Blockchain Papers

Dimaz Ankaa Wijaya, Joseph K. Liu, Ron Steinfeld, Dongxi Liu

Monero is one of the privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies employing CryptoNote protocol. The privacy features in Monero are provided by cryptographic techniques such as linkable ring signature and one-time public key. Recent studies show that the majority of Monero inputs are traceable prior to mandatory RingCT transaction. After the RingCT was implemented, the problems were mitigated. We propose a novel attack to reduce the anonymity of Monero transactions or even to fully deanonymise the inputs. The proposed protocol can be launched in RingCT protocol and enables multiple attackers to collaborate without trusting each other. The attack scheme can be planted in the existing Monero services without extra fees and without putting the users' money at risk.

Abed Peerally

Summary The topics of Dark Matter and Dark Energy and of the Higgs phenomenon, are amongst the dramatic examples of the universe being to a large extent unknown. Reported in the late 1990’s by S. Perlmutter, B. Schmidt and A. Riess, the Nobel Committee in awarding the Nobel Prize to them in 2011 said: Their “findings have unveiled a universe that is to a large extent unknown to science”. That is still true today and is likely to be so for decades to come. These findings were based on the behaviour of the Type 1a Supernovae which, due to their consistent brightness, have developed the reputation of being reliable standard candles in cosmological research. Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess found that these supernovae, as earlier workers for decades had observed, are dimmer than what expected, and they concluded that they must be accelerating faster than believed, in their motion. The work of Riess et al proposed that dark energy, must be a kind of energy that could have an anti-gravitational pull, thus explaining the strange behaviour of the Type 1a supernovae as they move away from us, into the infinite horizon of the universe. Now in the late second decade of the 21st century, no dark energy reality has been discovered at all, and the same applies to the dark matter hypothesis that came out of the work that was awarded the Nobel Prize 2011. It appears like there will perhaps never be any proof of the existence of dark matter and dark energy particles, for these are claimed to be unable to interact with normal matter and energy and not to have any radiation. This is a typical example of why perhaps a Theory of Everything is required to throw some light on the mysterious realities of existence, if possible. Actually explaining something that has no material or energy evidence of any kind, makes that something as impossible to explain as God. They do not interact with anything at all. However, if the Theory of Everything can explain how the universe originated, it might surely also provide evidence of whether dark matter and dark energy exist or not. This appears very tricky for they have been claimed as being totally invisible and insensitive to any kind of experimental set up. 2 The Higgs boson came out dramatically in the work of Higgs, Salam, Weinberg, Glashow and others, that found linkages between the weak force and the electromagnetic force. It is believed in relation to the Higgs boson, even if it is not true, that all particles should have zero mass. Several different eminent physicists thought of rather similar ways of explaining mass and its origin. Generally, it was felt that a new Field that was later called the Higgs Field, permeated the universe, and the property of mass was acquired when particles interacted with this field whose particle was named the Higgs boson, the simplest manifestation of the field. However many physicists believe the Higgs phenomenon and its particle discovered in 2012 should be a more elaborate mechanism, on which further work is ongoing, particularly at the LHC. The feeling is that the phenomenon of mass has not understood in its full reality. It goes without saying that in the absence of a Theory of Everything, it is not possible to really know, as far as possible, the nature and fate of the universe, mainly because the universe was conceived on a deliberate master plan. The implication is that there could have existed only one such specific plan: the supernatural plan to create our universe, which to humans is the Theory of Everything as far as possible, capable to describe our universe. The fact humans are destined to discover the Theory of Everything, according to Kepler and Whewell, indicates there was supernatural creation of the universe, and therefore finding the Theory of Everything is an astounding perspective. The scientific/philosophical Theory of Everything will be describes soon, is coming at a historical juncture where several well-known cosmologists are talking about natural creation from practically nothing or based solely on mathematics. Since most intellectuals and members of the public believe the universe had a supernatural creation, a scientific concept of the origin of the universe by a Supernatural Mind or God, would be of enormous interest. It will be the collision of the traditional imaginary Godless concepts of the origin of our universe with a scientific concept that creates an extraordinary historical event in our current intellectual, scientific, philosophical and theological world. Since the Theory of Everything will be really, as far as possible, a universal and metaphysical concept of the universe, it can produce an intellectual revolution in the scientific and philosophical sectors, that will impact on theology in ways not seen before. There whole world will benefit, for the total 3 confusion that surrounds the comprehension of the realities and origin of our universe would reach a turning point, never seen before. It will demonstrate the power of intellectual knowledge as the torch bearer of humanity. The reason is that intellectual ideas are capable to turn humanity into one collective mind in the universe. The universe under GRT is expanding, and there was never been any tendency for the universe to contract and collapse into an unimaginable black hole. Penrose’s hypothesis of a cosmic crunch and the rebirth of the universe (CCC), is not a possibility, because the uncertainly in science is at the quantum microscale, and not at the macro or universal scale. Gravity was correctly explained by Einstein. He referred to it as pseudo-force, causing the warping of space time, being perhaps a kind of variation of the electromagnetic force. The truth is that the nature of black holes happens to be as misunderstood as is the nature of the universe. Cosmology has been a precariously understood domain, the reason being the lack of adequate cosmological understanding of how the universe came into existence. This is not surprising, as I explain in my coming second book on the origin of the universe, for our world is, historically, at the beginning phase of its modern scientific era, being hardly one century old, if we take the golden age of physics of the first decades of the last century, as marking the beginning of our modern scientific culture. No wonder we do not know the real nature of forces, particles, space, time, atoms, matter, gravitation, expansion of the universe, dark energy, dark matter, and the origin and fate of the universe, topics addressed in my second book due in late 2018. Our extraordinary universe must have been inspired by a scientifically precise and elaborate design. Gravity remains one of the greatest mysteries of science for it has no quantum particulate physical identity, its imagined particle, the graviton cannot exist, and up to now gravity can only be calculated and described, for instance in the equations of Newton and Einstein. It exists because it arises due to totally natural reasons, which were largely seen in Descartes’ belief there must exist a law of the universal conservation of the quantity of motion. The quantum nature of spacetime, if it is not a particle, must have physical realities that are sensitive to acceleration, indicating that spacetime is perhaps fractal in its physical reality or at least mathematically, the reason why Einstein was very precise in his description of general and special relativity. String Theory, a great intellectual exercise, has the weakness of not explaining how exactly the strings acquire their 4 property of vibration. Any Theory of Everything must incontrovertibly explain the origin of motion and of gravitation. The physics of the universe are intimately fused with the philosophy of existence, not surprisingly, as the purpose of creation must have been for producing a conscious being, not solely the universe.

