Feroz Ahmad Ahmad, Prashant Kumar, Gulshan Shrivastava, Med Salim Bouhlel
ON 12 JANUARY 2009 a pseudonymous entity signed a transaction that instructed a distributed network to transfer a small amount of digital currency to Hal Finney, one ofthe key figures of the cypherpunk movement. After a few minutes, the transaction was recorded on a distributed public ledger, permanently updating the balance ofbothparties. This transaction— the first Bitcoin transaction—marked the beginning of a new era of decentralized payment systems, ushering in a variety of financial Services that do not depend on any centralized clearinghouse or other financial middleman. Bitcoin is regarded by many as a powerful technological innovation that could disrupt many sectors, in the realm of finance and beyond. But the underlying technology on which the network operates, the Bitcoin blockchain can do much more than that. Just as the internet did in the early-1990s, blockchain technology carries with it a whole new range of promises concerning how decentralization can support and promote individual freedoms and autonomy. Blockchain proponents believe that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency platforms will revolutionize mechanisms of value exchange in the same way that the internet transformed information sharing, by providing a platform for people to exchange digital resources, in a secure and decentralized manner without the need to rely on any intermediary or trusted authority. But this revolutionary potential also carries with it serious implications for censorship, intellectual property, and the regulated flow of information. A blockchain is a decentralized database of transactions maintained by a distributed network of computers, which all contribute to the verification and the validation of transactions. Once accepted, these transactions are recorded inside a “block” of transactions, which incorporates a reference to previous blocks. This creates a long chain of blocks—a “blockchain”—that stores the history of all transactions in a chronological order. Every block contains information about a particular set of transactions, a reference to the preceding block in the blockchain, and the answer to a complex mathematical puzzle that is used to validate the data associated with that block. A copy of the blockchain is stored on every computer in the network, making it virtually impossible for anyone unilaterally to modify the data stored on this decentralized database: if anyone tries to modify any transaction the fraud will be immediately detected by all other network participants.
Open access
42 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin is the first and most popular decentralized cryptocurrency to date. In this work, we extract and analyze the core of the Bitcoin protocol, which we term the Bitcoin backbone , and prove three of its fundamental properties which we call Common Prefix , Chain Quality, and Chain Growth in the static setting where the number of players remains fixed. Our proofs hinge on appropriate and novel assumptions on the “hashing power” of the protocol participants and their interplay with the protocol parameters and the time needed for reliable message passing between honest parties in terms of computational steps. A takeaway from our analysis is that, all else being equal, the protocol’s provable tolerance in terms of the number of adversarial parties (or, equivalently, their “hashing power” in our model) decreases as the duration of a message passing round increases. Next, we propose and analyze applications that can be built “on top” of the backbone protocol, specifically focusing on Byzantine agreement (BA) and on the notion of a public transaction ledger. Regarding BA, we observe that a proposal due to Nakamoto falls short of solving it, and present a simple alternative which works assuming that the adversary’s hashing power is bounded by 1/3. The public transaction ledger captures the essence of Bitcoin’s operation as a cryptocurrency, in the sense that it guarantees the liveness and persistence of committed transactions. Based on this notion, we describe and analyze the Bitcoin system as well as a more elaborate BA protocol and we prove them secure assuming the adversary’s hashing power is strictly less than 1/2. Instrumental to this latter result is a technique we call 2-for-1 proof-of-work (PoW) that has proven to be useful in the design of other PoW-based protocols.
In this chapter we provide an overview of the concept of blockchain technology and its potential to disrupt the world of banking through facilitating global money remittance, smart contracts, automated banking ledgers and digital assets. In this regard, we first provide a brief overview of the core aspects of this technology, as well as the second-generation contract-based developments. From there we discuss key issues that must be considered in developing such ledger based technologies in a banking context.
La versione italiana di questo documento è disponibile al seguente link: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2731132 The core technology of Bitcoin, the blockchain, has recently emerged as a disruptive innovation with a wide range of applications, potentially able to redesign our interactions in business, politics and society at large. Although scholarly interest in this subject is growing, a comprehensive analysis of blockchain applications from a political perspective is severely lacking to date. This paper aims to fill this gap and it discusses the key points of blockchain-based decentralized governance, which challenges to varying degrees the traditional mechanisms of State authority, citizenship and democracy. In particular, the paper verifies to which extent blockchain and decentralized platforms can be considered as hyper-political tools, capable to manage social interactions on large scale and dismiss traditional central authorities. The analysis highlights risks related to a dominant position of private powers in distributed ecosystems, which may lead to a general disempowerment of citizens and to the emergence of a stateless global society. While technological utopians urge the demise of any centralized institution, this paper advocates the role of the State as a necessary central point of coordination in society, showing that decentralization through algorithm-based consensus is an organizational theory, not a stand-alone political theory.
Blockchains represent a novel application of cryptography and information technology to ag-eold problems of financial record-keeping, and they may lead to far-reaching changes in corporate governance. Many major players in the financial industry have began to invest in this new technology, and stock exchanges have proposed using blockchains as a new method for trading corporate equities and tracking their ownership. This essay evaluates the potential implications of these changes for managers, institutional investors, small shareholders, auditors, and other parties involved in corporate governance. The lower cost, greater liquidity, more accurate recordkeeping, and transparency of ownership offered by blockchains may significantly upend the balance of power among these cohorts.
