Blockchain Papers

Mark Wynn, The Society of Christian Philosophers

In this collection of essays (old and new), Kai Nielsen offers a characteristically clear and forthright formulation of a perspective for which he is already well known.There is not much in the book that engages in detail with recent developments in analytic philosophy of religion; indeed, Nielsen comments that because of its habitual neglect of certain questions, philosophy of religion in this style fails to make any serious demand upon our attention: "I suppose we could analytically reconstruct and conceptually clarify Mary Baker Eddy's metaphysical tract too, but that would hardly enhance interest in it or further our understanding of the significance of religion.These analytical philosopher-theologians need first, against the antimetaphysical arguments of Wittgenstein, Davidson, Rorty, and Putnam, to give us some reason to think that there is in the sorts of things they are doing something significant" (p.20).A second, related difficulty for mainstream analytic philosophy of religion is that it is "very rationalistic"; rather than worrying about new versions of the traditional proofs, "what is crucial to face instead is whether we need a belief, however overwhelmed with intellectual impediments, in a Jewish, Christian or Islamic God to make sense of our lives and to live really human lives" (p.21).In these remarks, Nielsen sets two kinds of challenge for contemporary philosophical theology: to confront the difficulties inherent in any kind of metaphysical claim, and to consider whether religious commitment can be understood, and perhaps justified in some degree, by reference to its contribution to human flourishing.Let's take these challenges in tum.Nielsen evidently thinks it rather obvious that a metaphysically committed kind of religious belief is intellectually defective.Indeed, thinking in particular of the metaphysical dimension of religious belief, he comments: "I remain utterly flabbergasted that reflective, intelligent, and informed people ... can be believers" (p.393).Naturally Nielsen wonders whether his inability to understand the commitments of 'intelligent and informed' people raises a question about whether he has fully understood what is at stake here.Even so, the very obviousness of the case for atheism, from his point of view, seems at times to get in the way of a detailed presentation of

Usman Khalil, Owais Ahmed Malik, Wee-Hong Ong, Mueen Uddin

The concept of smart city architecture requires a comprehensive solution that can combine real-time response applications for cyber-physical systems. However, the architecture faces challenges that can obstruct the operations in terms of systems, processes, and data flow as far as the breach risk is concerned. Though the field has been researched with the existence of centralized and distributed architectures to support smart cities. Research gaps regarding security concerns, platform assistance, and resource management continue to persist. This research article presents a novel blockchain-based architecture that proposes expansion in the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to cater to the expansion of IoT-enabled smart assets. It enables NFTs to employ fog computing for all users and smart devices connected to a fog node in a cyber-physical system. The proposed expansion suggested in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for IoT assets representation in a cyber-physical system, provides devices and user identification and authentication functionality. The proposed NFT architecture has been designed to provide a smart city solution for cyber-physical systems that ensures robust security features (such as CIA) by introducing new attributes and functions for Owner, User, Fog, and IoT device/s authentication. The validation and rigor of the security services, efficiency, and latency have been achieved by deployments on private and public ledgers. The efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of the suggested functions and components have been evaluated in terms of evaluation cost and time complexity which resulted in promising results, obtained and validated on a testnet. The evaluation cost for the devised mint component was approximately 81%, and devised approve() was approximately 23% more efficient than other solutions.