Bitcoin is a digital currency that aims to offer anonymity. However, anonymity is less secure than it is believed to be because it is based on using pseudonyms for addresses. To demonstrate this weakness, we used statistics related to transaction histories and the frequency of transactions to deanonymize a set of bitcoin addresses. In this paper, we explore the fundamental properties of Bitcoin addresses based on actual Bitcoin transaction data. We propose a new method for deanonymizing Bitcoin addresses from a set of output addresses and we demonstrate that 80.5% of addresses could be identified.
Resumo Este artigo apresenta uma nova tecnologia de informação chamada Smart Contract (SC) como proposta para automação da gestão de contratos no processo de comercialização do gás natural. O centro decisor, ao avaliar essa opção, deve estimar com antecedência seu impacto para o futuro. A proposta de utilização da SC encontra fundamentos para implementação no contexto atual do mercado de gás natural brasileiro, englobando os principais players desse comércio, isto é, governo, organização e consumidor. Este artigo propõe uma abordagem exploratória sobre a SC, pois busca-se um melhor entendimento sobre seus atributos, haja vista que não há estudos anteriores com aplicação do SC ao peculiar mercado de gás brasileiro. A metodologia é qualitativa porque trata-se de aspectos subjetivos na utilização da tecnologia de informação. Foi com auxílio de questionário satisfatoriamente respondido por dois especialistas que contribuíram para o processo de compreensão da viabilidade do uso do SC. Apresento dois possíveis cenários na utilização da SC para fomentar a discussão considerando o status quo do mercado de gás brasileiro. A técnica de coleta de dados sobre os construtos foi feita através da pesquisa documental da emergente literatura sobre Smart Contract, Blockchain e o atual mercado de gás natural no Brasil.
Now a days many applications are being built using the immutability and robustness of blockchain. Blockchain is a new class of information technology which combines cryptography and distributed ledger that already exists. The model is composed of a group of computers that collaborate towards maintaining a secured database, without storing the data at any central unit. It is the technology behind all the crypto currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Etherum and now finding its way to record everything possible. This paper focuses on the basic framework of blockchain model, its development history, prerequisites and challenges of blockchain. Finally, various current real time applications of the technology are discussed.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abstract: This article explores whether the legal landscape will be fundamentally changed in view of the emergence of smart contracts in China. Beyond the phenomenon of bitcoin supported by blockchain technology, we examine the development of smart contracts on blockchain with a close scrutiny of their merits and limits, and the intrinsic legal uncertainties in their application. The main argument is that while the gaps between the regulatory framework and the business practice can be identified, for most parts, the current legal framework can accommodate or mitigate the legal risks brought about by smart contracts. Résumé: Cet article pose la question si le paysage juridique sera fondamentalement changé par l’émergence des contrats intelligents en Chine. À part du phénomène du Bitcoin qui s’appuie sur la technologie Blockchain, nous examinons le développement des contrats intelligents en Blockchain avec une étude approfondie de leurs mérites et limites ainsi que les incertitudes légales qui sont intrinsèques à leur application. L’argument principal est que, bien qu’on puisse identifier des différences entre le cadre réglementaire et la pratique d’affaires, le cadre juridique contemporain peut, pour la plupart, accommoder ou mitiger les risques légaux causés par les contrats intelligents.
Abstract As world economy evolved over years, barter which is a primitive transaction system left its place to money system. Commodity and bimetallic systems of money resolved the problems, especially the requirement of double coincidence of wants and eased the trade within parties. Chronologically, paper system of money followed the commodity system and implemented via two methods. In the first method, convertible paper money is converted into gold and silver by the authority that issued paper money. In the second method that is still valid today, fiat money is accepted by parties because of its being a legal tender. Money supply definitions keep changing as new liquid assets emerge day by day. Especially after the post global financial crisis, central banks have a more critical function for the world economies. Keeping all these developments aside, surrounded by fintech trends, financial system has confronted with a new instrument bitcoin that is first introduced in 2009. Though there are still too many consideration about this new financial instrument, number of bitcoins has growing since 2009 and has reached almost 17 million as of September 2018. Some economists consider bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a threat especially for central banks’ emission power. In this study we try to shed light to bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology with regard to their evolvement and whether they pose a threat or provide an opportunity to the financial system.