This article examines whether hitherto marginalized actors, industries and innovations – such as women, services industries and service innovations – could be acknowledged by the use of a bottom-up approach in innovation research in a way that helps make public innovation support more inclusive. It is scrutinized whether the relation between context, organization and outcomes in publically financed innovation networks such as clusters and innovation systems serves to highlight how more inclusive innovation support could be designed. Four regional innovation networks promoting women’s entrepreneurship and innovation in Sweden are analyzed by a bottom-up approach, since while emphasizing decentralization and inclusion in theory, most innovation theories and policies are in practice characterized by a top-down approach, ascribing superiority to certain actors, industries and innovations while marginalizing others in a distinct – often gendered – pattern. The bottom-up approach makes it possible to expose that being a marginalized actor in public innovation support is related to the organization of entrepreneurial types of innovation systems, based on contacts established ad hoc and resources gathered from scratch, making a wider range of actors, industries and innovations relevant than in insti-tutional types of innovation systems favored in prevalent public innovation support. By acknowledging both types of innovation systems, more inclusive innovation policies could be designed and more nuanced innovation theories could be developed.
Following the completion of the process of decentralization of the public administration in Poland in 2003, a number of tasks implemented so far by the state authorities were transferred to the local level. One of the most significant changes in the methods of financing and management of the local authorities was the transfer of culture and national heritage-related tasks to a group of the own tasks implemented by local governments. As a result of the decentralization process, the local government units in Poland were given a significant autonomy in determining the purposes of their budgetary expenditure on culture. At the same time they were obliged to cover these expenses from their own revenue. This paper focuses on the analysis of expenditure on culture covered by the provincial budgets, taking into consideration the structure of cultural institutions by their types in the years 2003, 2006, 2010 and 2012. To illustrate the diversity of the expenditure on culture by the type of the institutions in particular provinces, one applied the location quotient (LQ), which reflects a spatial distribution of expenditure on culture in relation to reference expenses incurred by the cultural institutions in Poland.
Christian Decker, Jochen Seidel, Roger Wattenhofer
The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong consistency. Our system, PeerCensus, acts as a certification authority, manages peer identities in a peer-to-peer network, and ultimately enhances Bitcoin and similar systems with strong consistency. Our extensive analysis shows that PeerCensus is in a secure state with high probability. We also show how Discoin, a Bitcoin variant that decouples block creation and transaction confirmation, can be built on top of PeerCensus, enabling real-time payments. Unlike Bitcoin, once transactions in Discoin are committed, they stay committed.
India today needs to have around 2,OO,OOO MW of power to meet its current energy needs, but it is able to provide only about two third of it. Additional finances are difficult to come by and the infrastructure is often not available to make it reach the remote areas. Heavy roistering in city areas has been a perpetual feature in some states. Many of the dwellers of small cities have come to depend on what is called an 'inverter' and its associated battery based storage system to cope up with the frequent power outages. Seen from another perspective these systems only lack the solar panels to become completely self contained power systems. Thus addition of solar panels to these will be only an incremental cost. By encouraging this approach several problems can be solved all the same time. First of all this additional investment will be from the users themselves. Next the power generated will be environmentally friendly and the regular power supply and the grid may need to be used sparingly. These storage based systems may become parts of Smart Grids for the future as they may be further evolved to feed power into the grid.Evaluation of the performance of these systems has been studied through simulation and the economics of the system has been investigated under various conditions for typical users. The proposed system has been compared with the early telecom systems in India that were based on land lines and could not be expanded fast enough. Later the privatized and decentralized wireless based approach provided the desirable solutions.
Despite the predominance of liberal ideology in the United States since its formation as an independent nation, the US has consistently expanded its capacity to finance and support the efforts of the private sector to create and commercialize new technologies in strategic sectors. As such, this study aims to identify and describe the characteristics of interventions by the American state to foster economic development. It also seeks to analyze how these characteristics fit within the different typologies of the Developmental State. A case study was conducted on the nanotechnology sector in the US, complemented by mini case studies on the computation, semiconductor, and biotechnology sectors. The empirical findings were compared to the ideal types of the Regulatory State, the Developmental Bureaucratic State, and the Developmental Network State. These ideal types were constructed using the Weberian model using concepts from the literature pertaining to the Developmental State. This study concludes that the American Developmental State has adopted a model that is closely related to the Developmental Network State, acting in a fragmented and decentralized manner, dedicated to promoting collaboration and joint action with the private sector. This is in line with the triple helix model (industry, academia, and government) with the intention of fostering development and growth of high-technology sectors, which are considered economically, scientifically, or militarily strategic. Furthermore, the State also carries out various actions designed to facilitate transforming technological innovations into commercialized products, with the idea of ensuring the country's scientific and technological leadership, its international competitiveness, the vitality of its domestic industry, and the dynamism of the national economy.
