Everybody throws around the term "blockchain" these days, like it's some secret sauce. But smart contracts are where things actually start to get interesting. Forget endless forms and relying on someone's handshake; smart contracts handle things automatically. They're just coded agreements that trigger themselves no middlemen, no second-guessing if someone's being honest. You know what you're getting. This review looks at how smart contracts are changing the game in two touchy areas: healthcare and voting, where trust and privacy can't be taken lightly. Dealing with healthcare is usually a hassle. People lose records, insurance companies bounce you around, and privacy feels flimsy. With smart contracts, you're in charge of your data, claims happen faster, and private info stays private. Doctors can share what they need to, without breaking the rules. Voting? It's had trust issues forever people aren't sure their votes count for anything. Smart contracts clean things up. They make voting more transparent, help stop fraud, and lock down the results. You can check your ballot and know nobody's changing numbers behind the scenes. Of course, it's not all smooth sailing blockchain slows down when things get big, laws haven't caught up, some of the interfaces are confusing, and big organizations don't like change. This paper covers what works, what needs help, and where things could go next.
1 Cryptocurrencies in Insolvency Proceedings Abstract The thesis explores how crypto-assets are situated within Czech insolvency law and examines how their technological properties interact with established institutions of bankruptcy proceedings. It starts from a practical observation: distributed-ledger-based assets appear in debtors' estates with growing frequency and in diverse roles-as means of exchange, as investment items, as collateral, or as parts of operational processes. This development raises new questions concerning legal characterisation, discovery and tracing, procedural securing, safe administration, and the choice of realisation methods for the benefit of creditors. The aim is to map these questions systematically, provide a clear vocabulary, and outline a working framework that enables decision-makers to act predictably while respecting efficiency, transparency, and equal treatment of creditors. The opening chapter recalls the foundational principles of Czech insolvency law and the roles of the main actors, with particular attention to the trustee's duties and the supervisory function of creditors' bodies. A concise technical primer then explains how crypto-assets function: the role of private keys and addresses, the nature of on-chain transactions, distinctions between custodial and...
The article examines the use of intellectual property as collateral and as a tool for attracting financing. It considers the legal and economic aspects of using intellectual property rights to secure loans and investments, as well as the associated investment risks. Russian and international experiences are analyzed. Special attention is given to the challenges of valuing intangible assets, high transaction complexity, and the prospects of digitalizing rights management using distributed ledgers. The article presents conclusions on the significance of intellectual property as a financial resource for innovative businesses and the development of high-tech industries.
The article examines the impact of legal protection of intellectual property on the investment attractiveness of the economy. It considers mechanisms for safeguarding intellectual property, including rights registration, patenting, and the use of digital technologies, as well as their role in reducing transaction costs and increasing investor confidence. The advantages of an effective intellectual property protection system for stimulating innovation, enhancing company capitalization, and developing high-tech industries are analyzed. Special attention is given to international aspects and the prospects for integrating distributed ledgers into economic processes.
Digital Transformation in Law
Security, Politics, and Digital Transformation
Digitalization and Economic Development in Agriculture
Communication protocol is a fundamental component of modern networking. With proliferation of networking and communication, users have become more concerned about privacy. This leads to development of end-to-end encrypted messaging systems which provides confidential communication. Besides confidentiality, there is an increasing demand for additional security properties such as unforgeability, anonymity, off-the-record (OTR), and consistency. However, efficiently achieving these properties simultaneously, especially on resource-constrained mobile devices, remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose MERIT, a novel multi-designated receiver authenticated broadcast encryption scheme that satisfies all the above security guarantees in a highly efficient manner. MERIT ensures the following key properties: (i) unforgeability prevents unauthorized parties from generating valid messages; (ii) privacy safeguards the messages and identities of the sender and receivers from non-designated parties; (iii) OTR ensures that receivers cannot later prove the origin of the messages even with their secret keys; and (iv) consistency ensures that all designated receivers obtain identical decrypted messages and identities. The core building block of MERIT is a practical multi-designated verifier signature (PMDVS), which might be of independent interest. We employed a novel batched cut-and-choose technology to prove that the ciphertext is well-formed. This results in an order-of-magnitude efficiency improvement in our scheme compared to its counterparts that rely on general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs. We then show how MERIT leverages PMDVS to provide unforgeability, privacy, OTR, and consistency in the scenario of group messaging. We provide security analysis to demonstrate that MERIT satisfies these security guarantees. We also conduct a thorough performance implementation, and the experimental results demonstrate that MERIT is highly efficient for deployment on mobile devices.
We present Processual Memory Architecture (PMA), a computational framework that unifies data storage and computation by representing all information as transformation functions rather than static state, rendering the traditional ontological distinction between them architecturally unnecessary. In PMA, storing information means encoding it as a mathematical transformation that produces the data when applied to a standardized canonical input; reading means applying the transformation; and computing means composing transformations. This inversion of the conventional von Neumann paradigm yields five emergent architectural properties—structural auditability, transparent reasoning, enforced constraints, tamper evidence, and reversibility—that collectively enable verifiable computation: systems that can mathematically verify the integrity and correctness of their own reasoning chains. We provide a complete mathematical specification of PMA over Galois fields GF(2k) with roundtrip exactness guarantees, constructive algorithms for both invertible and non-invertible encoding modes, and a reference permutation-based embodiment with explicit bit-level storage formats. We analyze thermodynamic properties under reversible logic implementation, demonstrating that PMA operations on adiabatic substrates can approach within 10× of the Landauer limit at the localnode level. We then present the integration architecture for PMA with artificial general intelligence (AGI) safety frameworks, showing how transformation-based reasoning enables safety constraints that are structural rather than advisory—creating systems where unsafe behavior is computationally undefined rather than merely prohibited. We discuss applications to financial auditing, medical AI verification, and autonomous systems governance, and compare PMA's approach to verifiable computation with existing paradigms including blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, and mechanistic interpretability.