The digital currency Bitcoin has had remarkable growth since it was first proposed in 2008. Its distributed nature allows currency transactions without a central authority by using cryptographic methods and a data structure called the blockchain. In this paper we use the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics to introduce Quantum Bitcoin, a Bitcoin-like currency that runs on a quantum computer. We show that our construction of quantum shards and two blockchains allows untrusted peers to mint quantum money without risking the integrity of the currency. The Quantum Bitcoin protocol has several advantages over classical Bitcoin, including immediate local verification of transactions. This is a major improvement since we no longer need the computationally intensive and time-consuming method Bitcoin uses to record all transactions in the blockchain. Instead, Quantum Bitcoin only records newly minted currency which drastically reduces the footprint and increases efficiency. We present formal security proofs for counterfeiting resistance and show that a quantum bitcoin can be re-used a large number of times before wearing out - just like ordinary coins and banknotes. Quantum Bitcoin is the first distributed quantum money system and we show that the lack of a paper trail implies full anonymity for the users. In addition, there are no transaction fees and the system can scale to any transaction volume.
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable example of such a cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, which is primarily mined using application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) based machines. Due to the supposed profitability of cryptocurrency mining, such hardware has been in great demand in recent years, in-spite of high associated costs like electricity. In this work, we show that because mining rewards are given in the mined cryptocurrency, while expenses are usually paid in some fiat currency such as the United States Dollar (USD), cryptocurrency mining is in fact a bundle of financial options. When exercised, each option converts electricity to tokens. We provide a method of pricing mining hardware based on this insight, and prove that any other price creates arbitrage. Our method shows that contrary to the popular belief that mining hardware is worth less if the cryptocurrency is highly volatile, the opposite effect is true: volatility increases value. Thus, if a coin's volatility decreases, some miners may leave, affecting security. We compare the prices produced by our method to prices obtained from popular tools currently used by miners and show that the latter only consider the expected returns from mining, while neglecting to account for the inherent risk in mining, which is due to the high exchange-rate volatility of cryptocurrencies. Finally, we show that the returns made from mining can be imitated by trading in bonds and coins, and create such imitating investment portfolios. Historically, realized revenues of these portfolios have outperformed mining, showing that indeed hardware is mispriced.
Current regulation of decentralized ledger technology leaves industry actors in confusion, facing high risk, and confronting significant disincentives to innovate. This Article argues that an endogenous regulatory approach offers an avenue for alleviating these obstacles while still providing sufficient tools for government oversight. In particular, this Article proposes regulation that is endogenous at two levels: first, in that it is created through an iterative, cooperative process involving both regulators and industry actors, and second, that it is implemented as regulation-through-code, that is, regulation written into the code itself. In so doing, this Article also investigates whether successful implementation of such an approach could disrupt the dichotomous choice between ex ante and ex post regulation in the financial and other spheres. This Article first examines the current regulatory landscape facing decentralized ledger technologies, including payments applications such as bitcoin. This Article then discusses ways in which these regulatory approaches have failed to keep pace with the technology and, as a result, are impeding innovation in a variety of sectors. This Article next outlines criteria for improving the regulatory landscape applicable to decentralized ledger technologies, evaluating alternative models of regulation in light of the criteria, and concluding that most such proposals continue to leave a regulatory lacunae. Drawing on theories of endogenous economic regulation, endogenous development, comparative law’s functional method and financial regulation, this Article attempts to fill the gap by proposing that decentralized technologies, including decentralized payment systems such as bitcoin, are robust enough to support a theory of endogenous, technology-assisted regulation.
<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In Bitcoin system, transactions are prioritized according to transaction fees. Transactions without fees are given low priority and likely to wait for confirmation. Because the demand of micro payment in Bitcoin is expected to increase due to low remittance cost, it is important to quantitatively investigate how transactions with small fees of Bitcoin affect the transaction-confirmation time. In this paper, we analyze the transaction-confirmation time by queueing theory. We model the transaction-confirmation process of Bitcoin as a priority queueing system with batch service, deriving the mean transaction-confirmation time. Numerical examples show how the demand of transactions with low fees affects the transaction-confirmation time. We also consider the effect of the maximum block size on the transaction-confirmation time.
The high volatility in financial markets in developing and developed countries increases investors interest in new forms of investment assets. One of these forms are cryptocurrency and the most common of them -Bitcoin. The article examines the attractive features of virtual currency and crypto-technology. The article presents the statistical and comparative analysis of the spread and use of Bitcoin. The article identifies the threats and risks arising from the decentralization of the payment system.