This paper reviews the waves of democratization and the development of the public administration and public finances in Hungary, with special attention municipalities caused by the changes in sub-national finance regulation since 2010. During the transition yeas, Hungary was very forward looking and the first among CEE countries to end central planning and to introduce market rules into the economy. Everybody expected the decentralization to be a success story. 25 years later, Hungary not only failed to meet the expectations, but also undergone though a situation in 2008 to start a massive recentralization process. This paper puts fiscal decentralization in Hungary in a historical context while critically investigating the findings of recent literatures on decentralization process in Hungary. The critical investigation of past experiences and reform steps of the current government suggest possible reform measures to solve the financial problems of Hungarian municipalities.
Open access
Local Government Finance and Decentralization
Regional Development and Policy
Hungarian Social, Economic and Educational Studies
The expansion of higher education across the globe is among the most profound developments of the last century, 1 with deep and broad ranging impact on societies, national economies, culture, attitudes and values. In 1900, about half a million students were enrolled in colleges and universities globally, or about 1% of the global college-aged population. By the end of the century, over 100 million students were enrolled, nearly 20% of the population of eligible youth. 2 Economic development is a significant factor in this massive expansion: “governments in many countries have come to believe that higher education is an engine of economic development,” and there is abundant evidence to support the belief. 3 Almost all countries host at least one national university, and these are usually considered central institutions for training the workforce and preserving cultural traditions and heritage. Among the Arab states of the Persian Gulf generally, the combination of a massive labor deficit, the abundance of discretionary wealth, and the overall lackluster performance of indigenous higher education systems propelled the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain to pursue “bold policy implementation” in the higher education arena. 4 Across the Persian Gulf, the higher education sector has become “a fertile zone of experimentation and entrepreneurship.” 5 The boldest — and by far the most expensive and prominent — of these initiatives has been the pursuit of international branch campuses (IBCs) of universities in the U.S. and Europe. IBCs have been in existence for nearly sixty years. While the UAE introduced the first IBC to the Gulf, and supports the largest number of them by far anywhere in the world, Qatar's Education City is an altogether new organizational form — an assemblage of 8 international branch campuses of U.S. and European universities combined into a single hub. In a region where much of what is considered innovative involves borrowing or importing from other contexts, Education City is a completely unprecedented development in the field of IBCs and global higher education. multiple IBCs operated by foreign universities from different sending countries formally de-coupled from each other but loosely affiliated through joint programs and research projects, cross-registration of students, administrative consultation, and other collaborations; complete autonomy over curriculum, hiring, admissions, and other core functions of the university's mission; equivalence between the curriculum and degrees conferred on the home campus and through the IBC; the existence of an integrative structure operated by the host country that mobilizes IBCs for joint educational programs, collective research initiatives, and other campus-by-campus collaborations, as well as manage some common administrative functions like financial aid and capital development; and complete funding by the host country for all personnel, building and operating expenses. This paper will examine some of the forces responsible for and describe the evolution of the IBC cluster model in Doha. After setting the context for Education City's role in Qatar's higher education strategy, we will review the unique constraints on small states as they develop a system of higher education. We will also situate Qatar's choice to pursue an IBC strategy within the development of IBCs globally and in the MENA region, before reviewing what little is known or can be surmised 7 about the factors that influenced Qatar's choice to devise a new model for national education. Finally, we will consider what all of this tells us about the ongoing process of educational innovation in Qatar. Like many developing societies, Qatar has turned to education as a primary vehicle for addressing the challenges of national development. The vision of education among Qatar's elite, however, is considerably more ambitious than most developing societies. 8 As first laid out in the Qatar National Vision 2030, Qatar's leadership expects that educational expansion and reform will transform Qatar's carbon economy to a “post-carbon” economy, or a “knowledge economy.” Educational and research institutions will not only train the workforce, they will become the workforce. Qatar created an institutional complex, Education City, which is intended to spearhead this transformation of the economy. … the Arab Gulf States are still generally considered to be part of the educational ‘periphery’ on the basis that they lack developed knowledge-based economies and embedded research culture, and because they rely on imported products such as materials, services, and expertise from the centre. 9 For these reasons and more, the choice of a “knowledge economy” as a development strategy is an implausible one for Qatar except for one important (and obvious) social fact — Qatar is staggeringly wealthy. As the world's largest producer of liquefied natural gas, in a few short years, Qatar has begun to top the list of countries ranked by GDP per capita when purchasing power parity is factored, according to the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (separately). 10 While growth rates since 2004 have fluctuated, most years saw annual growth at rates between 12% and 21%. 11 Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, controlled by the Qatar Investment Authority, is estimated well in excess of USD $100 billion as of February 2014 and is commonly thought to be the largest such fund in the world. 12 Qatar's wealth, then, compensates for the deficits in its labor pool by allowing it to attract millions of manual laborers and professional expatriates to serve the economy and pursue its ambitious plans for development. The capital city, Doha, now a metropolis with more than 2 million residents, had less than 500,000 residents in 1995. This is more than a four-fold increase in less than 25 years (and most of that growth has occurred since 2005, when the population was about 821,000). 