Divya Rana, Syed Md Faisal Ali Khan, Arvind Arahant, Jitender Kumar Chaudhary
This study investigates the concept of green cryptocurrencies as a potential solution to mitigate the ecological footprint associated with traditional cryptocurrencies. It explores their viability as a sustainable alternative to traditional currencies. The rising popularity of cryptocurrencies has brought about concerns regarding their environmental impact, particularly due to the energy-intensive nature of mining and transactions.In conclusion, the importance of exploring sustainable alternatives to traditional cryptocurrencies emphasizes the potential of green cryptocurrencies to address environmental concerns.It discusses the growing awareness within the cryptocurrency community and the general public regarding the urgent need to address these issues. Green cryptocurrencies employ alternative consensus mechanisms, such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS) or energy-efficient algorithms, and utilize renewable energy sources for mining and transactions.
This paper proposes a self-governing cryptocurrency, dubbed Autonocoin. Cryptocurrency owners play formal tacit coordination games by making investments recorded on the blockchain. Such investments represent bets about the focal point resolution of normative issues, such as whether a proposed change to Autonocoin should occur. The game produces a result that resolves the issue. With a typical cryptocurrency, the client software establishes conventions that ultimately lead to the identification of the authoritative blockchain. Autonocoin completes a circle by making transactions on the blockchain that in turn define those conventions and the expected software behavior. The distributed consensus mechanism embodied by formal tacit coordination games, meanwhile, can make other types of decisions, including which of competing blockchains is authoritative and whether new Autonocoins should be rewarded to benefit those who have taken actions to benefit Autonocoin. This establishes a unique funding model for a cryptocurrency, and it addresses objections to cryptocurrencies issued predominantly to the initial founders, as well as to those that encourage wasteful mining activities.
Bitcoin, a virtual currency created in 2009 by an individual or group using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, is based on a decentralized peer-to-peer system. Transactions are made with no intermediary. There are no banks involved, little to no transaction fees, and transactions are almost instantaneous. Transactions are verified by network nodes, and the network uses a public ledger called the block chain to record transactions. There is no central repository or administrator. Treasury categorizes it as a decentralized virtual currency. As public acceptance increases, so too does the number of merchants willing to accept bitcoin as a form of payment. But even though the public is slowly embracing bitcoin as a form of payment (thus giving it characteristics of a currency), public officials continue to struggle with the question of whether bitcoin is a currency â and therefore subject to appropriate currency regulations â or if it is simply property, making transactions in bitcoin more akin to barter.
An open distributed system can be secured by requiring participants to present proof of work and rewarding them for participation. The Bitcoin digital currency introduced this mechanism, which is adopted by almost all contemporary digital currencies and related services. A natural process leads participants of such systems to form pools, where members aggregate their power and share the rewards. Experience with Bitcoin shows that the largest pools are often open, allowing anyone to join. It has long been known that a member can sabotage an open pool by seemingly joining it but never sharing its proofs of work. The pool shares its revenue with the attacker, and so each of its participants earns less. We define and analyze a game where pools use some of their participants to infiltrate other pools and perform such an attack. With any number of pools, no-pool-attacks is not a Nash equilibrium. We study the special cases where either two pools or any number of identical pools play the game and the rest of the participants are uninvolved. In both of these cases there exists an equilibrium that constitutes a âtragedy of the commonsâ where the participating pools attack one another and earn less than they would have if none had attacked. For two pools, the decision whether or not to attack is the minerâs dilemma, an instance of the iterative prisonerâs dilemma. The game is played daily by the active Bitcoin pools, which apparently choose not to attack. If this balance breaks, the revenue of open pools might diminish, making them unattractive to participants.
Abstract. LowMC is a collection of block cipher families introduced at Eurocrypt 2015 by Albrecht et al. Its design is optimized for instanti-ations of multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and zero-knowledge proofs. A unique feature of LowMC is that its internal affine layers are chosen at random, and thus each block cipher family contains a huge number of instances. The Eurocrypt paper proposed two specific block cipher families of LowMC, having 80-bit and 128-bit keys. In this paper, we mount interpolation attacks (algebraic attacks intro-duced by Jakobsen and Knudsen) on LowMC, and show that a practically significant fraction of 2â38 of its 80-bit key instances could be broken 223 times faster than exhaustive search. Moreover, essentially all instances that are claimed to provide 128-bit security could be broken about 1000 times faster. In order to obtain these results, we had to develop novel techniques and optimize the original interpolation attack in new ways. While some of our new techniques exploit specific internal properties of LowMC, others are more generic and could be applied, in principle, to any block cipher.