Open access
Economic and Technological Developments in Russia
Economic Development and Digital Transformation
Economic, Social, and Public Health Issues in Russia and Globally
When a dangerously mentally ill person is in need of in-patient psychiatric hospitalization, the apparatus for involuntary civil commitment goes into motion. As a result, a mentally ill person can be confined against his or her will, to remain in the hospital indefinitely. The mentally ill person’s freedom depends on the outcome of a single hearing. The civil commitment process raises a number of legal questions: What are the constitutional protections against self-incrimination and the right to remain silent? Who presides over the hearing? Do the rules of evidence apply, specifically hearsay? Is the burden of proof standard by the preponderance of evidence, clear and convincing, or beyond a reasonable doubt? Should the mentally ill person have the right to an independent evaluation of his or her psychiatric condition to contest the view of the hospital psychiatrist? Is the adversarial hearing process best suited to address the need for in-patient hospitalization? Should legal guardians and those designated as power of attorney be given the authority to voluntarily admit a patient into a psychiatric hospital? This Article will explore the current involuntary civil commitment process for confining a mentally ill and dangerous person in a psychiatric hospital. A criminal defendant is often guaranteed greater protections than a mentally ill person facing involuntary civil commitment. As a person’s freedom is at stake, the serious nature of confinement warrants a critical review of how we address the need for psychiatric treatment of our dangerously mentally ill. Part I will examine the government’s power to confine a mentally ill person and the minimum due process safeguards for involuntary admission. Part II will explore the applicability of the constitutional right to remain silent in civil commitment proceedings. Part III will discuss the authority of mental health professionals to testify at the civil commitment hearings and consider issues of privileged communication. Parts IV and V will look at issues pertaining to the rules of evidence, ranging from the burden of proof to hearsay evidence as heard by the hearing judge. Parts VI and VII will analyze respectively the right to an independent psychiatric evaluation and alternative procedures to resolve the determination of the need for hospitalization. Part VIII will address the rights of others to consent to voluntary hospitalization of a mentally ill person, including guardians, persons with power of attorney, and parents of minor persons. Part IX will make recommendations for improving the involuntary civil confinement process. This Article provides an analysis of the current system and practical, concrete suggestions for improving the involuntary civil confinement process through the eyes of the attorney representing the mentally ill client facing involuntary psychiatric hospitalization.
In Bitcoin system, transactions are prioritized according to attributes such as the remittance amount and transaction fees, and transactions with low priority are likely to wait for confirmation. Because the demand of micro payment in Bitcoin is expected to increase due to low remittance cost, it is important to quantitatively investigate how the priority mechanism of Bitcoin affects the transaction-confirmation time. In this paper, we analyze the transaction-confirmation time by queueing theory. We model the transaction priority mechanism of Bitcoin as a priority queueing system with batch service, deriving the mean transaction-confirmation time. Numerical examples show how the demand of transactions of low remittance amount affects the transaction-confirmation time. We also consider the effect of the maximum block size on the transaction-confirmation time.
Studies of resilience highlight the tension between actions that allow a firm – and a system – to be robust and those that allows it to be flexible. Studies suggest that an entrepreneurial firm will prioritize flexibility, given resource constraints. However, what occurs when a number of firms are embedded in a common socio-technical system and an extreme event affects them collectively? This paper tests whether existing theory about resilience predicts the responses of entrepreneurs in such a system, with reference to an extreme event in the Bitcoin socio-technical system: the much-publicized bankruptcy of Mt.Gox, a key player. It relies on in-depth interviews with 8 entrepreneurs in Europe, triangulated with other data. We find that robustness is the dominant strategy for those interviewed. This is partly because the firms rely on pooled resources supplied by the collective, and partly because robustness builds trust, giving the firms a competitive advantage.