13 This rapid increase is not the result of natural population growth, but rather a highly planned effort to recruit workers from around the world. The constraints on Qatar's development choices pushed the leadership to adapt a mixed strategy of traditional and innovative approaches to educational development. Qatar invested substantially in reforms of the elementary and secondary school system. It also invested heavily in the national university, Qatar University, to expand access, improve its educational programs, adapt them to the needs of Qatar's society and workforce, and expand its capacity to conduct research. It recruited global education professionals — most notably the RAND Corporation — to advise and assist with development and reform plans for the entire educational system. It also paid close attention to global educational benchmarks and standards set by UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank. 14 School reforms, of a national university, and of global are among the most common higher education development among states in the developing world, most states not Qatar's Education City, Qatar massive educational is the largest single educational anywhere in the world. in on the of the Doha, Education City a nearly complete of educational for through to elementary and secondary school a highly school an international school on the International model a school for with needs an which school for and the an educational training and The of the “knowledge however, is in its of international branch Education City is of international branch campuses operated by and European campuses degrees but a few and one a the first and only U.S. to be the United The IBCs of Education City University, University, University, School of University, of and Education City also supports universities operated by Qatar the Qatar of and Education City is by Qatar which also a for international students and a with the and years for all higher education institutions in Qatar as of of and in Qatar with Education City Education City is also among the most expensive national education in the world. for the are not to the but the annual for capital projects, personnel, and was of billion in The annual operating for in was to be an of USD million for years, with an between USD and million to in with operating an The of Education City, however, is less significant than the innovation it in the evolution of international branch While IBCs have been in since not Education City had multiple IBCs been into a combined “a of Qatar's because of its small it a set of In this we will review some of the small states as they a system of higher education. states a significant of the world's While of small states from to 5 of the states of the United of 3 million or less in states have been as of to of development from the of states around the This is less when of and institutions of higher education. education is and in small economies than in This be were the in small states as in In however, are usually in small states first because institutions have to and because they it to economies of In of the national educational systems of countries with a population of million or less in and that countries at the end of the population some on support … the of small states this of is 25 This in a of and training by in or out of the host of national by foreign programs and programs, foreign development of and in highly developed small societies, on capacity states to for In and for complete some or all of training in other In to these there is at least one significant that small states because of the of professional and educational in small states is only a few are known to each other and are in professional and social national educational — which are by and — small professional are by common professional and the of in small This can to an that of collective and as well as the of common to these This is the the list of from by and the that there is of innovation and in many small the innovative of Qatar's IBC cluster it is also to the of international branch campuses as an organizational model for higher education. The on the growth of the IBCs from the on The of a small of in the that the development of international branch on a short and by an review of the its first in by in and higher education that is in country from the which it or with some in the host and which at least one in the host country that is in the country of the of and International by for and International and The on of and IBCs by World by for and International and The on with all other the Arab states of the Gulf have been the most in the development and of The United Arab the first IBC in the Gulf region in the of by in As a result of a growth in the first of the the MENA region now for of IBCs in of these are in in the United Arab Emirates, 10 in Qatar, and 3 in in the Gulf, the MENA region generally has not the IBC model of higher education to other of the — U.S. and and the of and the of of IBCs in the MENA region with the of the world. of of IBCs in MENA by for and International and The on of the experimentation with IBCs is the of sending countries with which Gulf states have Qatar's on U.S. (and some universities is for which a of and all of the Gulf IBCs have the of with only IBCs as in the UAE of entire IBC have been in Qatar or Bahrain to according to the in from the to the is For in to the IBCs by in the plans for 7 IBCs in with 3 campuses In and countries for 10 of the largest IBCs as by population to campuses in the Gulf in and one in In among the planned by the — all of them to be in or — only one new IBC was in the MENA region at the of the — a to in the region of in In other the that the of IBCs in the Gulf and MENA for the come to an While Qatar some of the challenges as other small Qatar is also different in significant before in Qatar turned to of and foreign workers to labor deficits as the economy In across the Gulf have been for of because of the of and within the Gulf and with the The of and the of because of the of wealth and the of new As as with foreign that for the of and the and for when were not While leadership to such there was also as as when the of all foreign workers of in the labor is a with which and Gulf states have for at least a In Qatar, as with most small the higher education system was thought from the to be the for — or at least — the on foreign workers and for the of the economy to other than to the of the national liquefied natural to the of Qatar — the first and only indigenous in Qatar — the choices for to higher education were As these of in with universities in Saudi Arabia, and or the more and of education In the Qatar of Education a of and that foreign education with some to universities in the years the of the in the that and were enrolled in universities in the for students to the of and the common this not the number of students enrolled from In the and By were enrolled in higher education of Qatar, in the Arab the the and As these to Qatar, the with a as in the for higher education. As these students top in not only a of a in the but also a for building a a or in some the of Qatar in higher education more to The core of the of colleges in with foreign education at UNESCO, University, and The colleges were into of social and in to the of was in and the of about the of at a when primary and secondary school was its for more education not a for the of a national in the The Qatar to fund Qatar at and introduced a of reforms intended to for an international for and While it was the considered of by the different Gulf States at different that the of a in each Gulf was not on the basis of the small of the indigenous population and of the small number of national students eligible for all these because all these states to have national that leadership for to Qatar all had generally been In an that with for Education at Qatar at the (and now of that the primary in the of the leadership to Education City was to a education for the choice before the leadership as we on or we to other that that of IBC however, was not the first choice for the leadership of Qatar to the model was a single university, to top in and to the by Qatar to for the that universities were more to the of than the European universities that were After a and in the the on of in the United The vision was an unprecedented operated by much like campus in which not be over 10 years in the such model anywhere in the world. with in an with in when was of Qatar that Qatar