Blockchain Papers

José Alexander Manjarres Márquez, Ramiro Enrique Salazar Ramos, E. Pérez

This article reviews the Colombian regulatory system, which has developed various forms of transferring resources from the national level to the local level for financing social expenditures, primarily in education, which is the sector with the highest allocation. Subsequently, the current system is described, which grants the most representative transfers from the nation to territorial entities to address sector-specific social expenditure. To analyze the resources allocated to the education sector in the Sucre department during the period 2010-2020 in practice and to determine if the transfer system effectively aims at fiscal decentralization, coupled with strengthening local and departmental capacities to autonomously manage transferred resources and efficiently manage tax collection and the acquisition of own resources. The work was developed using a mixed-method methodology, allowing for the approach of quantitative data to support qualitative analyses of the research using primary and secondary sources, as well as the observation of socioeconomic phenomena, establishing concurrent triangulation design.

Е.А. Мосакова

The article focuses on ways to assess the origin and development of the first national currency in the world which was introduced into circulation in Venezuela in 2018.Besides, it sets the goal to find out specific features of Petro (PTR) and its operation as Venezuelan national cryptocurrency.The methodological basis consists of general scientific methods of cognition to include analysis, synthesis, and comparison.The special methods such as content analysis of official documents as well as economic analysis are also applied in the article.The research produced some key findings: recent surveys confirm its new function of becoming a convenient means of payment in the environment of the cash absence, and a means of survival for many families living in the environment of a deepening economic crisis and sanctions introduce by the USA.The main outcomes imply that the national cryptocurrency PRT has some advantages over other cryptocurrencies, one of them being the fact that unlike Bitcoin and other currencies it is issued by the Venezuelan government and has a state guarantee of reliability and stability when operating in the country.However, it is not without disadvantages, the main one being the possibility of its anonymous usage which has resulted in an increased flow of illegal transactions and a larger shadow economy which has grown significantly in Venezuela.The main conclusions drawn from the research are that the introduction of the national cryptocurrency had produced a positive impact on the economic development of the country.In fact, it resulted in an increase in the number of financial transactions within the country; it led to additional opportunities concerning exchanges with other countries and international financing of Venezuela by third parties; the cryptocurrency contributed to the integration of Venezuela into a new type of the world market.

Carlos Duarte Torres

This research focuses on the analysis of the Colombian multiculturalism through an operative characterization. In this sense, the assessment of multicultural policies goes beyond the traditional discourse analysis, and instead it empirically reviews the implementation of differential rights translated into concrete public policies. To meet this goal, this study first explores the different symbolic schemes of the relationship between the State-Nation and the indigenous populations. In a second stage, it analyses how the policies that recognize cultural difference since 1991, are articulated with a project of state modernization of neoliberal characteristics, that is exemplified by the territorial decentralization phenomena. Finally, this research presents an analysis of the actual effects of multiculturalism in the fields of health, education, economic production and political governance for the Misak people, specifically for the Resguardo Mayor de Guambia, an indigenous reserve located in the department of Cauca. From this case study, readers will be able to discover how in the Colombian context, there are un-meet aspects (des-encuentros) and paradoxical effects between the Government’s neoliberal vision on public policies, the dynamics of ethnic recognition promoted by the state and the communitarian autonomous processes advocated by indigenous organizations.

Kent Eaton

In recent years, decentralization and regional autonomy measures have figured prominently in negotiations designed to end some of the world's most important conflicts, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan. Reforms that shift powers to subnational units deserve the attention of those who are trying to promote security via institutional design, but the risks associated with these territorial reforms are considerable. When political and economic resources are transferred to subnational governments in the attempt to create meaningful access to the political system for former combatants, the great risk is that these same resources can be used to finance a continuation of the armed struggle instead. In response to the popularity of territorial reforms in many post-conflict settings, this paper sounds a cautionary note by evaluating the negative impact of decentralization on security in Colombia, site of Latin America's longest and deadliest armed conflict. After analyzing the design decisions of reformers who hoped that decentralization would help end the conflict, I argue that decentralization in fact financed the expansion of armed clientelism by illegal groups on both the left and right. Thanks to the weakness of the police in much of the national territory, guerrillas and paramilitaries have been able to use decentralized resources to destabilize the state, limiting even further its monopoly over the use of force and creating what are in effect parallel states on the left and right.

Eduardo Chaves, Julio Salazar

Elections around the world have become a major international concern since the inception of modern democracy. It is a fact that the success of any democracy depends largely on its electoral process. In conducting a free and credible election, the process must be transparent to be adjudged credible. The electioneering process begins with the compilation of a voter register; this register contains the details of every eligible voter as stipulated by law or guild lines that guilds the electoral process. As part of what makes up, the guidelines are age restrictions for every intended voter. It is forbidding by law in most countries for a child to register as a voter, but this is not so in reality in most countries, especially in a developing nation. Because the age restriction is not obeyed, this has resulted in the incidences of underage voters and disputed election outcomes. This work provides an efficient and effective solution for the above concerns, using multiple digital solutions. The model will be integrating a deep learning Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), an Interplanetary File System (IPFS), and an Ethereum Smart Contract Blockchain. The role of the CNN is to detect any underage individual who intends to register as a voter. The CNN is built with a pretrained dataset, and it was trained with an age classifier that grouped the age on the images on the data set into eight distinct groups. This age grouping will help the age predictive algorithm estimate and place every image on the camera in a unique age group. This will only produce a binary result, which is "eligible to voter or not eligible to vote." This outcome is based on the preset threshold cut-off on the age group. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) will provide a large storage capacity that will allow for off-chain data storage and still provide the model with all the functionalities and benefits of the blockchain. It also provides a hashing function that will assign and identify every registered voter with a unique cryptographic Identity. This ID will prevent the storage of the same information into the database, in so doing, eliminating multiple voting. Finally, the blockchain will provide a voting platform where the model will be implemented. It will allow every registered voter with a unique ID to create an account and vote on the blockchain. The adapted CNN was tested and evaluated and shows 85.9% performance accuracy, and when compared against two other age predictive models, it recorded an increase of 1.2%. In comparison, the complete digital solution model recorded 95.3% in performance. We believe this model will perform even better when subjected to further research work.