Alexia Maddox, Supriya Singh, Heather A. Horst, Greg Adamson
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are a recent socio-technical innovation that seeks to disrupt the existing monetary system. Through mundane uses of this new digital cash, they provide a social critique of the centralized infrastructures of the banking industry. This paper outlines an ethnographic research agenda for this new digital frontier of social practice and exchange and the human affordances of engaging with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Firstly we argue that the use of Bitcoin can be seen as acts of social resistance and a form of social mobility that harnesses the emergent, serendipitous and dynamic properties of digital community. We then outline the disruptive nature of borderless, affordable and instantaneous international transfers within social practice. Finally, we identify the possible permutations of trust that may be found in the technical affordances of Bitcoin and how these relate to user (pseudo)anonymity, cybertheft, cyberfraud, and consumer protection. Bringing together these three key areas we highlight the importance of understanding the ordinary (rather than extra-ordinary) uses of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We contend that focusing upon users interactions with Bitcoin as a system and culture will shed light upon mundane acts of socio-technical disruption, acts that critique and provide alternative financial exchange practices to the economic and regulatory financial infrastructures of the centralised banking industry.
Quantum information and computation provide a fascinating twist on the notion of proofs in computational complexity theory. For instance, one may consider a quantum computational analogue of the complexity class NP, known as QMA, in which a quantum state plays the role of a proof (also called a certificate or witness), and is checked by a polynomial-time quantum computation. For some problems, the fact that a quantum proof state could be a superposition over exponentially many classical states appears to offer computational advantages over classical proof strings. In the interactive proof system setting, one may consider a verifier and one or more provers that exchange and process quantum information rather than classical information during an interaction for a given input string, giving rise to quantum complexity classes such as QIP, QSZK, and QMIP* that represent natural quantum analogues of IP, SZK, and MIP. While quantum interactive proof systems inherit some properties from their classical counterparts, they also possess distinct and uniquely quantum features that lead to an interesting landscape of complexity classes based on variants of this model. In this survey we provide an overview of many of the known results concerning quantum proofs, computational models based on this concept, and properties of the complexity classes they define. In particular, we discuss non-interactive proofs and the complexity class QMA, single-prover quantum interactive proof systems and the complexity class QIP, statistical zero-knowledge quantum interactive proof systems and the complexity class QSZK, and multiprover interactive proof systems and the complexity classes QMIP, QMIP*, and MIP*.
The main goal of this present essay was to exam Minas Gerais government ability in the development and consolidation of social assistance policy as facing its legal and constitutional competences. Federal constitution of 1988 redefined the Brazilian federal system and reformulated all social policies, including social assistance as one of the pillars of social security. The decentralization was established as the structuring heart of the new federative arrangement which cares about the redistribution of competences, functions and resources between federal unities. The decentralization´s implementation of social policies in the context of Brazilian federation rebirth is not something simplistic and it depends on difficult compatibility in the beings autonomy, with the need of politic coordination and interdependence among them. In case of social assistance there is an extra challenge: to consolidate itself effectively as a policy of public responsibility. The existence of competences in common modified the intergovernmental relations as in the this areas the success of the public policies promotion depends on frequent pacts and collaboration among the three levels of government. In this context, the intention is to verify the intergovernmental relations established in the process of decentralization and institutionalization of social assistance policies in Minas Gerais, aiming the role of the government of Minas Gerais as facing the poverty, vulnerability and inequalities, after the restructuration of unique system of social assistance - SUAS in 2005. For this reason it was made a exploratory study about the asymmetries among Minas Gerais areas, the organizational structure of the state´s manager part of social assistance, the implementation of the net in the area of services, the municipalization of the policy through the process of habilitation of the cities in management of the SUAS and the expansion of the net of basic social protection and special in Minas Gerais. It was analyzed as well the process of financing social assistance of the state (own resources investment and traference for the co financing) because the financial effort done by federate being reflects , clearly its own politic priorities. The results point to a weak actuation of Minas Gerais government to accomplish its competences which is a determining factor that makes the social assistance of Minas Gerais incapable to face poverty in the constitutional perspective of social citizenship and to provide a highest level of equity and better conditions of life for its people.
Oriane Blondel, Patrícia Gonçalves, Marielle Simon
In this paper we prove the convergence to the stochastic Burgers equation\nfrom one-dimensional interacting particle systems, whose dynamics allow the\ndegeneracy of the jump rates. To this aim, we provide a new proof of the second\norder Boltzmann-Gibbs principle introduced in [Gon\\c{c}alves, Jara 2014]. The\nmain technical difficulty is that our models exhibit configurations that do not\nevolve under the dynamics - the blocked configurations - and are locally\nnon-ergodic. Our proof does not impose any knowledge on the spectral gap for\nthe microscopic models. Instead, it relies on the fact that, under the\nequilibrium measure, the probability to find a blocked configuration in a\nfinite box is exponentially small in the size of the box. Then, a dynamical\nmechanism allows to exchange particles even when the jump rate for the direct\nexchange is zero.\n
Alexander Chepurnoy, Mario Larangeira, Alexander Ojiganov
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Usefulness of the mining process requiring a lot of computational resources to be wasted, though, remains disputable. One of possible alternatives for useful Proof-of-Work schemes, Permacoin, is using non-interactive proofs of a static dataset retrievability thus providing a mechanism to store a huge dataset being spread across miners collectively.