Despite the enactment of a number of public finance management reforms since the 1990s, misappropriation of public funds in Uganda remains a challenge. For example, scandals in the Office of the Prime Minister where UGX 60 billion was stolen and UGX 340 billion was lost to ghost pensioners in the Ministry of Public Services prompted several donor governments to suspend budget support to Uganda in 2012. In response to this and other challenges, the government took advantage of provisions in existing laws and regulations to initiate a number of new reforms and measures to further strengthen public financial management and improve public service delivery. This report examines the progress and impact of these on-going public finance management reforms undertaken by the MFPED since 2012/13. These reforms include the implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA); upgrading the Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS) and the Integrated Personnel and Payroll System (IPPS); improving wage and payroll management, improving budget formulation, implementation, monitoring and reporting; and strengthening budget transparency. The study employed different but complimentary approaches to gather the relevant data and information. These included an extensive review of government documents and reports relating to the reforms to obtain a clear understanding of the existing public finance management system, consultations with key ministries and government departments who were driving and implementing the reforms to capture their perspectives on the progress of the reforms in terms of achievement and challenges, and the collection of qualitative data from local governments (districts and municipalities) as well as service delivery units (schools and health centers) using a multi-stage purposive sampling procedure. The study findings show that despite some challenges, the reforms are so far yielding positive results in terms of improved accountability, reporting and service delivery. A summary of the outcomes of the key reforms is as follows. The key reforms contributed to improved public finance management at different levels of government. These areas include improved public expenditure management through the (TSA), improved accountability and public expenditure use through the IFMS, reduction in ghost workers and the overall wage bill at MDAs and local governments through the IPPS and the decentralization of the wage and payroll management system. A major milestone of these reforms in particular is the decentralization of payroll management that has so far reduced the incidence of ghost workers and reduced the governmentâs total wage bill. However, despite the noted improvements, there are still challenges with the implementation of some of these reforms. The challenges include limited coverage of the IFMS; limited interfacing between the IFMS and IPPS; limited internet infrastructure to support the IFMS and IPPS; and inadequate technical capacity to operate the IFMS, IPPS and OBT systems. There is also limited printing and display of the payroll at local government units.
Artificial intelligence (AI) delivers numerous chances to add to the prosperity of people and the stability of economies and society, yet besides, it adds up a variety of novel moral, legal, social, and innovative difficulties. Trustworthy AI (TAI) bases on the possibility that trust builds the establishment of various societies, economies, and sustainable turn of events, and that people, organizations, and societies can along these lines just at any point understand the maximum capacity of AI, if trust can be set up in its development, deployment, and use. The risks of unintended and negative outcomes related to AI are proportionately high, particularly at scale. Most AI is really artificial narrow intelligence, intended to achieve a specific task on previously curated information from a certain source. Since most AI models expand on correlations, predictions could fail to sum up to various populations or settings and might fuel existing disparities and biases. As the AI industry is amazingly imbalanced, and experts are as of now overpowered by other digital devices, there could be a little capacity to catch blunders. With this article, we aim to present the idea of TAI and its five essential standards (1) usefulness, (2) non-maleficence, (3) autonomy, (4) justice, and (5) logic. We further draw on these five standards to build up a data-driven analysis for TAI and present its application by portraying productive paths for future research, especially as to the distributed ledger technology-based acknowledgment of TAI.
Open access
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
The technologies of today's world are constantly updating themselves and adding innovations.The concept of Metaverse, which is seen as the biggest digital transformation concept of recent years, represents a brand new and unpredictable universe where multiple virtual universes merge.The graphic design field is also seen as a field that can renew itself with the Metaverse era in line with its professional skills.When used effectively, this virtual universe is seen as a brand new door of opportunity for graphic designers who can make three-dimensional (3D) designs, design user interfaces and have sufficient technical skills and equipment.For graphic artists who can produce digital works for the Metaverse, NFT [Non Fungible Token (qualified intellectual property)] allows them to earn income while protecting their works.However, in this new virtual universe community, which has not yet settled into a certain systematization, it remains unclear what the course of events will be for graphic designers.