Achampet Harshavardhan, T. Vijayakumar, S. R. Mugunthan

Blockchain, the establishment of Bitcoin, has gotten broad considerations as of late. Blockchain fills in as an unchanging record which permits exchanges occur in a decentralized way. In spite of the fact that the component of blockchain advances may bring us more dependable and advantageous administrations, the security issues and difficulties behind this imaginative strategy is additionally an essential point that we have to concern. We give an outline of blockchain engineering initially and look at some common accord calculations utilized as a part of various blockchains. Moreover, this paper indicates how blockchain is utilized as a part of cloud storage and increase in security measures.

Hsin‐Te Wu, Changyi Yang

As technology advances, many countries have now opted for electronic voting systems. Any voting system must follow principles of transparency and impartiality in order to achieve fairness; the electronic voting process must also be protected against cyberattacks or denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) because such attacks may affect the processing time in voting procedures and even hinder the fairness in voting. This study establishes a network security mechanism for voting systems based on blockchain technology. The blockchain mechanism employs a distributed architecture that can prevent system shutdown resulting from malicious cyberattacks; additionally, any user in the blockchain can authenticate data integrity, which satisfies requirements of transparency and impartiality in voting systems. This study utilizes bilinear pairing to establish network security in voting systems, which call for anonymity, authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation. When authenticating voting integrity, the user's anonymity must be ensured to prevent identity revelation, and the data must be protected against malicious tampering such security measures also fulfill blockchain requirements. The proposed voting system relies on the basis of blockchains to create a trustworthy voting system. In current blockchain technology, smart contracts allow the establishment of voter-related regulations to prevent controversies during voting processes. Additionally, in order to establish both a secret ballot and an open ballot system, the study also implements a bilinear pairing security mechanism to ensure the overall security of a voting procedure.