In this paper we present a new consensus protocol for Bitcoin-like peer-to-peer systems, where the right to generate a block is given to the party which provides non-interactive proofs of retrievability for the past state snapshots. This Proof-of-Work scheme has better resistance to specialized hardware than Bitcoin and Permacoin. Unlike blockchain systems being used today, a network using the protocol of ours is safe if majority of nodes are rational in terms of storing full blocks. By using that we also show that one useful application of our protocol is the construction of a prunable blockchain system without a security loss.
Alexander Chepurnoy, Mario Larangeira, Alexander Ojiganov
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and other blockchain systems of today by repurposing their work. First, space to store a blockchain is growing linearly with number of transactions. Second, a honest node is forced to be irrational regarding storing full blocks by a way implementations are done. Third, a trustless bootstrapping process for a new node involves downloading and processing all the transactions ever written into a blockchain. In this paper we present a new consensus protocol for Bitcoin-like peer-to-peer systems where a right to generate a block is given to a party providing non-interactive proofs of storing a subset of the past state snapshots. Unlike the blockchain systems in use today, a network using our protocol is safe if the nodes prune full blocks not needed for mining. We extend the GKL model to describe our Proof-of-Work scheme and a transactional model modifications needed for it. We provide a detailed analysis of our protocol and proofs of its security.
Business support services are internal services required by various business units within a company to support their operations and meet their strategic business objectives.The strategies for sourcing, structuring and governance of business support services depend on the nature of work being performed and who is being served.In recent decades, companies have been using various service delivery models, such as decentralization, centralization, shared services, offshoring and outsourcing to deliver these services.Through these models of service delivery companies manage their business support services not only as stand-alone functions but also as sub-functions such as payroll, general ledger accounting, accounts payable, employee services and purchasing, which are carried out within the departments of Finance, HR, IT, Supply Chain Management and Facilities Management.These sub-functions within functions deliver services such as payment of employees, bookkeeping, payment of vendors, employee records and processing of purchase orders.Business support services are internal services that are required by various business units within a company.These internal services, in turn, support the company's operations in meeting the company's strategic business objectives.The models applied to deliver these services have changed significantly.Current models include decentralization, centralization, shared services, offshoring and
"The article analyzes the potential uses of cryptocurrency as collateral in Article 9 secured transactions. At present, there is no clear guidance as to what status, if any, cryptocurrency has as collateral under Article 9. This paper briefly defines cryptocurrency, explains how it functions in its various forms, and shows why it would behoove lenders to utilize cryptocurrency as collateral. The current regulatory efforts over cryptocurrency are discussed to provide some context, through which the proposed actions and revisions of Article 9 are viewed. Finally, this paper recommends how cryptocurrency can be used as collateral under Article 9 under the current system, suggests possible revisions or explanatory notes which can be added to Article 9 to provide clearer guidance for policymakers and lenders alike."
