Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource allocation in Germany. Bitcoin is a digital, decentralized, partially anonymous currency, not backed by German or any government or other legal entity, and not redeemable for gold or other commodities. Bitcoin relies on peer-to-peer networking and cryptography to maintain its integrity. Compared to most currencies or online payment services, such as PayPal, bitcoins are highly liquid, have low transaction costs, and can be used to make micropayments in Germany. Although the Bitcoin economy is flourishing, Bitcoin users are anxious about Bitcoin’s legal status. This paper examines a few relevant legal issues. The research question is to investigate how supplementary digital terminating currency Bitcoin can provide a superior fallback position as e-gold standard in Germany and worldwide. Digital self-liquidating e-Gold ounce could be distributed immediately to voters by using swipe cards used by some governments for transit facilities. Bitcoins as e-Gold ounce do not provide a viable medium of exchange because of the cost of their purchase, creation and/or exchange.
The virginity test as a practise stretching back to at least the Middle Ages has, in recent western popular discourse, been firmly connected with cultures in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Its appearance, then, in the western-authored sheikh romance is not entirely surprising. This chapter explores the representation of the virginity test in English Orientalist romances from two distinct historical moments: the late Middle Ages and the twenty-first century. This cross-period approach takes a long view of the virginity test, considering how current romance ideologies contrast with those of medieval romance. It antagonises exactly what is at stake in persistent reference to the virginity test in romance literature, focusing on their articulations of certainty and uncertainty, loss and possession. Through close readings of six popular sheikh romances featuring virgin heroines published by the genre’s biggest publisher, Harlequin Mills & Boon – Lynne Graham’s The Arabian Mistress (2001), Lucy Monroe’s The Sheikh’s Bartered Bride (2004), Penny Jordan’s Possessed by the Sheikh (2005), Sarah Morgan’s The Sultan’s Virgin Bride (2006), Lynne Graham’s The Desert Sheikh's Captive Wife (2007) and Chantelle Shaw’s At the Sheikh’s Bidding (2008) – alongside two popular English medieval romances – Bevis of Hampton (c.1300) and Floris and Blancheflur (c.1250) – the chapter considers how the test is positioned in each text and what this reveals about the importance of virginity. To put the testing in context, I first offer a brief overview of virginity testing in European culture. Next, I examine the role virginity plays in these romances, outlining their narrative importance. I then move to a focus on the test itself, indicating how testing for virginity is, in these romances, inherently unstable. In the two medieval romances, virginity test can be manipulated, highlighting the unreliability of the test to prove virginity. In sheikh romance, the ultimate virginity test for heroines is penetrative sex with the hero. Therefore, the moment at which the sheikh realises the heroine is a virgin is precisely the moment she ceases to be a virgin; any proof of virginity identified by penetration during a sex act can only be retrospective. Encoded in the very basis of the sex act as virginity test, then, is a fundamental ambiguity; as Kelly argues, ‘in the end, all tests for verifying virginity are inherently flawed’ (2000, 18). Yet while these retrospective, liminal tests might not be reliable as clear indicators of virginity, they do indicate what is at stake in the ‘loss’ of female virginity; ultimately, testing for virginity functions to secure male ownership of women as part of the romance genre’s celebration of a heteronormative gender system within which virginity is valued.