Some recent trends in distributed intelligent systems rely extensively on agent-based approaches. The so-called Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are taking over the management of sensitive data on behalf of their producers and users (e.g., medical records, financial investment, energy market). Therefore, trusted interactions are needed more than ever, while accountability and transparency among the agents seem crucial characteristics to be achieved. To do so, recent trends advocate the use of blockchain technologies (BCT) in MAS. The blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that can execute programmable transaction logic, and provides a shared, immutable, and transparent append-only register of all the actions happening in the network. Although a few theoretical approaches have already been proposed, the quest for such a system consolidating BCT and MAS to guarantee privacy, scalability, transparency, and efficiency continues. This paper presents a reconciling system including BCT within the dynamics of a MAS. Such a system aims at (i) building a solid ground for trusted interactions and (ii) enabling more characterizing feature-based and trustworthy ways of computing agent reputation. The system has been tested in four scenarios with different configurations (regular executions and involving down-agents or malicious behaviors). Finally, the paper summarizes and discusses the experience gained, argues about the strategic choice of binding MAS and BCT, and presents some future challenges.
We introduce the distributed ledger (blockchain) technology of crypto‐currencies. We examine the ‘monetary’ attributes of crypto‐currencies, and describe some of the reasons they have been adopted. The paper discusses the mechanics of Bitcoin – the original crypto‐currency – to illustrate the fundamental elements of decentralized crypto‐currencies. We then provide a high‐level summary of the implications of crypto‐currencies for consumers, financial systems, and for monetary and regulatory authorities. We argue that crypto‐currencies are unlikely to supplant traditional fiat currencies and we anticipate an enduring role for financial intermediaries in facilitating credit.
IOTA is a novel cryptocurrency that uses distributed ledger technology based on directed acyclic graph data structure. Security of cryptocurrencies ought to be scrutinized in order to acquire esteemed security, attain trust, and accomplish indelible adoption. Although IOTA proffer resilient security controls, IOTA security is not yet well explored. Among all the propounded IOTA vulnerabilities that have been identified, we pragmatically exploit replay attack against IOTA. We further analyze the attack to perceive its impact. Attack methodology and proof of concept for the replay attack is presented. Our proposed exploitation methodology is based upon address reuse, while IOTA in default mode does not reuse addresses. Distrust, and privation of balance can be some of the severe impacts of this vulnerability.
THE PROBLEM Conflict of interest (COI) is a subject of intense interest, to the extent that an entire issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association was devoted to this subject last year.1 In 2014, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons created a task force to address this problem.2 Conflict of interest was the lead story of a recent issue of Plastic Surgery News.2 Remarkably, about half of U.S. physicians, and 61% of surgeons, received payments from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries in 2015, amounting to $2.4 billion, including 136 plastic surgeons who received >$10,000 each.3 Before the early 1980s, there was little intersection between medicine and industry. Collaboration between the medical profession and the corporate world has increased.4 The link between commercial funding and study conclusions is undeniable in plastic surgery.5,6 When industry-supported Continuing Medical Education programs are conducted at resort hotels and upscale restaurants, the boundary between education and industry marketing is blurred.7 At meetings, plastic surgeons often declare, “I have no relevant conflict of interest” or “I have no conflicts that would affect the content of my presentation.” Luce laments that sometimes the duration of the disclosure slide presentation could be measured in nanoseconds, as reported in Plastic Surgery News.2 The speaker usually decides whether a conflict is relevant. Presenters sometimes comment, wryly, “I have no conflict of interest, unfortunately,” recognizing, and trivializing, the financial benefit of a COI. Some speakers display a long list of conflicts and suggest that because they have so many, they are at least “equal opportunity conflicters.” Some investigators believe that if they previously received money but no longer receive payments, they are no longer conflicted. Is there an expiry date for financial conflicts? Although some journals specify a 3-year period before submission, full disclosure is preferred, allowing the reader to decide on the merits.8 DEFINITION Luce6 defines COI: “Conflicts in ethically