This study was about the civil service leadership role to implement civil service reform in Tigray Region. In Ethiopia, civil service leaders are required to contribute towards the development of public sectors. To this regard, the district level decentralization in Ethiopia let civil service leaders to provide high quality public services and to ensure freedom of choice and customer participation since early 1991.The 1990s was the period of change in government from Central Planning to Federal system. It was during this time that the government has tried to restructure the civil service system as a structural adjustment with federal outlook. Not only theoretically but also in practical discipline, civil service leaders have the responsibility to implement effectively government policies and strategies. It was with this intention that, the autonomous Ethiopia civil service institutions in general and that of Tigray regionâs in particular were established and the civil service leaders were begun to operate independently the civil service organizations. It is believed that, a successful leadership is the cornerstone of government institutions to implement public policy which intern can have a direct impact on the development performance of a nation. However, some empirical evidence indicates that, the civil service leadership approach is inhibited by many administrative bureaucracies. Therefore, the objective of this journal article was to examine leadership role in implementing civil service reform in Ethiopia: the case of Tigray regional state. To examine the leadership role, the relevant data was collected both from primary and secondary data sources. Finally, the factors that impede the role of leadership to implement the civil service reform were identified and the discussion was concluded that regardless of the institutional framework in-place, the civil service leaders were ineffective and were not played their role effectively as a result of the inadequate appointment of civil service officials and process owners.
Haeruddin Haeruddin, Agus Suryono, Mujibur Rahman Khairul Muluk, Tjahjanulin Domai
The regional administration in the context of regional autonomy brought significant changes to the centralization system of local governance turned into a decentralized system. This normative phenomenon is creating administrative boundaries and functional area for each local government as an autonomous region. While empirical phenomena in the administration of public services across the region hindered administrative problems and functional boundaries of each local government, as a solution to overcome these problems required cooperation among local governments. Researchers adopting the concept of cooperation between local government approach (Smith) consisting of; 1). Legal and political approaches; 2). Inter-Organizational Politics; and 3). Political Community, to be used as a tool dialogue and analysis of the research findings. This study used a qualitative approach to research instruments; people, events and documents. Data collection techniques are interview, observation and documentation. Data analysis techniques are grounded theory. Our study focus on: 1). The processed for determining the object of cooperation; 2). Implementation of cooperation in water resources management; 3). Factors that influence the management of water resources. The results showed that 1). The process of determining the object of cooperation has met the principles of law and administration, reduce regional ego; 2). Implementation of the cooperation is not only a formality but prefers the value of togetherness, efficiency and effectiveness of service provision for drinking water has been established well characterized by the distribution of drinking water services in the three local government in Malang; 3). The most influential factor is the regional head support, coordination and less harmonized local ego; 4). Cooperation model that built up is joint service agreement in written agreements and intergovernmental agreement model (government to government = G to G).
Matteo Maffei, Giulio Malavolta, Manuel Reinert, Dominique Schröder
Cloud storage has rapidly become a cornerstone of many IT infrastructures, constituting a seamless solution for the backup, synchronization, and sharing of large amounts of data. Putting user data in the direct control of cloud service providers, however, raises security and privacy concerns related to the integrity of outsourced data, the accidental or intentional leakage of sensitive information, the profiling of user activities and so on. Furthermore, even if the cloud provider is trusted, users having access to outsourced files might be malicious and misbehave. These concerns are particularly serious in sensitive applications like personal health records and credit score systems. To tackle this problem, we present GORAM, a cryptographic system that protects the secrecy and integrity of outsourced data with respect to both an untrusted server and malicious clients, guarantees the anonymity and unlink ability of accesses to such data, and allows the data owner to share outsourced data with other clients, selectively granting them read and write permissions. GORAM is the first system to achieve such a wide range of security and privacy properties for outsourced storage. In the process of designing an efficient construction, we developed two new, generally applicable cryptographic schemes, namely, batched zero-knowledge proofs of shuffle and an accountability technique based on chameleon signatures, which we consider of independent interest. We implemented GORAM in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and ran a performance evaluation demonstrating the scalability and efficiency of our construction.