The world is complex. So too is human development. I know of no scientist, within or outside the field of developmental science, who would dispute these obvious points. Differences among scientists exist, however, in regard to how complexity is treated.At this writing, there are two prominent approaches to treating the complexity of human development. One approach embraces it, including complexity as a defining feature of the developmental process. As explained with nuance, insight, and eloquence by Witherington and Lickliter [this issue, pp. 200-234], the other approach reduces the complexity of development to changes that merely express, or that fail to express, information that exists prior to a given organism even being conceived.The latter approach is an essentialist formulation.1 Complexity is in essence explained away through ideas that reduce higher (and more complex) levels of organization to a fundamental level (in this case, a gene). The essentialist proposal is that the to-be-reduced-to element comprises the unit of analysis existing at the fundamental or ultimate level of analysis (i.e., the one that explains development). Examples of such formulations in developmental science are the stimulus-response (S-R) connections to which complex human behavior (e.g., cognitive development, language development, moral development) was said to be able to be reduced [e.g., Bijou & Baer, 1961; Skinner, 1971], fixed action patterns (FAPs) [Lorenz, 1965], genes per se [e.g., Belsky, 2014; Plomin, Defries, Knopik, & Neiderhiser, 2016; Rimfeld, Ayorech, Dale, Kovas, & Plomin, 2016; Rushton, 2000], or constructions termed “evolved probabilistic cognitive mechanisms” (EPCMs) that are said to reside in genes by proponents of evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) [e.g., Bjorklund, 2015; Bjorklund & Ellis, 2005; del Giudice & Ellis, 2016]. As explained by Witherington and Lickliter [2016], the argument of EDP proponents has been that these entities control the parameters of the higher levels of organization. The role in human development of these higher levels is only to manage the expression or release of the information contained in the essential level. In short, in the essentialist approach there is a Cartesian-like split between the ultimate cause of development - pre-organism-existing information, shaped by evolution (phylogeny) and inserted into the organism at conception through the content of a gene - and the instantiation of the information, which depends on the vicissitudes of everyday life, the ebb and flow of relations between the organism, and its context across ontogeny [Witherington & Lickliter, 2016]. In turn, however, in the approach that embraces complexity (and does not reduce it to an essentialist entity), the process of development itself is the source of structure and function of the organism; there is no preexisting information split off from the developmental process and no essential level of organization to which complex higher levels are to be reduced [Witherington & Lickliter, 2016]. As explained by Witherington and Lickliter, this approach is associated with a relational developmental systems (RDS) metatheory, which is derived from what Overton [2015] terms a process-relational paradigm.Overton [2015] explains that, compared to a Cartesian worldview, the process-relational paradigm focuses on process (systematic changes in the developmental system), becoming (moving from potential to actuality; a developmental process as having a past, present, and future [Whitehead, 1929/1978]), holism (the meanings of entities and events derive from the context in which they are embedded), relational analysis (assessment of the mutually influential relations within the developmental system), and the use of multiple perspectives and explanatory forms (employment of ideas from multiple theory-based models of change within and of the developmental system) in understanding human development. Within the process-relational paradigm, the organism is seen as inherently active, self-creating (autopoietic), self-organizing, self-regulating (agentic), adaptive, and nonlinear/complex [Overton, 2015; see also Sokol, Hammond, Kuebli, & Sweetman, 2015]. In turn, within the RDS approach to theory, split conceptions are eschewed in favor of a metatheoretical emphasis on the study and integration of different levels of organization, ranging from biology/physiology to culture and history, as a means to understand life span human development [Lerner, 2006, 2012, 2015; Overton, 2013, 2015]. Accordingly, the conceptual emphasis in RDS theories is placed on mutually influential relations between individuals and contexts across ontogeny, represented as individual ↔ context relations. Witherington and Lickliter emphasize that the concept of emergence is of fundamental importance in understanding the RDS approach and its difference with essentialist approaches, such as EDP [e.g., Bjorklund, 2015; Bjorklund & Ellis, 2005; del Giudice & Ellis, 2016). I agree. Specifically, a fundamental idea in the EDP approach is that there are entities, EPCMs, that exist before the organism and frame its development (with ontogeny just determining what is placed within the frame - much like a building contractor frames one's house but the owners of the house fill