Sandeep Bhattacharjee

Today's banking system has seen revolutionary change within a decode or more. The foremost reason being the adaptation of information technology in the banking system. Although , this has strengthened the economy of our country, it has also led to many frauds and scams in the recent times. In this research paper, we have tried to collect information on the above events and tried to preview the actual positioning of India's banking system. There has also been some discussion on the understanding, growth, usability and adaptability of crypto currencies such as Bitcoins, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash etc. The overall discussion helps us to understand how the inner complexities of Indian banking system is leading to consumer's thoughts and interest shifting towards crypto currency. Some suggestions have also been provided as different steps which can be taken in the present situation.

Aisong Zhang, Xinxin Ma

Current digital certification revocation systems are insufficient in the application scenario of multiple certification authorities (CAs), and it leads to a lack of mutual trust, access stability, and timeliness of data synchronization between CAs. We propose a decentralized digital certificate revocation system based on consortium blockchain technology with a secret sharing scheme. It can invalidate the digital certificate in special cases to protect the user's information and property security. Based on the characteristics of the decentralized consensus mechanism, consortium blockchain technology is the core technology of the system. The scheme achieves collaborative management of digital certificate revocation lists (CRLs) by multiple CAs, and introduces secret sharing scheme, further safeguarding the reliability of the maintenance process, and then the online certificate status protocol (OCSP) can be developed based on this system. This system is security, effective, and cannot be tampered. Compared with the traditional revocation scheme, it achieves trusted and reliable CRL system above multiple CAs, which can provide new ideas for the way of digital certificate revocation and expand the application range of blockchain technology.

Monireh Vahdati, Kamran Gholizadeh HamlAbadi, Ali Mohammad Saghiri, Hassan Rashidi

Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology are used to improve the traditional companies. One type of traditional companies is insurance companies. These companies suffer several problems that are leading to decrease their efficiency in modern societies. Many users of these companies are unhappy and dissatisfied because of some problems. The main problems of these companies are that their operations are not transparent. Moreover, their insurance rates are not calculated and in adaptive with customer's characteristics, e.g for low-risk and high-risk customers. Note that, users are not identical to the same insurance rates, which are determined by the insurer. In modern society, we have the IoT technology that enables us to find some specific information about users. This information enables the insurance companies to increase its accuracy. In addition, considering the potential of the smart contract of the blockchain, determining insurance rates must be transparent. This article proposes a self-organizing framework for insurance based on IoT and blockchain, which eliminates the main problems of traditional insurance. To evaluate the proposed framework, it is compared with the existing framework. The results show that it has several advantages over the existing framework and could be useful in near future.

Junqin Huang, Lingkun Kong, Linghe Kong, Zhen Liu · 6 authors

Crowd-sensing systems have gained considerable interests and adoption in recent years. However, most existing crowd-sensing systems rely on central servers, which are subject to low reliability due to the traditional centralized architecture and high service fee. Motivated by constructing a crowd-sensing system with security and low service fee, we propose a blockchain-based crowd-sensing system (BCS), which replaces traditional triangle architecture by decentralized blockchain system. Also, in order to accelerate the formation of the fabric of trust, BCS implements applications of smart contracts to reward sensing-task workers, which offers reliable anonymity in the meantime. By leveraging blockchain technology, BCS has good performance in privacy protection and system robustness.