problematic situations are those in which the practitioner participates in clinical investigation of new devices/technology, publishes that experience, and, in parallel, is paid a consultant’s fee by the manufacturer.” Fineberg9 believes that a COI exists when a reasonable person would interpret the financial circumstances as sufficient to influence a physician’s judgment. When the reasonable person standard is used, the “appearance of” a COI is redundant.9 Proof of patient harm is not a requisite for COI; there are no “potential” COIs.10 INDUSTRY PAYMENTS TO INDIVIDUALS The American Society of Plastic Surgeons recently introduced dollar ranges for reporting financial conflicts.2 However, no data are available regarding a monetary threshold for a COI.11 Using Open Payments data, a 2016 study found that receipt of industry-sponsored meals, even just a single meal, was associated with an increase in the rate of prescribing the promoted brand-name drug.12 The more money doctors receive, on average, the more brand-name medications they prescribe.13 The evidence shows that even small gifts induce unconscious feelings of gratitude and reciprocity. Gifts to physicians can perpetuate a mindset of entitlement.14 INDIRECT CONFLICTS OF INTEREST Incentives that are not directly financial but have financial implications such as career advancement may also represent potent COIs.15 Academic COIs may contribute to the disturbing prevalence of research irreproducibility.15 Preset convictions can cause investigators to overlook or selectively interpret data. The investigator who is so certain that the concept is correct may, even subconsciously, alter the eligibility criteria, or the number of subjects, to fit the data to the hypothesis, and reach the desired level of significance, a practice known as p hacking.16 A t test may be conducted on a tiny number of patients using data that are not normally distributed. The sample size may be kept small to ensure that adverse outcomes do not reach statistical significance. INDUSTRY PAYMENTS TO PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES AND JOURNALS Many professional societies, including plastic surgery societies, accept large payments from industry (ie, >$1 million annually). A key recommendation of a 2009 consensus report was a preliminary reduction in industry support to <25% of the operating budget of the professional medical association, with an ultimate goal of complete freedom from industry funding.17 Companies partner with our societies and fund journal supplements, compromising the separation of science and advertising. Industry involvement may extend to writing the manuscript, called “writing support.” Many medical journals derive a substantial proportion of their operating revenue from advertising.18 Sponsored supplements are typically written to support the marketing goals of the sponsor,18 and lack counterpoint discussions written by nonconflicted plastic surgeons. Brand names are featured in the titles. Editors may argue that supplements are treated with the same degree of scrutiny as regular publications,19 but the potential for inappropriate influence cannot be excluded. Publication bias is a well-known problem.5 Researchers who are consultants, hold stock options, or receive royalties from companies, are much more likely to report positive results.5,20 Not surprisingly, industry is notoriously reluctant to publish negative findings.5,21 Some trial protocols include a provision for review of the manuscript by the funder before submission for publication, and the right to delay or even veto its publication.5,22 The timeline is pertinent. Plastic surgeons reporting on new products (eg, breast implants, implantable mesh, cryolipolysis, radiofrequency) may hold changing, often increasing, ownership stakes in successive publications, begging the question, when was this investment decision made and did it influence the research? EXAMPLES OF CONFLICT OF INTEREST IN PLASTIC SURGERY Breast Implants The promotion of shaped, textured breast implants reflects the quid pro quo between the industry and surgeons.23 The highly praised gummy bear implant was always an inferior product. Shaped implants malrotate in 42% of patients.24 These devices are firm, may have palpable edges, can cause double capsules and seromas25 and are much more costly than smooth round alternatives. Most importantly, textured implants are linked to breast implant-associated anaplastic large-cell lymphoma.26 Hidalgo and Weinstein27 and others28,29 report no aesthetic advantage. Yet for decades now, textured, shaped implants have been promoted as superior to less expensive alternatives. Hall-Findlay30 writes: “We listen to the manufacturer’s claims and then years later we find that we have been misled – both by the manufacturers themselves and by those surgeons who are burdened by a conflict of interest.” A study of nano-textured and micro-textured breast implants was recently published in a corporate-funded journal supplement.31 The authors report a complication rate of 0.3%, with 1 hematoma, no cases of implant malposition, no pain, no rippling, no ruptures, no