in the frame by acting to select paint colors, appliances, floor coverings, etc.). In contrast, and as also emphasized by Witherington and Lickliter [2016; see also Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2015; Mascolo, 2013; Overton, 2015; van Geert & Fischer, 2009; Witherington, 2011, 2015], Raeff [2016, pp. 12-13] explains that in the RDS-based view: Behavior emerges out of interrelations among “ongoing processes intrinsic to the system” [Lewis, 2000, p. 38]. Claiming that human functioning emerges through interrelations among intrinsic constituent processes means that one does not have to involve external, antecedent, or independent factors to explain what people do. In addition, the concept of emergence stands in explicit contrast to any conceptualization of behavior and development as predesigned or predestined by, for example, genetics or how the brain is “hardwired.” Rather, what a person does emerges, or is always coming into being, through the ongoing dynamics of constituent processes.In short, at this writing developmental science includes two very different approaches to the complexity of the integrated, multilevel, interrelated changes that everyone within the field agrees characterize human ontogeny. What are we to make of these two approaches? Are both useful frames for the study of human development? If so, then how should research proceed? If not, why? And again, how should research about human development proceed?Given the features of the essentialist and the RDS approaches that Witherington and Lickliter [2016] explain in careful detail and that I have summarized, a key question must be addressed in evaluating their respective usefulness: are the characteristics of an individual (a) features deriving from the constituent processes of the developmental system or are they (b) an outcome of the developmental system acting on something that preexists and that merely awaits expression, should the organism happen to grow up in an environment “typical” of its species? From an EDP perspective, del Giudice and Ellis [2016] contend that “while [sic] evolved mechanisms prepare an organism for life in a species-typical environment, they are not preformed or specified in advance by a rigid genetic program” (p. 7).But where do these “mechanisms” exist and in what form? From an essentialist perspective, they must exist prior to the existence of the organism that houses them during its ontogeny. Presumably these mechanisms must be located in the gametes of parents. But how did the information or process constituted by these “mechanisms” come to reside in the gametes? This information or material - or whatever it is - must have come through the germ line of the parents' parents (so we are now going to the grandparental generation for an answer to the question of the origin of the EPCMs in the development of a given, “target” individual). But the same question continues to be needed to be asked of this grandparent generation, of the one prior to it, and so on through an infinite regress that keeps the question being pushed further back in history without any definitive empirical verification. Because of this infinite regress, EDP sets up an argument that cannot be falsified by any developmental data pertinent to a target individual's life span, because there always has to be an appeal made to a former generation as the source of the “whatever.” Moreover, the idea of this whatever - for the purposes of illustration let me label is, say, a homunculus - can only pertain to something that could actually exist if genes and context are split entities and, as such, if genes were then conceived of as entities that contained the homunculus, and, as well, if modern work in biology pertaining to epigenetics was irrelevant [e.g., Lester, Conradt, & Marsit, 2016; Meaney, 2010; Moore, 2015]. Of course, in such a formulation, the homunculus could only be released if the gene was turned on sufficiently, and here proponents of EDP claim that, for such an occurrence, for the homunculus to be instantiated, the “correct” context, a species-typical one, needs to be present for at least some (unspecified) portion of ontogeny [e.g., again, see del Giudice & Ellis, 2016, p. 7]. But here lie problems of circularity of reasoning becoming coupled with an argument already fatally flawed by the use of the unfalsifiable postulation of an infinite regress: if one sees the homunculus, then it must be the case that there was a species-typical environment, because there would be no other way for the homunculus to appear. And if one does not see the homunculus, then it must be that it is absent because there was not a species-typical environment within which the organism developed. Ironically, the postulation of the existence of this prior-to-being homunculus cannot be falsified by any direct empirical evidence pertinent to the purported evolutionary (phylogenetic) history that created it. Phylogeny is not studied and, instead, reference is made to an unassessed ontogenetic history that is inferred to have existed because of the presence or absence of some behaviors that are claimed to reflect the also-never-assessed evolutionary history. Indeed, it is ironic that the only recourse proponents of EDP have to prove their phylogenetic case is to appeal to an ontogenetic