tried to propose simpler and more efficient zero-knowledge proofs for this setting, but we prove in this paper that their protocol is not secure. We fix the problem by designing a new protocol, and formally proving its security properties. We then compare the efficiency of the new zero-knowledge non-membership protocol with that of the protocol, when they are integrated with anonymous authentication systems based on RSA (notably, the IBM product Idemix for anonymous credentials). We discuss for which values of the size k of the blacklist L, one protocol is preferable to the other one, and we propose different ways to combine and implement the two protocols.
The Spain state, unitary state is for years a reference for decentralization for several countries including Morocco wich now leads a project of reform and territorial organization. We want to return to the subject of decentralization and its relation to the democratic process in Spain.Obviously in the light evolution of this country and its constitution a remarkable evolution crowned by the accession to the European union with strong productive and autonomous regions.
Bitcoin is a virtual money and a new payment system which is not regulated by a central authority.Bitcoin became popular quickly and gained the ability of affecting the real economy.Being used extensively and seen as an investment tool, Bitcoin created its own market, users and investors.This study aims to shed light on Bitcoin market.To understand what Bitcoin is, the history of Bitcoin was summarized firstly and the Bitcoin system and how the protocol works was explained.Then Efficiency, Liquidity and Volatility of the Bitcoin Markets were analyzed.We concluded that the pricing of Bitcoin is too complicated; and the Bitcoin market is still vulnerable to many risks and speculation.
We are proposing two greedy and a new linear programming based approximation algorithm for the total positive influence dominating set problem in weighted networks. Applications of this problem in weighted settings include finding: a minimum cost set of nodes to broadcast a message in social networks, such that each node has majority of neighbours broadcasting that message; a maximum trusted set in bitcoin network; an optimal set of hosts when running distributed apps etc. Extensive experiments on different generated and real networks highlight advantages and potential issues for each algorithm.
Imagine being told that your wage was going to be cut in half. Well, that’s what’s soon going to happen to those who make money from Bitcoin mining, the process of earning the online currency Bitcoin.The current expected date for this change is 11 July 2016. Many see this as the day when Bitcoin prices will rocket and when Bitcoin owners could make a great deal of money. Others see it as the start of a Bitcoin crash. At present no one quite knows which way it will go.Bitcoin was created in 2009 by someone known as Satoshi Nakamoto, borrowing from a whole lot of research methods. It is a cryptocurrency, meaning it uses digital encryption techniques to create bitcoins and secure financial transactions. It doesn’t need a central government or organisation to regulate it, nor a broker to manage payments.Conventional currencies usually have a central bank that creates money and controls its supply. Bitcoin is instead created when individuals “mine” for it by using their computers to perform complex calculations through special software. The algorithm behind Bitcoin is designed to limit the number of bitcoins that can ever be created.All Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public database known as a blockchain. Every time someone mines for Bitcoin, it is recorded with a new block that is transmitted to every Bitcoin app across the network, like a bank updating its online records.
A little orange plastic dog just ran into my ear and the little bugger won't come out.I even offered him some beef jerky but he says he only eats mosquito paste so I've been sittin' around smashing up mosquitoes to coax this dog out of my ear and when I've finally got enough of this mosquito-mush mixed up the dog says he changed his mind about it and now he just wants some smack.I don't have any l tell him and he starts biting the inside of my ear and I'm afraid the little bastard's gonna make me go deaf 'cause he's barking too, so -I don't like to do it -but I go in after him with a Q-tip.He comes out looking like a little ball of earwax, but I can still make out the tail.When I was young I had a dog that died and I never got to bury him so I take the Q-tip and wipe the little orange ball with a tail off onto a Kleenex and put the Kleenex in a shoebox and bury the shoebox in the backyard .Then I stand over the burial mound and play "Taps" on my grandfather's old accordion.Then some motherfucker animal rights activist who is very well known for her hunger strikes to stop the extermination of cockroaches, and who was acquitted when she went on trial for killing a Terminex man with a flamethrower, gets wind of my method of little plastic dog removal and calls the ASPCA and PETA which both promptly send agents out to my apartment to flush me out using mustard gas.I don't know where they got the mustard gas -it was explicitly banned after WWI-but they had it and they used it and next thing I know I'm on my way