of was about a that was in the top 10 but we that there was one that was at of a with in that the was by a they a for a an school and a in that to first considered the of universities of which there are in and Saudi Arabia, for on to that these were because of them had far to on the international were it that setting an and it was only to recruit an that to a education of the and was to the as that in the United In the of an of the of Qatar and Education City, it is to when the of an IBC cluster model It is the between and Qatar first with an to education in was in with School of the this was not a branch campus educational programs but it was not to a in leadership believe that the to an IBC cluster model was well the with In Qatar its with School to a branch campus and a complete that in rapid Qatar with universities to IBCs in in in in 2005, and in by with European in and in other IBCs are planned for Education The with innovation in the evolution of This was the first an a complete — and one that was on from the at the home of the Education City IBCs this The by the IBCs in are by the as the at the campuses the of that with In many the to students by the IBCs and the to and the of the home only and not the of the campus where was for the of the IBCs in to and the educational with the While not by all these and of campus with the campus in joint research between of the of to Education City students to in campus of students in with programs and that students to the and between and campus by and students for joint projects, and For most years of its it was not thought to the Education City and there are about the of the IBC cluster It was considered far expensive for other countries to or This will be to the in the years as IBC come — in and in for a of the planned of IBCs that each university, of which have In these campuses have begun to the cluster model as they new of For U.S. institutions all of the programs in Education the model the system of higher education. Among other this students to for and to with a more of It also the of joint programs and with of IBC in and for was from and and for from the university's on 2014 … have had to of in one has a more system of institutional in with the its more to a set of challenges for the first The most significant core of the IBC cluster in Education City are its in and and the autonomy to the While Qatar of campus and for many common services, the IBCs are only loosely by some programs, collaborations, and This a of that campuses to adapt to challenges that from the of the home the of institutional and cultural traditions of the home and the needs of the curriculum they in Doha. The challenges by and a branch campus are many and are of challenges that have been to the branch campuses of Education have to preserving between and standards on campus and the branch campus in education and the of the branch campus to a and with the and to among and Qatar While on some there is in the IBCs these they have that the and constraints that result from the home traditions and the home campuses were to in Education City, the to and of institutional many of admissions, the of and services, and and institutional review performance and and many other The IBCs in much autonomy they have to manage these and are with the home campus for and however, have generally been on the branch campuses — these the overall the branch campuses were to adapt to a for is not commonly the first of and are not nearly as to as in the U.S. of the home campuses have the for have and to a on the branch branch campuses to the of the home campus to of research with and about the of In Qatar that all research be by a and the universities were to While the of Education City is to the of the the to Qatar is Among the IBCs in Education City, there are different and is by Qatar these functions across it were the of the with Qatar is not a because of the of and that are by the and traditional of the home In to the this Qatar to these functions or to conduct or for growth or common the number of students, or in Education City because there is with this U.S. for are by the Educational and which the from with the also Qatar in for the of it has created at The IBCs are as part of the process of the home not as there is system that the IBCs or Education City as a the support of Qatar U.S. and World is its first among institutions of higher education it has in the MENA As as is for the branch it is a of for Qatar which a more campus and a for students, and as products of Education City rather than only of one campus or The of in was in part an effort by Qatar to a more role in the of the IBCs of Education The of is to programs the and in Education City through new colleges — operated by Qatar — in and and social and and As an research is also to serve Qatar's Qatar National and national development through the development of a global research in Doha. As plans to the and of its and out to and new to in research and While the of new colleges many years to programs in education from the in Education of such programs is in in This involves a among the of the education and of and the policy expertise of In to programs, the IBCs of Education City have begun to joint initiatives in to and For in and a joint in and on the of each This of be out of the for the home institutions because of the between the however, is not an in Education the of Education City and the IBCs is a for as they the on As the cluster model of IBCs of around the world, the of its also more and more to educational and The of Education City will be an important — not the only one — of other are to the this in its short however, not much is known about the overall impact of Education City on and there are that the of the performance of students, or the of for the about the power of educational institutions to transform the sector and society more generally be for some a or more, are and into at the as the that this is what will In the a few the challenges and the IBCs can be as the where according to the as many as IBC campuses with of the Education City IBCs have or of In as of of the IBCs have with Qatar and are are not for for of also to be at a While is — and there is across — a within a of among for in Qatar. with the of it is the important that from the and educational about the IBC cluster and Education as an at an IBC in Education City for over years, have a of to Education City, from support and to and While this is by an the most common by of Education City on the the expensive with the the of cultural and that is thought to be by foreign or the of the central that highly will transform the economy for the or serve the primary of the the of an IBC standards have been in to the educational has been because the is Qatar and the for financial and the of the institutions in Education City it to most and an educational system that that other universities in Qatar. were to the embedded in these they are not to be at The in society and about the for development in a as well as within the home institutions and education in the U.S. and Europe. of these are not and in fact are by and to all of these have Qatar and the IBCs are well of and have to or to the For in to with the home campus and in some universities have with campus and have programs and review of the IBCs host from the campus and have of the campus to the Qatar As for the at IBCs with campus in to IBCs in Education City also students to a or enrolled in on the campus and with joint through In to such programs also the IBCs a with the home In one Qatar of an IBC cluster model as the of higher education in Qatar a that small states have to develop educational systems — that of for of higher education development that can be or for in the home Qatar's for consultation, and labor is and will not in