developmental process that is regarded by them to have no ultimate causal efficacy, but only the capacity to facilitate the expression of an entity caused by a phylogenetic process! The morass of logical problems and appeals to impossible-to-document histories makes the cornerstone idea of EDP - EPCMs - as useful a scientific concept as is the homunculus label I have applied to it.Importantly, developmental science has been subjected to these problematic formulations before the advent of EDP. That is, the logical and empirical shortcomings of the EDP concept of EPCMs are comparable to the fatal flaws associated with the other formulations of essentialist thinking in developmental science that I noted earlier in this article. All of these formulations become counterfactual because of not being able to marshal the empirical evidence that is needed to support their claims about scientific usefulness. For instance, for the nurture reductionism of Skinner [e.g., 1971] to work as a comprehensive explanation of the behavior of organisms [Skinner, 1938], there must be an S for every R. However, as pointed out by Bowers [1973], one of the key reasons that Skinner's approach fails is the problem of the missing S. Simply, research has failed to identify an S (i.e., a discriminative stimulus, which has the status of a secondary reinforcing stimulus) for every R that exists. Yet, such an S is stipulated by Skinner to be needed to elicit operant behavior. If such stimuli are the cause of operant behavior in any given situation, then how can empiricists hold that the S-R formulation (SD-R-SR) is useful when there are so many R s for which there are no S s to be seen? They cannot. As such, the radical behaviorism of Skinner [e.g., 1938, 1971] is reduced to a view that must be accepted on the basis of faith (that there must have been an S somewhere) and not on empirical evidence.The concept of the FAP formulated by Lorenz [1937a, b, 1965] is an example of a nature essentialist formulation, one which is similar to the EPCMs postulated by proponents of EDP [e.g., Bjorklund, 2015; Bjorklund & Ellis, 2005; del Giudice & Ellis, 2016]. Oddly, these EDP proponents are either unaware of this similarity or have elected to not note it because of the several logical and empirical problems with Lorenz's concept or, perhaps as well, because of Lorenz's own history of problems with his use of nativist ideas [e.g., see Lerner, 1992]. In any case, Lorenz [1937a, b, 1965] used the FAP to illustrate his concept of instinct, which he claimed was a behavior that could be observed when the individual experienced a specific “releasing” stimulus - that is, when the organism encountered a certain stimulus that “triggered” a given instinct. Lorenz posited the existence of an “innate releasing mechanism,” a hypothetical mechanism believed to involve a set of receptor cells that released the instinctual behavior pattern when activated by a specific environmental stimulus.According to Lorenz [1937a, 1965], experience over the course of an organism's life (its ontogeny) had no role in the shaping of the development of a presumed neural structure that enabled the innate releasing mechanism to occur. Instead the key, innate feature of such a neural structure was “its ability to select, from the range of available possible stimuli, the one which specifically elicits its activity, and thus the response seen by the observer” [Lehrman, 1970, p. 24]. The response to the innate structure was an FAP. The classic example of an FAP involves the male three-spined stickleback fish [Lorenz, 1965]. When this fish encounters another male three-spined stickleback with a red belly, the fish displays a set of behaviors indicative of threat. In contrast, when the fish encounters a female with a swollen (but not red) belly, the male displays the behavior pattern indicative of mating. However, a problem with the foundational argument and definition of the FAP exists. Lorenz admitted that if the appropriate releasing stimulus was not encountered for some period of time, then the FAP could occur spontaneously. That is, it “might go off in vacuo, as if dammed energy burst through containing valves” [Richards, 1987, p. 531]. It seemed obvious to Lorenz [1965] that the FAP with the three-spined sticklebacks was a behavior clearly shaped by evolution, given what he saw as the importance of the threat or mating displays by the male fish for, respectively, warding off competitors for female fish and for engagement with a possible mate if a competitor for the mate swam away in the face of the FAP. However, the problematic facet of this and other examples of FAPs [Lehrman, 1970; Richards, 1987], which in effect might be termed an evolved probabilistic behavioral mechanism (EPBM), is the spontaneous enactment of the behavior. This spontaneous behavior would occur with no evolutionary-relevant stimulus (a male or a female conspecific) in view to engage the purported innate neural structure housing the innate releasing mechanism. Thus, the purported phylogenetic antecedent that explained the EPBM only explained it in some cases, at some times, in some contexts. Similarly, proponents of EDP can only say that if the EPCM occurs normatively, then the context was species typical; if the EPCM is not expressed normatively, then this