I INTRODUCTION The principle of subsidiarity has a logic of legitimacy that strives to allocate responsibility at the national level in order to bring decisionmaking closer to those affected by it. Legitimacy is not the only reason for allocating competence to the national level. In some cases, such as the United Nations Security Council's (UNSC) schemes to prevent terrorist financing and the proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear (CBN) weapons, decisions about where to allocate responsibility are made for reasons of effectiveness. Treating these security threats as weakest-link goods, (1) the UNSC has aimed to decenter the administration of collective security away from itself by harnessing individual nation-states so as to create a completely regulated international sphere in which terrorists and proliferators are starved of means and opportunities to perpetrate attacks. In pursuit of this goal, the UNSC has sought to create shared frameworks for action by carving out a new quasi-legislative power. In an attempt to quell criticism of this move, the UNSC reassured states that they will retain national control over the implementation of their obligations, thereby satisfying the principle of subsidiarity. In effect, however, subsidiarity has been sidelined by the UNSC's strategy of implementation. The UNSC's strategy employs disciplinary power to generate an infra-law at the level of technical detail and to normalize states according to it. (2) Discipline shares the UNSC's logic of effectiveness and subsidiarity's preference for national responsibility, but it operates below the surface of the formal law and out of the reach of subsidiarity. It offers a notion of national responsibility shorn of national control. The argument proceeds as follows. Subsidiarity's logic of legitimacy is briefly considered in part II, which concentrates on the logic of effectiveness underlying the UNSC's schemes. The disparity between the open-textured norms on the face of the UNSC's quasi-legislative resolutions and the disciplinary work of its subsidiary bodies is the focus of part III. The Financial Action Task Force's (FATF) recommendations on money laundering and terrorist financing are shown to constitute disciplinary infra-law of the legislative resolutions in part IV, which also offers an illustration of discipline's negative effect on national control. A. Logics of Effectiveness and Legitimacy Whereas the principle of subsidiarity has a logic of legitimacy, the UNSC's approach to the prevention of terrorist financing and CBN proliferation has a logic of effectiveness. These logics are incompatible. The UNSC's reasoning is totalizing; it treats the international realm as a bounded space that transnational threats cannot escape as they can the boundaries of nation-states. If this bounded space can be controlled, then, the logic continues, it may be possible to deprive terrorists and proliferators of the conditions they need to succeed, such as financial support, manpower, open borders, lax import-export controls, and corrupt or incompetent criminal-justice systems. The Council has framed the problem of preventing these threats as a weakest link good that makes every gap, deficiency, and malpractice a potential, however remote, impediment to achieving a totally regulated space and thereby preventing international terrorism and CBN proliferation. (3) Achieving this in practice is no easy task. The UNSC cannot regulate the international realm on its own, as it is dependent on UN member states to carry out its decisions. (4) Given this setup and the UNSC's unrepresentative post-World War II composition, it has adopted a strategy of using UN member states as nodes in a decentralized scheme of administering the entire international-- not global--space. Total regulation of aspects of this space is needed to deprive terrorists and proliferators of means of operation and opportunities to operate. …
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin specific application specific integrated circuits and centralized mining pools, undermining the decentralized motivations behind Bitcoin's design. In addition, the imminent block reward halving threatens the profitability of mining at any scale. Some work has been done in formal models for miner profitability, but existing models do not account for conditions such as the pricing of off-peak power and diverse investment strategies regarding sunken costs. There is also a lack of formal study of how the profit model changes as mining scales from the individual to the industrial level. Given the lack of analysis of these conditions, there are alternative models for profitable or net zero mining that operate at smaller, and therefore more desirable, scale.
Botnet phenomenon in smartphones is evolving with the proliferation in mobile phone technologies after leaving imperative impact on personal computers. It refers to the network of computers, laptops, mobile devices or tablets which is remotely controlled by the cybercriminals to initiate various distributed coordinated attacks including spam emails, ad-click fraud, Bitcoin mining, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), disseminating other malwares and much more. Likewise traditional PC based botnet, Mobile botnets have the same operational impact except the target audience is particular to smartphone users. Therefore, it is import to uncover this security issue prior to its widespread adaptation. We propose SMARTbot, a novel dynamic analysis framework augmented with machine learning techniques to automatically detect botnet binaries from malicious corpus. SMARTbot is a component based off-device behavioral analysis framework which can generate mobile botnet learning model by inducing Artificial Neural Networks' back-propagation method. Moreover, this framework can detect mobile botnet binaries with remarkable accuracy even in case of obfuscated program code. The results conclude that, a classifier model based on simple logistic regression outperform other machine learning classifier for botnet apps' detection, i.e 99.49% accuracy is achieved. Further, from manual inspection of botnet dataset we have extracted interesting trends in those applications. As an outcome of this research, a mobile botnet dataset is devised which will become the benchmark for future studies.
This Note will undertake to analyze bitcoin under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) and the Internal Revenue Code (IRC)—two important sources of commercial law—to see whether any existing asset categories adequately protect bitcoin’s commercial viability. This Note will demonstrate that although commercial law dictates that bitcoin should—nay must—be regulated as a currency in order to sustain its existence, the very definition of currency seems to preclude that from happening. Therefore, this Note will recommend that we experiment with a new type of asset that receives currency-like treatment, specifically designed for cryptocurrencies, under which bitcoin can be categorized in order to preserve its commercial feasibility and to give legal regulatory clarity.