That ancient rhetorical trope, symbolic patricide, is alive and well in contemporary philosophy. One need look no further than the fate of Gilles Deleuze at the hands of those who amass beneath the plural banner of contemporary philosophy for proof of this. Of course the great, unavoidable irony is that the position of father is often only occupied post mortem, symbolic murder being at the same time the installation of this or that thinker at the head of yesterdayâs table. I mean here simply that in the rush to stake new theoretical ground beyond âpost-modernismâ, hermeneutics and deconstruction, wild empiricism, correlationism â in sum, all of those avatars of imperialism our autochthonous fairy tales warn us about in such dire tones â Deleuzeâs name comes to stand in for everything we must not anymore want or think, despite his demonstrable innocence in many regards. This prosecutory fervor leads to critical attacks that engage very little with the work itself, unconsciously exemplifying Walter Benjaminâs ninth thesis for the critic: âPolemics mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studied the betterâ (2008: 67). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Bitcoins and their use are a very actual issue, especially with high popularity and high cost of Bitcoins. Number of Bitcoinâs transactions increasing day to day. But many individuals and business owners do not understand what is Bitcoin, how it works and how could it be used in business. This article discusses the nature of Bitcoin, a decentralized, anonymous and largely unregulated virtual currency, its legal status and use in business. The article includes examination of both advantages and disadvantages of Bitcoin and international regulation of legal status and taxation of this currency.
This paper is concerned with the new Darwinism of the payment system. The researcher discusses the payment system to understand if Bitcoin would replace our cash-based society. The analysis is based on the technology S-curve and Schumpeterâs model of economic development. At present, there are problems hindering Bitcoin innovation to achieve a wide adoption as the innovation is not well received by the government central banks around the world. It is interesting to see that the swing of S-curves is not strong enough to cause a paradigm shift according to the Schumpeterian concept of creative destruction. The results have shown parallel S-curve trajectories of electronic money innovations signifying a move from a cash-based economy towards a less cash society. The study provides useful implications to support the diffusion of Bitcoin innovation.
If the South Asia region hopes to meet its development goals and not risk slowing down or even halting growth, poverty alleviation, and shared prosperity, it is essential to make closing its huge infrastructure gap a priority. Identifying and addressing gaps in the data on expenditure, access, and quality are crucial to ensuring that governments make efficient, practical, and effective infrastructure development choices. This study addresses this knowledge gap by focusing on the current status of infrastructure sectors and geographical disparities, real levels of investment and private sector participation, deficits and proper targets for the future, and bottlenecks to expansion. The findings show that the South Asia region needs to invest between US$1.7 trillion and US$2.5 trillion (at current prices) to close its infrastructure gap. If investments are spread evenly over the years until 2020, the region needs to invest between 6.6 and 9.9 percent of 2010 gross domestic product per year, an estimated increase of up to 3 percentage points from the 6.9 percent of gross domestic product invested in infrastructure by countries in the region in 2009. Given the enormous size of the region's infrastructure deficiencies, it will need a mix of investment in infrastructure stock and supportive reforms to close its infrastructure gap. One major challenge will be prioritizing investment needs. Another will be choosing optimal forms of service provision, including the private sector's role, and the decentralization of administrative functions and powers.
Globalization, unpredictable markets, increased products customization and frequent changes in products, production technologies and machining systems have become a complexity in todayâs manufacturing environment. One key strategy for coping with the evolution of this situation is to develop or apply an enable technology such as intelligent manufacturing. Intelligent manufacturing system (IMS) is characterized by decentralized, distributed, networked compositions of heterogeneous and autonomous systems. The model of IMS is inherited from the organization of the living systems in biology and nature so that the manufacturing system has the advanced characteristics inspired from biology such as self-adaptation, self-diagnosis, and selfhealing. To prove this concept, an innovative system with applying the advanced information and communication technology such as internet of things, cognitive agent are proposed to integrate, organize and allocate the machining resources. Innovative system is essential for modern machining system to flexibly and quickly adapt to new challenges of manufacturing environment.