manifestation of behavior is taken as proof for the existence of a context (and typically a never measured context) that was atypical. Like Skinner [e.g., 1971], in regard to the postulation that a relevant (releasing) S must have been present if one saw an R [Bowers, 1973], the outcome in the formulation of EDP, the appearance (or lack thereof) of the EPCM, explains the antecedent that purportedly explains the outcome! Thus, the ideas of the proponents of EDP [e.g., Bjorklund, 2015; Bjorklund & Ellis, 2005; del Giudice and Ellis, 2016] converge with those involved in other essentialist formulations. Whether we are talking about EPCMs or EPBMs, we run into the same problem: one cannot identify these essentialist “mechanisms” independently of their ontogenetic emergence or their subsequent display in ontogeny after their emergence. We cannot say that these homunculi, EPCMs, EPBMs, FAPs, or whatevers, are always there, independently of context, because the context instantiates them (or does not instantiate them as the case may be). However, the instantiation by the context will be different under different environmental conditions (e.g., species typical vs. atypical, or red underbelly present vs. red underbelly absent), and therefore the whatever (e.g., the homunculus or the EPCM) cannot be known to exist in any form without the context. In short, there is no way of knowing the purported evolutionary-based “whatever” independently of the ontogenetic context! Simply, then, and at best, the foundational concept of EDP (the EPCM), the essentialist approach to the complexity of human development, is entirely nonempirical and gratuitous. At worst, it is so fraught with logical, conceptual, and empirical problems that using it as a basis for research in human development is a scholarly dead end. The objections that proponents of EDP (and proponents of the related evo-devo approach [e.g., Gilbert, 2003]) have to RDS-based approaches to the complexity of human development reflect at best a lack of understanding of the dynamics of developmental systems [e.g., see Raeff, 2016, and Witherington & Lickliter, 2016]. Whatever the basis of the objections of proponents of EDP, however, their views have resulted in their invention of the equivalent of a homunculus to explain the autopoietic features of a dynamic developmental system.Developmental science may be at a crossroad. Given the irreparable logical and empirical shortcomings of essentialist approaches to human development, there is no scientific value in the continued theoretical or empirical use of these ideas, whether we are discussing past instantiations of them, such as those forwarded by Skinner [1971] or Lorenz [1965], or examples of them present in the essentialist and reductionist literatures at the time of this writing, for instance, EDP [e.g., Bjorklund, 2015; del Giudice & Ellis, 2016], sociobiological neo-eugenics [e.g., Belsky, 2014], or behavior genetics [e.g., Plomin et al., 2016]. Focusing on these flawed ideas as a basis for research or as a means to formulate applications to social policies or programs is a waste of valuable scholarly resources and has the potential to foster applications of developmental science that are derived from seriously mistaken ideas [Lerner, 2015]. Developmental scientists enacting many of the roles associated with work - for example, in and and of course - are then, with a we the complexity of human development in the enactment of of roles and, as such, that essentialist approaches are no frames for the of developmental science (e.g., as we would if we were with evaluating work that used as the frame for or do we flawed thinking and associated work to fill the of and the of (in the of I the of this with more a given the range of I it will However, more the of science is at Developmental scientists should also that may in the given the applications of essentialist thinking its way into in the and at this writing, for instance, nativist ideas about and and about and The of life and the of of people may be by where developmental scientists in regard to these and what they may be to say about of this was in by from the and the
Christian Thiel, Christopher Brown, Mario Hellenkamp, Marius Spancken
Der Abschlussbericht fasst die Ergebnisse des Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprojektes 2015/2016 im Studiengang Master of Science Wirtschaftsinformatik (FH Münster) zur Themenstellung "Kryptowährungen und Smart Contracts" zusammen. Das Projekt analysierte die Einsatzzwecke, Potenziale und Architekturen von Blockchain-Anwendungen. Des Weiteren wurden verschiedene Fragestellungen zum Nutzen der Blockchain-Technologie in modernen Geschäftsprozessen und zu den technischen Herausforderungen mittels der Entwicklung zweier Prototypen betrachtet. Der erste Prototyp realisiert eine eigene Blockchain, in der verschiedene Angriffsszenarien durchgespielt werden können. Der zweite Prototyp realisiert eine Clearinghouse-Anwendung in Form einer verteilten Smart-Contract-Implementierung (in Ethereum). Der Bericht vermittelt einen Überblick über Ansätze, Strukturen, interne Abläufe und Rahmenbedingungen aktueller Blockchain-Implementierungen. Die erzielten Ergebnisse verdeutlichen neben dem Nutzen auch die Besonderheiten und Einschränkungen der Blockchain-Technologie.