the U.S. and to education and educational to them the nearly at on the and the international in higher education is only to to in Education City has not its are massive plans for expansion of (and research capacity in the years. In Qatar the Qatar and to innovative between the research and development of global and the Qatar a of research within Education City that will and research addressing many of the national the Qatar and the Qatar and the Qatar is for a in the social The largest research in the is to in The of the Qatar National has on an that will serve as Qatar's National and plans to attract as many as to by a of years, a of an entire research system that all of the most significant — from the to and in plans that most small states not of the IBC cluster model of Education City is not in states because of the and operating as we have there are of of the IBC cluster The of these will the of the IBC cluster model and it will become a for higher education development in small and The is for and by the of this by the of the for International and at School of in Qatar, and the of the on The and in the and many about the development of higher education and research at the School of in Qatar, also with the of and the of IBC This paper in part from research that was by from the Qatar National Fund of Qatar The are the of the
Magnus Skjegstad, Anil Madhavapeddy, Jon Crowcroft
Devices connected to the Internet today have a wide range of local communication channels available, such as wireless Wifi, Bluetooth or NFC, as well as wired backhaul. In densely populated areas it is possible to create heterogeneous, multihop communication paths using a combination of these technologies, and often transmit data with lower latency than via a wired Internet connection. However, the potential for sharing meshed wireless radios in this way has never been realised due to the lack of economic incentives to do so on the part of individual nodes. In this paper, we explore how virtual currencies such as Bitcoin might be used to provide an end-to-end incentive scheme to convince forwarding nodes that it is profitable to send packets on via the lowest latency mechanism available. Clients inject a small amount of money to transmit a datagram, and forwarding engines compete to solve a time-locked puzzle that can be claimed by the node that delivers the result in the lowest latency. This approach naturally extends congestion control techniques to a surge pricing model when available bandwidth is low. We conclude by discussing several latency-sensitive applications that would benefit for this, such as video streaming and local augmented reality systems.
Recent technological advances have given rise to the popularity and success of cloud. This new paradigm is gaining an expanding interest, since it provides cost efficient architectures that support the transmission, storage, and intensive computing of data. However, these promising storage services bring many challenging design issues, considerably due to the loss of data control. These challenges, namely data confidentiality and data integrity, have significant influence on the security and performances of the cloud system. This thesis aims at overcoming this trade-off, while considering two data security concerns. On one hand, we focus on data confidentiality preservation which becomes more complex with flexible data sharing among a dynamic group of users. It requires the secrecy of outsourced data and an efficient sharing of decrypting keys between different authorized users. For this purpose, we, first, proposed a new method relying on the use of ID-Based Cryptography (IBC), where each client acts as a Private Key Generator (PKG). That is, he generates his own public elements and derives his corresponding private key using a secret. Thanks to IBC properties, this contribution is shown to support data privacy and confidentiality, and to be resistant to unauthorized access to data during the sharing process, while considering two realistic threat models, namely an honest but curious server and a malicious user adversary. Second, we define CloudaSec, a public key based solution, which proposes the separation of subscription-based key management and confidentiality-oriented asymmetric encryption policies. That is, CloudaSec enables flexible and scalable deployment of the solution as well as strong security guarantees for outsourced data in cloud servers. Experimental results, under OpenStack Swift, have proven the efficiency of CloudaSec in scalable data sharing, while considering the impact of the cryptographic operations at the client side. On the other hand, we address the Proof of Data Possession (PDP) concern. In fact, the cloud customer should have an efficient way to perform periodical remote integrity verifications, without keeping the data locally, following three substantial aspects : security level, public verifiability, and performance. This concern is magnified by the client’s constrained storage and computation capabilities and the large size of outsourced data. In order to fulfill this security requirement, we first define a new zero-knowledge PDP proto- col that provides deterministic integrity verification guarantees, relying on the uniqueness of the Euclidean Division. These guarantees are considered as interesting, compared to several proposed schemes, presenting probabilistic approaches. Then, we propose SHoPS, a Set-Homomorphic Proof of Data Possession scheme, supporting the 3 levels of data verification. SHoPS enables the cloud client not only to obtain a proof of possession from the remote server, but also to verify that a given data file is distributed across multiple storage devices to achieve a certain desired level of fault tolerance. Indeed, we present the set homomorphism property, which extends malleability to set operations properties, such as union, intersection and inclusion. SHoPS presents high security level and low processing complexity. For instance, SHoPS saves energy within the cloud provider by distributing the computation over multiple nodes. Each node provides proofs of local data block sets. This is to make applicable, a resulting proof over sets of data blocks, satisfying several needs, such as, proofs aggregation

 
 
 This article examines whether hitherto marginalized actors, industries and innovations – such as women, services industries and service innovations – could be acknowledged by the use of a bottom-up approach in innovation research in a way that helps make public innovation support more inclusive. It is scrutinized whether the relation between context, organization and outcomes in publically financed innovation networks such as clusters and innovation systems serves to highlight how more inclusive innovation support could be designed. Four regional innovation networks promoting women’s entrepreneurship and innovation in Sweden are analyzed by a bottom-up approach, since while emphasizing decentralization and inclusion in theory, most innovation theories and policies are in practice characterized by a top-down approach, ascribing superiority to certain actors, industries and innovations while marginalizing others in a distinct – often gendered – pattern. The bottom-up approach makes it possible to expose that being a marginalized actor in public innovation support is related to the organization of entrepreneurial types of innovation systems, based on contacts established ad hoc and resources gathered from scratch, making a wider range of actors, industries and innovations relevant than in institutional types of innovation systems favored in prevalent public innovation support. By acknowledging both types of innovation systems, more inclusive innovation policies could be designed and more nuanced innovation theories could be developed.