This thesis asks whether the increased autonomy and decentralization associated with the New Public Management (NPM) have impacted on the coordination of organizations within the public sector. Ideas and practices once typical of the private sector have become increasingly common in public sectors around the world. Often times they have been promoted under the umbrella of fashionable terms such as rdquo;, âmodernizationâ or New Public Management (NPM). Although not entirely new, these ideas gained momentum, starting in the early 1980s, in some Western democracies and then increasingly became promoted as a solution â and sometimes the solution nbsp;to public administration problems across the world. Great variation exists, however, in their spread and implementation across countries and sectors. Two of these proposals for change are the disaggregation of bureaucratic forms of organization and decentralization. The expectation has been that these reforms would improve operational flexibility, responsiveness to the needs of service users and ultimately quality and performance. Following these reform proposals, administrators are supposed to make use of greater discretion in the application of managerial principles and techniques. Managers and the entities they lead are expected to exercise initiative, to be proactive, and to act rather than just to react to imperatives from politicians, as it was traditionally common in public administration. A second major reform that has been widely experimented with in the public sector is decentralization. Decisions, it is argued, ought to be made as close to the citizen as possible. In this way it is assumed that information and understanding of local needs improve, which can further translate into better decision making. There is also an ambition to reduce the overload and delay associated with highly centralized decisions. However, the trend towards decentralization is neither new nor uniform across public sectors. Some governments have taken steps to recentralize certain functions after earlier efforts to decentralize while others have been initially reluctant to decentralize, but recently have taken more confident steps in this direction. The specific setting of this doctoral dissertation comprises public hospital systems in selected European countries: 1)nbsp; a Nordic country â Norway 2)nbsp; nbsp;Baltic, EU member state since 2003, formerly part of the Soviet Union â Estonia 3) a nation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a former communist state and an EU member state since 2007 â Romania. The thesis comprises eight chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the subject matter and motivates its academic and social relevance. Chapter 2 reviews the literature and shows how the subject matter of the thesis is embedded in the broad academic discourse. This consists of the public administration and management literature â particularly New Public Management, governance and coordination â on the one hand, and healthcare and hospital management and governance, on the other hand. It provides a theoretical review of the concept of coordination, and shows how different theories have dealt with coordination in a public sector context. The chapter also reviews existing analytical and empirical approaches to coordination. In chapter 3 we propose an analytical framework geared to the central coordination of publicly-owned hospitals. The framework builds on two theories â principal-agent theory and sociological institutionalism â and seeks to explain why coordination problems occur across the three cases. Chapter 4 includes the research design: the case selection and methods. The thesis uses an explanatory comparative case study approach to understand how reform affects coordination in hospital systems in the three country cases: Estonia, Norway and Romania. We use congruence analysis as a specific type of case study research. Congruence analysis connects empirical observations to expectations derived from theory. The main source of empirical material comprises of a program of semi-structured interviews conducted in all three countries with various stakeholders â both in central institutions and public hospitals. This evidence is supplemented with relevant documentary data and statistical information. Chapters 5 through 7 constitute the core of the thesis and they describe, evaluate and explain the relationship between organizational reform in public hospitals and coordination problems. Each of these three country chapters ends by discussing the compatibility between empirical findings and the theoretical propositions derived from the two theories. In each country chapter we seek to explain the relationship between organizational reform in public hospitals and central coordination by means of the theoretical framework introduced in Chapter 3. Chapter 8 concludes by comparing the empirical and theoretical findings across the three cases and discusses the implications of the results for theory and practice. The research has reached the following conclusions: nbsp; Organizational reform in public hospitals has constituted an important component of healthcare policy in all three countries in the past 10 to 15 years. All three countries have experimented with structural reform (including decentralization or centralization) and have grappled with granting management autonomy to public hospitals while seeking to solidify policy-making and coordination capacity at the center of government nbsp; This administrative change across the three hospital systems has not been marginal only â it has involved major resources and has received considerable attention from different stakeholders âąnbsp; Although hospital decentralization and autonomy reform constitute on-going processes that may constantly undergo some degree of change, we have observed that in two of our three cases, Estonia and Norway, the reform model proposed more than 10 years ago has essentially endured to the present. While ideas for change to the model have been put forward, in Norway for example, it is unlikely that this change would radically reshape the type of reform model adopted years ago. Romania, while clearly experimenting with the same types of international ideas, has thus far only implemented decentralization. Granting greater autonomy to hospital management is still an idea that is being considered by central policy makers in Romania, but it is uncertain if, when and how it will be implemented nbsp; In the face of organizational reform the state capacity to coordinate the decentralized and autonomous hospitals has been put to the test nbsp; We have observed a reconsideration of