The paper deals with cryptocurrencies and trading. Main goal of this article is to introduce strategy for automated trading on cryptocurrency exchange market. For this purpose we will use algorithm based of Floyd-Warshall algorithm. Article is introductory and can this method can be developed in the future. First, a general introduction to cryptocurrencies is given from the programmer's point of view, some statistics data and figure representing volatility of exchange. Then the article describes some basic strategies for automated trading. Also explained is the algorithm Floyd-Warshall and its modifications for automation arbitrage. An illustrative example is given and a trading algorithm is listed.
Abstract This article addresses contemporary art as a means to investigate how, and to what extent, financial logic impacts upon the socio-cultural sphere. Its contribution is twofold: on the one hand, the article shows that contemporary art's valuation practices increasingly reflect the logic of capitalization; on the other hand, it assesses the emancipatory potential of blockchain technology for the cultural sphere. In relation to the latter I argue that, in spite of the technological novelty of blockchain-based art projects, these nonetheless fail to challenge a received logic of finance. This exposes the limitations to technological determinism as a means of countering financial power in the socio-cultural sphere, and points to new problems for art's valuation methods in relation to the liquid logic of algorithmic finance.
Cardiac arrests claim millions of lives each year. The condition can often be treated with a de\nfibrillator,buttimeisaverycriticalfactor. Asaconsequence,survivalratesarelow.\nRecent developments in drone technology have made civilian drones both cheap, easy to\noperate, and reliable. This paper looks into opportunities to use drones to deliver defibrilla\ntors to cardiac arrest victims faster than an ambulance, and focuses on unifying the needs of\nemergencyresponsewiththerulesandregulationsrequiredtooperatethedronessafely.\nThe study is performed as a literature study combined with interviews. The primary stake\nholderswereidentifiedasemergencyresponseandtheCivilianAviationAuthority.\nThe results showed that there was both a perceived use for ambulance drones and a way to\nlegally use them. The suggested approach involves using ambulance drones at sporting events\nsuch as "Birkebeinerrennet" as a proof of concept, before more advanced or permanent pro\ngramsareconsidered.
The empirical evidence and the academic literature point to the opposed directions on the capability of the territorial arrangements to extenuate conflict in ethnically divided and civil war-worn countries. Little is known about the diverse capacities of the territorial power sharing arrangements in diminishing violence in the post-conflict societies. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to the field through studying the conditions under which territorial power sharing arrangements reduce violence in the post-conflict settings. I argue that a resumption of violence is less likely following territorial power sharing arrangements in cases where a relatively high level of economic decentralization is provided for a subnational entity, as it allows the rebel groups to sustain their support base among key constituencies. To test the theoretical argument, a structured, focused comparison of territorial power sharing arrangements in Aceh province of Indonesia and Mindanao province of the Philippines is conducted. The empirical findings give support to the hypothesis in the expected direction. Aceh, where the resumption of violence did not occur, also was enjoying a relatively higher level of economic decentralization. While in ARMM, where the violence resumed after five years following the peace agreement, economic decentralization was relatively low. Nevertheless, the extended analysis reveals additional factors. Transformation of the rebel organization into the political parties and inclusive peace agreements potentially may have impact on the territorial power sharing arrangements’ capability to contain violence in the post conflict environments.