 
 
Perkembangan teknologi informasi dan didukung pula dengan teknologi komputer yang semakin canggih serta adanya jaringan internet yang menciptakan terkoneksinya perangkat-perangkat komputer baik berbentuk personal komputer maupun super komputer sehingga terciptanya aktivitas bisnis dengan teknologi jaringan internet atau disebut electronic commerce (e-commerce). Maka dari sinilah lahir pula mata uang virtual dunia maya (virtual currency) dengan konsep nilai berdasarkan supply dan demand serta mudah, praktis dan efisien dalam melakukan transaksi perdagangan maupun bisnis lainnya. Namun dampak terbesar dalam transaksi online seperti ini diantaranya adalah penipuan, pencurian dan kerugian yang akan dialami pengguna secara tidak wajar. \nBerangkat dari masalah di atas ada beberapa permasalahan yang dirumuskan untuk mengetahui analisis jual-beli bitcoin di dunia maya yaitu meliputi bagaimana analisis undang-undang tentang mata uang terhadap alat tukar bitcoin dan prespektif hukum Islam terhadap jual-beli bitcoin di dunia maya. Penyusun memilih tempat penelitian tersebut di website bitcoin exchanger (www.vip.bitcoin.co.id.) \nDalam menelusuri, menjelaskan dan menyimpulkan objek pembahasan pada skripsi ini. Penyusun menempuh metode jenis penelitian lapangan di dunia maya dengan menggunakan metode observasi partisipasif lengkap dimana peneliti menjadi bagian dalam aktivitas pada sumber data yang diteliti. Untuk mendapatkan informasi secara akurat, aktual dan terpercaya. Penyusun melakukan beberapa metode pengumpulan data yakni menggunakan metode wawancara, observasi dan dokumentasi yang selanjutnya dianalisis menggunakan metode deskriptif kualitatif. \nDari hasil penelitian ini dapat disimpulkan yakni analisis Undang-Undang No 7 Tahun 2011 Tentang Mata uang, bahwa bitcoin yang dijadikan alat tukar dalam pembayaran di Negara Indonesia ini termasuk melanggar undang-undang karena undang-undang sudah mengatur mengenai alat pembayaran yang sah di Indonesia. Penggunaan bitcoin tidak dijadikan sebagai alat tukar atau hanya sebagai komoditas ini tidak dipermasalahkan secara yuridis karena tidak ada peraturan yang mengatur maupun melarang dari OJK atau Bank Indonesia terhadap bitcoin. Akan tetapi terkait resiko seperti kehilangan dan kerugian itu ditanggung sendiri oleh penggunanya sebagaimana siaran pers “Pernyataan Bank Indonesia Terkait Bitcoin dan Virtual Currency Lainnya” No: 16/ 6 /DKom. Dalam prespektif hukum Islam bitcoin yang dijadikan sebagai alat tukar maupun alat investasi diharamkan. Sebab praktek yang terjadi terdapat unsur gharar dan maisir, serta menghindari kemadharatan yang dapat terjadi pada pengguna.
Democratic movements, market mechanisms, and decentralization reforms have been at the heart of transformation of former USSR republics. Republic of Moldova was not an exception. The initial argument behind such fascination with these reforms stems from the idea that market mechanisms in an open and democratic society will facilitate the efficient and effective resources’ allocation, compensating for interim distributive inequities and macro-economic challenges. Such a natural experiment has been in progress for more than 20 years in the Republic of Moldova. During these 20 years Moldova experienced democracy in its infancy, democratic return of communism, and once again return to democracy and its core ideas and values. Public administration system along with public finance and budgeting systems experienced comparably abrupt changes in their development. This qualitative study of Moldovan public administration and finance frameworks will provide an evaluative description of these three distinct, but interrelated periods in Moldovan history of independence and development of public administration and public budgeting systems. Such description will allow for evaluation of the public administration and public finance systems’ developments in Moldova as well as reasons of success and failure of these reforms.