redness, and no capsular contractures among 4,103 breast augmentations. The reoperation rate was <1%. The lead author reported no COI regarding this study, but accepted a position on the company’s medical advisory board immediately after submitting the article.31 Implantable Mesh The problem is not limited to breast implants. The COI regarding acellular dermal matrix is well documented.32 A recent article advocating the off-label use of implantable mesh in breast surgery was published by 2 authors who have a financial stake in the company that manufactures the mesh.33 A third author is a paid consultant and speaker. Galatea Surgical, a subsidiary of Tepha Inc. (Lexington, Ma.) financed the study, including medical writing, and referenced supplemental publications.33 Galatea is a corporate sponsor of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.34 The authors report that 100% of participating surgeons preferred to use mesh in all patients and the 1-year result was satisfactory in 100% of women.33 Such publications encourage plastic surgeons to adopt commercially driven practice patterns. A recent Continuing Medical Education article suggests that mesh support represents a paradigm shift.35 However, a nonconflicted analysis of mesh, and of the dated internal bra concept, finds no advantage.36 Radiofrequency Treatments A recent corporate-funded supplemental article, written by surgeons who are also shareholders, claims that radiofrequency-assisted liposuction (BodyTite, InMode Corp., Toronto, Canada) provides effective soft-tissue contraction, even creating an “internal brachioplasty scar.”37 This claim is based on a greater reduction in linear measurements than area measurements after radiofrequency-assisted liposuction compared with standard liposuction, a finding that is impossible to reconcile with basic geometry (the difference in area measurements must exceed linear changes).38 The authors offer a favorable return on investment analysis to justify the $205,000 purchase price, based on a $7,000 treatment fee.37 Conflicted author/investors frequently publish photographs that are not standardized in an effort to demonstrate a therapeutic benefit.33,36,39,40 A recent corporate-funded study on facial radiofrequency treatments with micro-needles was co-authored by a shareholder.39 The authors magnified the preoperative photograph of a nasolabial crease 58% to make it appear larger before treatment.40 Statistical errors included using a t test to compare nonparametric data, citing a P value of 1.00 for a comparison of nonidentical data, and a maximum range within 1 SD of the mean.40 DISCOUNTS TO INVESTIGATORS New transparency regulations help to inform the public about payments made to physicians.41 Unfortunately, it is not difficult to sidestep such reporting requirements. A well-known investigator may be given a device (eg, an ultrasonic liposuction machine) at a heavily discounted price. A breast implant manufacturer may provide its researchers with complimentary or discounted implants. There are many ways to reimburse surgeons indirectly. These considerations are substitutes for reportable cash payments, and they undermine the integrity of our research. COMPANY OFFICERS Investigators who are not only passive investors but company officers and shareholders42 have a financial obligation to the company. A fiduciary responsibility makes it impossible to remain objective.43 CLEARANCE BY U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION When a device receives clearance by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it is labeled with a stamp of authority that is reassuring to the public. This label also serves as a powerful marketing tool. Unfortunately, the approval process is not protected from commercial influence. For example, Coolsculpting (Allergan plc, Dublin, Ireland) gained Food and Drug Administration clearance for treatment of the thighs based on studies performed by investigators that received major financial reimbursement.44 The company itself was allowed to conduct vital ultrasound and photographic imaging.44 The lead investigator was at one time a Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc. (Pleasanton, Calif.) paid consultant and shareholder.44 Zeltiq was purchased in 2017 by Allergan plc (Dublin, Ireland) for $2.48 billion.45 HONEST REPORTING Corporate-funded studies consistently report unusually low complication rates, speedy recoveries, high rates of patient satisfaction, high “conversion rates,” and even the prospects for cross-selling.46 These sales-oriented characteristics undermine hard-won gains in honest reporting and the recognition of the importance of evidence-based medicine in our scientific journals. Adoption of unsound treatments and devices based on biased studies can have harmful long-term ramifications through a “rippling effect.”5 Biased studies may be referenced in practice guidelines.5 Physician disillusionment, especially after the purchase of an expensive yet underperforming device, may be a factor in physician burnout. CONSULTANTS Although physicians may consider themselves to be ethical professionals, many doctors