Nisha Bhat, Peter H. Kilmarx, Freeman Dube, Albert Manenji · 6 authors
BACKGROUND: We conducted a case study of the Zimbabwe National AIDS Trust Fund ('AIDS Levy') as an approach to domestic government financing of the response to HIV and AIDS. METHODS: Data came from three sources: a literature review, including a search for grey literature, review of government documents from the Zimbabwe National AIDS Council (NAC), and key informant interviews with representatives of the Zimbabwean government, civil society and international organizations. FINDINGS: The literature search yielded 139 sources, and 20 key informants were interviewed. Established by legislation in 1999, the AIDS Levy entails a 3% income tax for individuals and 3% tax on profits of employers and trusts (which excluded the mining industry until 2015). It is managed by the parastatal NAC through a decentralized structure of AIDS Action Committees. Revenues increased from inception to 2006 through 2008, a period of economic instability and hyperinflation. Following dollarization in 2009, annual revenues continued to increase, reaching US$38.6 million in 2014. By policy, at least 50% of funds are used for purchase of antiretroviral medications. Other spending includes administration and capital costs, HIV prevention, and monitoring and evaluation. Several financial controls and auditing systems are in place. Key informants perceived the AIDS Levy as a 'homegrown' solution that provided country ownership and reduced dependence on donor funding, but called for further increased transparency, accountability, and reduced administrative costs, as well as recommended changes to increase revenue. CONCLUSIONS: The Zimbabwe AIDS Levy has generated substantial resources, recently over US$35 million per year, and signals an important commitment by Zimbabweans, which may have helped attract other donor resources. Many key informants considered the Zimbabwe AIDS Levy to be a best practice for other countries to follow.
В статье рассмотрена эволюция денег, идентифицированы угрозы использования электронных денег, определены перспективы и возможности использования криптовалюты Bitcoin как финансового инструмента виртуальной экономики.
We revisit the question of constructing public-key encryption and signature schemes with security in the presence of bounded leakage and tampering memory attacks. For signatures we obtain the first construction in the standard model; for public-key encryption we obtain the first construction free of pairing (avoiding non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs). Our constructions are based on generic building blocks, and, as we show, also admit efficient instantiations under fairly standard number-theoretic assumptions.
Under the combined pressure of increased urbanization, fiscal adjustments and decentralization, central governments were pushed towards accepting the idea of local government accessing the private finance sources for their public infrastructure and service development investments. While the importance of borrowing increases for local developments, the main challenge many small municipalities have to face is the difficulty to access private financing sources. One obstacle is related to the creditworthiness of the municipal debtor or bond issuer. Sub-national governments can overcome the problem of creditworthiness through the use of credit enhancement mechanisms or techniques. The present paper is the first to discuss the situation of credit enhancements for Romanian municipal bond financing, its consequences and the path that might be followed for their further development. The absence of appropriate credit enhancements can be considered among the factors that contributed to the underdevelopment of the Romanian municipal bond market segment mainly between 2011 and 2014. In order to improve the municipal bond market profile, Romanian local governments should not ignore credit enhancements for any future bond issue and a combination of internal credit enhancements and bond pooling, as external credit enhancements seem to provide a feasible solution.