The purpose of this paper is to give a general overview on the decentralization process and on the financial autonomy of local government units in Albania. The principal base for the analysis done is the legal framework, accompanied shortly with examples of its implementation in several communes or municipalities. The paper is organised in 3 issues, which treat respectively the organization of local government in Albania, decentralization of functions and responsibilities in favour of the units of local government, and their budget and resources of financing. There has been some difficulties in practice during decentralization process raised out when fulfilling the whole legal framework on exercising exclusive and shared competences of local units of government, because of the dependence by the respective institutions for the implementation of legal acts for exclusive and shared functions in the fields of education, economic support and health care, and by lack of funds of the responsible ministry to transfer the service of water supply. In Albania seems yet early to give right importance to regions, and especially with regard to the aspirations for European integration many challenges raise to the Albanian institutions.
The main subject of this thesis is a paradigm of instability and stabilization in coalition forming among countries as rational actors, presented through a Statistical Physics inspired model.This is an interdisciplinary work involving the fields of applied mathematics and sociophysics, as well as the political applications in the real cases from past and present. Applied to political,economic and social problems, the models can be used to analyze a wide variety of real cases -- international alliances, economic or business alliances, coalitions of political parties, socialnetworks, and organizational structures.In the first part of this thesis we present and analyze the coalition forming and the instability among rational actors coupled with pairwise static historical propensity bonds that have evolvedindependently. Such organization leads to discordant associations into coalitions and the instability as a consequence of decentralized maximization of the individual benefits gained fromjoining or leaving the coalitions. We define Natural Model of coalition forming and address the questions of instability and stabilization among actors possessing different levels of rationality. The framework presented here allows to analytically calculate the optimal and non-optimal stable configurations of actors' coalitions. We then investigate the coalition forming and the stabilization under the influence of externally-set opposing global alliances, which are represented in Global Alliance Model. The stabilization is produced through new cooperations based on the effect of polarization of several distinct interests shared by actors, which generates interest-based propensities and enables a planned coalition forming. We then investigate the effect of dissolution of a global alliancewhich, together with the competing alliance, has previously generated stable coalitions.A special section of the thesis is devoted to investigation and illustration of coalition forming in real historical cases. This part presents the analysis of unstable coalitions in Europe - cycling in the England-Spain-France conflicting triangle and creation of the Italian state, as well as of the remarkable historical cases of the Soviet global alliance collapse, of the recent internal conflict in Syria, and of the "paradoxical stability" in the Eurozone.In the second part of this thesis, we present a simulation of the coalition forming models. The simulation allows to follow graphically the coalition forming processes. We present the methodology used in the simulation, as well as its application in the illustration of coalition forming in the prototypes of real case systems. Given exact propensity values, which is fairly consideredto be the most difficult part of coalition forming modeling, the simulation tool can be used to predict optimal and non-optimal spontaneous stabilizations and globally motivated stabilities inreal cases.An independent part of the thesis is devoted to the subject of viability correction in dynamic network of actors. The model is a finite set of autonomous actors with states that evolveindependently and connected into a network via their connection operators, which evolve independently as well. The network is defined to be viable if a joint evolution satisfies the centralized scarcity constraints set by the environment. In order to restore the viability of these decentralized dynamics, we apply to the method of correction by viability multipliers used in Viability Theory, where the multipliers play the role of decentralizing prices. Standing apart from the main course of the thesis, the subject of viability correction in dynamic network of actors suggests an interesting theoretic dynamical generalization of coalition stabilization in our models inspired from Statistical Physics.
Dániel Kondor, István Csabai, János Szüle, Márton Pósfai · 5 authors
A main focus in economics research is understanding the time series of prices of goods and assets. While statistical models using only the properties of the time series itself have been successful in many aspects, we expect to gain a better understanding of the phenomena involved if we can model the underlying system of interacting agents. In this article, we consider the history of Bitcoin, a novel digital currency system, for which the complete list of transactions is available for analysis. Using this dataset, we reconstruct the transaction network between users and analyze changes in the structure of the subgraph induced by the most active users. Our approach is based on the unsupervised identification of important features of the time variation of the network. Applying the widely used method of Principal Component Analysis to the matrix constructed from snapshots of the network at different times, we are able to show how structural changes in the network accompany significant changes in the exchange price of bitcoins.
Chain Of A Lifetime: How Blockchain Technology Might Transform Personal Insurance is the outcome of a research project conducted between August and December 2014 which explored how blockchain technology might transform personal insurance and in particular interactions among individuals and insurance companies over time.
Blockchain technology's main innovation is an electronic public transaction record of integrity without central authority. Beside cryptocurrencies and distributed payment systems, blockchain applications could include areas of finance where a central, trusted third party has traditionally been used, trade reporting, depository receipts, escrow accounts or trade finance. Blockchains can contain set of documents, record assets and help to manage interconnected devices. Emerging applications, such as smart contracts and decentralised autonomous organisations, might in future also permit blockchains to act as automated agents.
The report concludes that blockchain technology could transform the way people manage identities and personal information; blur even further the divide between global and local; influence consumer perception of time; drive honesty and transparency; and, influence consumer perceptions of risk that could change the way insurers support mutualisation. The report highlights how, at the time of writing, most insurance companies do not yet seem ready to experiment with blockchain technology. They find it difficult enough to understand Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. Non-insurers are more likely to be the first to create insurance or insurance-related applications. Blockchain applications in insurance are likely to start with digital identity systems and management of personal data.