remain unaware of the subconscious bias that industry relationships create.47 The practice of doctors accepting payments from companies has gone on for decades without a critical review. Are plastic surgeons truly acting as consultants, or is “consultant” a euphemism for receipt of a payment to shape one’s opinion in favor of the product and confer loyalty? Industry payments, which may be viewed as kickbacks, have created serious legal difficulties for physicians.2 Lopez et al.20 found that self-reported COIs have declined in recent years, but the proportion of consultantships has increased. In proposing an end to industry influence and regaining the public trust, a committee formed by the Institute of Medicine finds that continuing medical education “has become far too reliant on industry funding,” which “tends to promote a narrow focus on products.”48 The committee recommends restricting consultantships to the provision of objective technical advice paid at fair market value, documented in written contracts. Moreover, companies “should not involve physicians and patients in marketing projects that are presented as clinical research.”48 RECOMMENDATIONS The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors disclosure form insists that contributors disclose relevant financial relationships.49 In 2010, the Council of Medical Specialty Societies published a code for interactions with companies, with a provision that prohibits society officers and journal editors from accepting any compensation from industry.50 To facilitate transparency of disclosure, Congress passed the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which requires commercial companies to report any “transfer of value” to any physician, with a $10 threshold.51 In October 2010, ProPublica introduced Dollars for Docs, a central search engine for physician payments.41 Luce6 proposes that plastic surgeons with conflicts be excused as manuscript discussants and reviewers. Lichter50 recommends that a presentation with a COI should be balanced by a nonconflicted counterpoint discussant. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has adopted a requirement for disclosure of financial conflicts in dollar ranges (ie, $100–$1,000, $1,001–$5,000, $5,001–$10,000, etc.).2 These are reasonable first steps. Device evaluation does not necessarily require industry funding, as evidenced by the research efforts of investigators without financial conflicts.25,27 Publication of independent research in a highly respected peer-reviewed journal and the accolades that come with it provide more than adequate compensation, and potential for practice building and career advancement. It is impossible to reconcile corporate sponsorship with unbiased research. Physician investigators should consider declining any paid consultancies and all forms of indirect corporate reimbursement. Study design and implementation, and manuscript preparation should not be outsourced. RELINQUISHING INDUSTRY FINANCIAL SUPPORT Asking attendees to visit the exhibits, “without which none of this [i.e., the meeting] would be possible” is a familiar refrain at meetings. The physician-industry complex has gone on for so long that plastic surgeons may find it difficult to imagine an arms-length relationship. Without industry sponsorship, plastic surgeons can expect to pay more to attend meetings and Continuing Medical Education activities, but the prices of devices and implants are likely to fall as companies are relieved of the tremendous financial burden6 of payments to physicians and societies. The net overall financial effect to physicians is zero, but medical integrity is restored. Relinquishing industry financial support represents a bold step, but recent examples of the influence of financial conflicts underscore the magnitude of the problem. As reported by Rohrich et al.,52 when Goldwyn stepped down as the longtime former editor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, he worried most about commercial influence and keeping the specialty “pure.” He cautioned the incoming managing editor that he would need a strong sense of ethics because “you’ll need them in this business.” Goldwyn,53 quoting his father, wrote: “It is amazing how easy it is to be truthful if one wants to be.” CONCLUSIONS It is impossible for investigators to function as highly paid consultants and remain unbiased. Disclosure, including the amount of money paid, allows the audience to determine the importance of the conflict. Separation of commerce and science in our journal publications is vital so that scientific publications do not become marketing tools. Plastic surgeons must be better advocates for our patients and their pocketbooks. Part of the privilege of caring for patients is to be mindful of their finances and their health.14 Most importantly, our societies need to reconsider corporate partnership. Editors are already aware of the professional positions of reviewers and the need to protect the article that upsets the apple cart. As Descartes famously observed, “doubt is the origin of wisdom.”54 Progress is only made possible by challenging the status quo.