to the PETA Animal Rights Violators' Concentration Camp where, if I don't cough up my lungs in big chunks from the mustard gas, I am slated to be hanged and then burned at the stake when they're through drawing and quartering me.Fortunately enough, I wasn't exposed to the gas long enough for it to be fatal, but I do have some pretty severe respiratory problems as I write this.And since the gas didn't kill me, the animal-friendlies sure wanted to.They had exhumed the little ball of plastic orange with a tail from my backyard grave as proof that I was a barbaric torturer of beings unable to defend themselves.They also got a testimony from the neighbors that I had played "Taps" on an accordion, a blatant mockery of the seriousness of the plastic dog's death.They were gonna string me up at high noon, cut me to pieces and start the fire by five after.Well, I ruined their little plans and here's how: My detainment quarters were swarming with ants.I just took a couple of real big ones with me to my execution.You have no idea what sort of negotiating tool a big ant between
We prove that for every 3-player (3-prover) game G with value less than one, whose query distribution has the support S = {(1,0,0), (0,1,0), (0,0,1)} of Hamming weight one vectors, the value of the n-fold parallel repetition G^{⊗n} decays polynomially fast to zero; that is, there is a constant c = c(G) > 0 such that the value of the game G^{⊗n} is at most n^{-c}. Following the recent work of Girish, Holmgren, Mittal, Raz and Zhan (STOC 2022), our result is the missing piece that implies a similar bound for a much more general class of multiplayer games: For every 3-player game G over binary questions and arbitrary answer lengths, with value less than 1, there is a constant c = c(G) > 0 such that the value of the game G^{⊗n} is at most n^{-c}. Our proof technique is new and requires many new ideas. For example, we make use of the Level-k inequalities from Boolean Fourier Analysis, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been explored in this context prior to our work.
In the Polish legal system, shares of local government units in state Personal Income Tax (PIT) falls into the category of the local government’s own revenues. Such assignment does not meet the basic attribute of the so-called decentralized taxes, which is the taxing power. The local authorities cannot affect the income tax revenue in this case, while at the same time they suffer financial consequences of amendments in the construction of this tax. In Poland, this issue, among other things, fueled a discussion on the need to reduce the dependence of local government units’ revenues on central tax decisions in the form of “local-governmentalization” of the Personal Income Tax and introduction of the so-called municipal (local) PIT. Not only does the article aim to present this concept, but also to identify potential advantages and risks connected with the possible introduction of municipal PIT in the Polish system of local finance.
This study is purposed to (1) determine the financial management performance of Keerom district, (2) effective and efficient in the financing the needs of the region. This research is a descriptive study describing and analyzing the data obtained. The object of this study is to measure the performance of financial management in Keerom district in terms of the ratio of financial independence area, Regional Financial Dependency Ratio, the ratio of fiscal decentralization, the effectiveness and efficiency ratios. Results of the analysis of the financial performance ratio in Keerom district in 2009-2013 shows that (1) the financial performance is not optimal yet in the implementation of regional autonomy, this is indicated by the indicator of financial performance, they are; Regional independence of Keerom district reached 3.22%, Regional Financial Dependence is very high towards the central government, it is reached 53.91%, and the Fiscal Decentralization is less, considering the financial dependence on the central government is very high at 16.44%. (2) effectiveness in managing local finance in Keerom district is Highly Effective since it reaches 95.11% and it needs to be maintained and improved, but the efficiency of financial management in this district shows the results of inefficient, it reaches 100.41%, then it needs special attention in order to avoid wastage in the use of finance to fund the development and the activity of other areas.
Bitcoin has demonstrated there are many security improvements applicable to normal currency. As the human race expands and we colonize other planets, we have to consider how we are going to extend integral parts of of society, and that includes our currency system. Information transferring does not scale well with very large distances, entirely due to physical limitations. For example, there is a maximum speed that any information can travel, and it cannot be faster than the speed of light. In this paper we take these physical limitations into account to give treatment to the following question. Can a single crypto-currency be used across the entire universe? Trivially many currencies can be used with exchange rates but we will try to avoid this as our solution. The idea of this paper was inspired by a paper titled "The Theory of Interstellar Trade" by Paul Krugman, a Nobel Economist.