the role of central institutions, most notably the ministries of health, but also health insurance funds in social insurance systems or other central bodies in tax-based systems nbsp; Hospital autonomy has overall posed serious challenges to the central coordination of autonomous hospitals in Estonia, much more so than in the case of Norway and Romania nbsp; However, the autonomy of hospitals is not the only factor that affects the effectiveness of coordination. Hospitals that enjoy a lower degree of autonomy, as in Romania for example, are not necessarily more effectively coordinated than hospitals that enjoy a high degree of decision-making discretion nbsp; nbsp;Norway, a high-trust society that is compliant with government regulation, coordination problems exist in more specific areas of ICT and in the case of elite medical specialties in the Oslo University Hospital. Overall, coordination in Norway has significantly improved following the 2002 hospital reform, but this does not necessarily mean that coordination in the public hospital sector is problem-free nbsp; Hospital system culture and principal-agent theory offer complementary insights into the dynamics of public hospital coordination. Conflicting interests and goals and cultural factors are particularly relevant in understanding the effectiveness of central coordination of public hospitals nbsp; There is more evidence for some propositions of principal-agent theory than for othersnbsp;more evidence was found in favour of conflicting interests and goals than in the case of imperfect information. Positive and negative incentives are situated in the middle with more evidence in some cases than in others. The thesis contributes to the existing literature in the following ways: nbsp; Directly compares two eastern and one western European system and shows that such comparison, although it does not follow a most similar research design, is both feasible and productive. This research finds that problems of coordination can occur in different systems and therefore to study public sector coordination comparatively one can choose to select cases that display differences between them and look for factors that can explain a similar outcome nbsp; Covers one country where only very limited research on hospital reforms has previously been published (Romania) âąnbsp; Sets out new primary evidence in the form of original interviews and documentary evidence which has not previously been cited in academic research nbsp; Employs two theoretical approaches in a comparative and complementary way, and argues that conflicting interests and goals and hospital system culture help explain coordination in European public hospital systems nbsp; Proposes an analytical framework for analyzing coordination in public hospital systems and finds the framework to be useful in that it encourages researchers and practitioners to think specifically about the implications of coordination; that is, the problems and effects of coordination problems.
Open access
Healthcare Policy and Management
Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
This paper focuses on the evolution of cryptocurrencies. It traces the history of early cryptography, the âcypherpunkâ movement, and how the work of some cyber libertarians and cryptographers enabled the emergence of popular cryptocurrencies. The paper then focuses on Bitcoin. It delves into the technology behind the Bitcoin architecture and shows how exactly this technology works. The paper then does an analysis of security and regulatory considerations that affect the growth of Bitcoin-based businesses. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future work in the area.
Nicolas T. Courtois, Pinar Emirdag, Zhouyixing Wang
In this paper we study the question of centralisation in bitcoin digital currency. In theory bitcoin has been designed to be a totally decentralized distributed system. Satoshi Nakamoto has very clearly postulated that each node should be collecting recent transactions and trying to create new blocks (Satoshi08). In bitcoin transactions are aggregated in block in order to authenticate them and form an official ledger and history of bitcoin transactions. In practice as soon as expensive ASIC bitcoin miners have replaced general-purpose hardware, production of bitcoins and the validation of transactions has concentrated in the hands of a smaller group of people. Then at some moment in early 2012 an important decision was taken: the Stratum protocol was designed (Palatinus12) which took a deliberate decision to move the power of selecting which transactions are included in blocks from miners to pool managers. The growing difficulty of mining and large standard deviation in this process (Rosenfeld13; CourtoisBahack14) made that majority of miners naturally shifted to pooled mining. At this moment bitcoin ceased being a decentralized democratic system. In this paper we survey the question of a 51% attacks and show that there is a large variety of plausible attack scenarios. In particular we study one particularly subversive attack scenario which depends on non-trivial internal details of the bitcoin hashing process. How does it compare with the current mining practices? We have study the Stratum protocol in four popular real-life mining configurations. Our analysis shows that pools could very easily cheat the majority of people. However the most subversive versions of the attack are NOT facilitated and could potentially be detected.
Despite a high volatility and the recent fall in price, more and more merchants and consumers adopt Bitcoin. The virtual currency might be standing at its critical point to reach the early majority of adopters. This paper examines whether an application called ChangeTip has the potential to catalyze the breakthrough of Bitcoin. We assume a strong linkage between the diffusion of ChangeTip and Bitcoin so that we can directly deduce the impact of this application on Bitcoin. Results from a conducted online survey of 210 potential early adopters indicate that the diffusion of ChangeTip has the potential to advance the diffusion of Bitcoin to mainstream markets. We found that performance expectancy is the key driver for the intention to recommend ChangeTip. Also, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions are important factors for recommending ChangeTip. Concerning the intention to use ChangeTip in the future, performance expectancy and social influence are the main drivers. Furthermore, facilitating conditions are important for using ChangeTip. In addition, an analysis of the non-user of Bitcoin and ChangeTip was conducted. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.