Blockchain is the one of leading technology of this time; it has started to revolutionize several fields like, finance, business, industry, smart home, healthcare, social networks, Internet and the Internet of Things. It has many benefits like, decentralized network, robustness, availability, stability, anonymity, auditability and accountability. The applications of Blockchain are emerging, and it is found that most of the work is focused on its engineering implementation. While the theoretical part is very less considered and explored. In this paper we implemented the simulation of mining process in Blockchain based systems using queuing theory. We took the parameters of one of the mature Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin's real data and simulated using M/M/n/L queuing system in JSIMgraph. We have achieved realistic results; and expect that it will open up new research direction in theoretical research of Blockchain based systems.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The multi-agent framework is a well-known approach to realize distributed intelligent systems. Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly employed in safety-and information-critical domains (e.g., eHealth, cyber-physical systems, financial services, and energy market). Therefore, these systems need to be equipped with mechanisms to ensure transparency and the trustworthiness of the behaviors of their components. Trust can be achieved by employing reputation-based mechanisms. Nevertheless, the existing methods are still unable to fully guarantee the desired accountability and transparency. Aligned with the recent trends, advocating the distribution of trust to avoid the risks of having a single point of failure of the system, this work extends existing efforts on combining blockchain technologies (BCT) and MAS. To attain a trusted environment, we provide the architecture and implementation of a system that allows the agents to interact with each other and enables tracking how their reputation changes after every interaction. Agents reputations are computed transparently using smart contracts. Immutable distributed ledger stores reputation values, as well as services and their evaluations to ensure trustworthy interactions between the agents. We also developed a graphical interface to test different scenarios of interactions between the agents. Finally, we summarize and discuss the experience gained and explain the strategic choices when binding MAS and BCT.
Bitcoin-derived blockchain has shown promise as infrastructure for many decentralized models. However, problems are withholding the realization of the potentials. The booming increase of storage demand has hindered devices with storage shortage to use blockchain powered distributed applications. In this paper, we present section-blockchain, a new blockchain protocol, which is designed to solve the oversize storage problem without compromise the security of blockchain. There are no full nodes or lightweight nodes, all nodes are equal and contributing to the Section-Blockchain network. Experiments demonstrate that Section-Blockchain is efficient, remarkably reduced the storage, and withstand sudden nodes losing of massive scale. Section-blockchain also extended the capability of blockchain to the foundation of an autotrophic, tamper-resist decentralized storage system, in which, data can be equidistributional distributed worldwide automatically without any centralized dispatcher to assign storage; nodes are motivated to change their local storage to receive more remuneration. The global storage distribution is continuously optimizing and fit into any adding/losing nodes.
With the popularity of cloud storage, how to verify the integrity of data on the cloud has become a challenging problem. Traditional verification framework involves the Third Party Auditors (TPAs) which are not entirely credible. In this paper, we present a framework for blockchain-based data integrity verification in P2P cloud storage, making verification more open, transparent, and auditable. In this framework, we present Merkle trees for data integrity verification, and analyze the system performance under different Merkle trees structures. Furthermore, we develop rational sampling strategies to make sampling verification more effective. Moreover, we discuss the optimal sample size to tradeoff the conflict between verification overhead and verification precision, and suggest two efficient algorithms of order of verification. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the schemes of our framework. The experimental results show that our schemes can effectively improve the performance of data integrity verification.
Aiming at the problem of illegal activities of Bitcoin, in this paper, transaction data structure of Bitcoin and data storage mechanism of Bitcoin Core (official client for Bitcoin) and are firstly analyzed, then a MapReduce-based structured method for processing transaction data from Bitcoin Core is introduced. Based on above knowledge, mechanisms of tracking and tracing Bitcoin fund flows are proposed, along with the visualization powered by D3.js. This paper provides a practical tool for researching and analyzing flows of illegal transaction funds.
A Blockchain is basically a decentralized, distributed ledger of all the transactions or events which takes place within a network that involves multiple parties. The transactions that happen are anonymous hence it has very high level of security. Any transaction that takes place is verified by all the members present in the chain. However, there are some drawbacks as well like scalability. This technology can be used in different areas and one of them is the travel industry which can change the whole transaction dynamics of the traditional way the travel sector works. This paper will give the outline or an idea of the underlining concepts about this new technology and how it can be used in travel industry.