Can competition among privately issued fiat currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum work? Only sometimes. To show this, we build a model of competition among privately issued fiat currencies. We modify the current workhorse of monetary economics, the Lagos-Wright environment, by including entrepreneurs who can issue their own fiat currencies in order to maximize their utility. Otherwise, the model is standard. We show that there exists an equilibrium in which price stability is consistent with competing private monies, but also that there exists a continuum of equilibrium trajectories with the property that the value of private currencies monotonically converges to zero. These latter equilibria disappear, however, when we introduce productive capital. We also investigate the properties of hybrid monetary arrangements with private and government monies, of automata issuing money, and the role of network effects.
Money laundering is a growing issue which has in later years emigrated more and more to the digital sphere of Bitcoin. Its pseudonymous nature and unrigorous legal definition has made regulation a difficult challenge. This thesis provides a unique take on the Bitcoin money laundering problematique by using incentive structures in place of forced restrictions. The goal is to create, validate and analyze a game theoretic incentive model which aims to combat money laundering by increasing the transaction costs for money laundering Bitcoin users without affecting the transaction costs for the honest users. The results prove the model to be feasible, leading to the conclusion that its real-world application has the potential to combat money laundering in Bitcoin to a significant degree.
The paper reviews the last technological tools that arguably can contribute to reducing the excessively high costs of remittance transactions in Africa. Indeed, despite huge remittance inflows to and within the continent, Africa is the most expensive destination to send money to. As remittances have become more important than Overseas Development Assistance and Foreign Direct Investment inflows in some countries, it has become crucial to explore technological advances that can contribute to reducing their transaction costs. Such reduction would enable the end beneficiaries to capture a larger share of these external resources, which in turn could have an even bigger impact on development in Africa. In addition to revisiting the role of mobile banking in lowering remittance transaction prices, the paper takes a closer look at the newest available technology, the Bitcoin blockchain technology that underpins digital currencies. At this early stage, very few social science researchers have addressed the role that such digital currency could play in the reduction of the remittance transaction prices, except for a few innovative Bitcoin operators. The paper proceeds as follows. It first looks at the causes of the high remittance transaction costs. Then, it reviews, presents and analyses the official remittances data downloaded from the World Bank's Remittances Prices Worldwide database. It also briefly reviews a few remittance transfer technological instruments. Given the novelty of the topic, the review of the most recent existing "literature" on Bitcoin is mainly retrieved from either on - line news sources or information from a few leading Bitcoin operators. In the light of the UN Global Working Group Post-2015 Development Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals proposal to reduce by 2030 the remittance transaction costs to even less than 3%, the effectiveness of these new technological instruments to reach such objective are discussed. Finally, a number of appropriate policy actions to foster the economic impact of remittances are proposed.
This article summarizes some of the key points raised at a conference convened at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law on March 3, 2016. The conference brought together luminaries from government, private practice, the marketplace, and the academy to discuss the phenomenon that is Bitcoin and its future. This article also introduces some other articles that were published by conference participants.
Published as: Shackelford, S., and S. Myers. 2017. “Block-by-Block: Leveraging the Power of Blockchain Technology to Build Trust and Promote Cyber Peace.” Yale Journal of Law & Technology 19:334–388. \n"There has been increasing interest in the transformative power of not only crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, but also the technology underlying them—namely blockchain. To the uninitiated, a blockchain is a sophisticated, distributed online ledger that has the potential, according to Goldman Sachs, to 'change everything.' From making businesses more efficient to recording property deeds to engendering the growth of ‘smart’ contracts, blockchain technology is now being investigated by a huge range of organizations and is attracting billions in venture funding. Even the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is investigating blockchain technology to 'create an unhackable messaging system.' However, the legal literature has largely ignored the rise of blockchain technology outside of its finance, securities, and copyright implications. This Article seeks to address this omission by analyzing the potential impact of blockchain technology on advancing the cybersecurity of firms across an array of sectors and industries with a particular focus on certificate authorities and the critical infrastructure context. Moreover, we examine the rise of blockchains through the lens of the literature on polycentric governance to ascertain what lessons this research holds to build trust in distributed systems and ultimately promote cyber peace."