Alice Ensor, Sigrid Schefer-Wenzl, Igor Miladinović
Blockchains and other Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are a much-proposed solution for an Internet of Things (IoT) payment platform. Because of their decentralized networks, they are one of the few technologies which allow for true Machine-to-Machine financial transactions, considered essential for the IoT economy. In this paper, we examine the issues surrounding IoT payment systems, including their requirements and proposed specifications. We will also discuss limitations of blockchains to meet these specific requirements, and whether other DLTs or possible optimization solutions for blockchains can overcome these limitations. We present example IoT payment implementations using DLTs to illustrate the opportunities surrounding this technology. This paper aims to capture the breadth and depth of this topic to understand why IoT payment systems are essential to the IoT economy and how blockchains might provide the answer for implementing them in an effective manner.
The value of various Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum are always elusive. Hence, it would be a great value addition to investors if a model is able to predict what would be the nature of the crypto market for the next day. Through this paper, a time-series model using Long Short-Term Memory Networks is built to determine the value of cryptocurrency in the future. As a study, three cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum has been taken into consideration. A comparison of the results by using opinion mining to interpret the mood of the market on the current day for different currencies has been done. The sentiment scores got from natural language processing of textual data are used as features to the model used for predictions. The time-series charts are plotted using Plotly – python library for graphing plots. The Mean Absolute Error calculated between the actual and predicted values is used as the uncertainty quantification method. These uncertainty quantification methods are compared to analyze the present-day scenario of the market using opinion mining.
Ku Ruhana Ku‐Mahamud, Nur Azzah Abu Bakar, Mazni Omar
Blockchain has emerged as a popular digital technology aimed at ensuring that financial transactions can be secured and trusted. The expansion of FinTech industry has encouraged the use of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. A study has been conducted to assess the blockchain, cryptocurrency and FinTech market growth. This paper provides empirical evidence on the factors influencing the market growth in Malaysia and highlights the factors that could spur and hinder its future use. A survey of 304 blockchain users and industry players in Malaysia was conducted and quantitative results revealed that privacy is the most significant barrier to the adoption of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency ecosystem. Other barriers include those related to legality, cost, security, and stability, as well as difficulties in switching to a new technology. Thus, government regulation is needed to provide guidelines for ensuring the sustainability and growth of this technology in the near future. In addition, results demonstrate that the banking sector is going to be the most affected by the FinTech industry. This current trend may assist the decision makers in evaluating the potential usage of this technology, allowing them to make strategic decisions to improve business and services.
Recent proliferation in disruptive technologies has opened up a new horizon for Internet of Vehicles (IoV). The success of IoV highly depends on the robustness of vehicular information system as a dispute among the service providers on data rights or any kind of security violation could disrupt the transport services altogether. In this work we propose a blockchain based novel architecture for vehicle authentication and privacy preservation with seamless access control for IoV. Proposed architecture is decentralized, robust and scalable. Along with privacy preserving authentication and conflict-free access-log maintenance, the proposed BlockAPP protocol also supports an optional traceability feature. Performance evaluation using smart contact over Ethereum Blockchain validates the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.
Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, have become increasingly popular over the last decade. The price of Bitcoin has gone through several cycles of highs and lows. As a result, it is a widely discussed topic, especially on platforms like Twitter. Sentiment analysis is a research area of Natural Language Processing. It is used to determine whether the text is positive, negative, or neutral. Twitter tweets are more challenging to analyze when compared to other forms of text, due to the presence of irregular grammar, emoticons, and sarcasm. This study intends to analyze the effect of tweets on the stock price of Bitcoin. In order to study the effect, the sentiment associated with each tweet is calculated using VADER, and also the profession and follower countassociated with verified users who tweet about bitcoin is found. Following this, a model is trained and tested using a combined dataset of tweet related data and historical bitcoin price data. It was found that the sentiment of tweets does correlate with the shift in the price of bitcoin.
Developments in internet-based payment platforms employing the blockchain technology known as “cryptocurrencies” contributed their integration in the official payment systems. Because of the growing interest in cryptocurrencies, it is necessary to review existing cryptocurrency research literature and determine areas for future studies. This study gives an up to date summary of accessible literature on cryptocurrencies according to their subject of issues, theories, methods, and findings and provides direction for future research. A systematic literature review was carried out to examine accessible academic and reliable publications between 2010 and 2018. Based on results research limitations for individual, organizational, ecosystemic and discourse approaches are identified and the study concluded that there are still insufficient and uncovered issues related to the cryptocurrencies notably from a legal and regulatory point of view.