Emma Manning

I set myself a mini-goal for June to learn about blockchain technology. Blockchain tech underpins cryptocurrencies, but the tech itself has many other uses. In the case of Bitcoin, the distributed ledger functions by giving Bitcoin in the form of a financial reward to whichever account provides the service of encrypting the next block in the chain. This removes need for oversight, by virtue of the volume of accounts participating the ability for collusion is disabled. Blockchain tech is so effective in cryptocurrencies, because the way transactions are locked into the ledger means once a transaction occurs and has been captured within a block, the data within the previous blocks can never be changed.

Jakob Felix Schneider

Innerhalb der letzten Jahre wurden Blockchain-Technologien in vielen traditionellen Sektoren (z.B. im Finanzbereich) adaptiert. Dadurch wurden existierende Systeme neu überdacht und ganzheitlich neuartige Systeme erfunden. Allerdings blieb während dieser Zeit des raschen Fortschritts der Fokus stets auf der schnellen Produktentwicklung, was zu vielen Sicherheitsproblemen geführt hat durch die mehrere hundert Millionen von USD gestohlen oder verloren wurden. Nahezu alle derzeitig öffentlichen Blockchains bieten keine formale Semantik oder formales Framework zur Verifizierung von Smart-Contract-Code. Diese Arbeit präsentiert eine neuartige Semantik für Smart-Contract-Interaktionen und eine state-of-the-art Implementierung eines smart-contract-basierenden Investmentfonds für die Ethereum Blockchain. Der Fokus liegt darauf, eine formale Semantik für Smart Contracts mit dem tatsächlichen, wirtschaftlichen Anwendungsfall eines Investmentfonds zu verbinden. Genauer gesagt, die eingeführte Semantik bietet einen neuartigen Denkansatz dadurch, dass sie Smart Contract Interaktionen und nicht einzelne Smart-Contract-Ausführungen in den Mittelpunkt stellt. Die Blockchain wird durch einen Global State repräsentiert, auf welchem komplexe Transaktionen durch eine Big-Step-Semantik modelliert werden können. Der im Laufe dieser Arbeit entwickelte Investmentfonds ERCFund macht es möglich, in ein aktiv verwaltetes Portfolio von ERC20-Tokens und Ether zu investieren. Dies wird realisiert durch Tokens, welche als Anteil des Investmentfonds genutzt werden und je nach Bedarf gemünzt und vernichtet werden können. Außerdem unterstützt die Software mehrere fortgeschrittene Funktionen, wie z.B. Cold-Wallet-Support und Multi-Signature-Schutz durch Off-Chain-Signaturen. Wir zeigen, dass die eingeführte Semantik in einer realen, geschäftlichen Situation anwendbar ist, indem wir eine wesentliche Sicherheitsfunktion des Investmentfonds adaptieren und formal beweisen.

Domhnall Carlin, Philip OrKane, Sakir Sezer, Jonah Burgess

With the rise in worth and popularity of cryptocurrencies, a new opportunity for criminal gain is being exploited and with little currently offered in the way of defence. The cost of mining (i.e., earning cryptocurrency through CPU-intensive calculations that underpin the blockchain technology) can be prohibitively expensive, with hardware costs and electrical overheads previously offering a loss compared to the cryptocurrency gained. Off-loading these costs along a distributed network of machines via malware offers an instantly profitable scenario, though standard Anti-virus (AV) products offer some defences against file-based threats. However, newer fileless malicious attacks, occurring through the browser on seemingly legitimate websites, can easily evade detection and surreptitiously engage the victim machine in computationally-expensive cryptomining (cryptojacking). With no current academic literature on the dynamic opcode analysis of cryptomining, to the best of our knowledge, we present the first such experimental study. Indeed, this is the first such work presenting opcode analysis on non-executable files. Our results show that browser-based cryptomining within our dataset can be detected by dynamic opcode analysis, with accuracies of up to 100%. Further to this, our model can distinguish between cryptomining sites, weaponized benign sites, de-weaponized cryptomining sites and real world benign sites. As it is process-based, our technique offers an opportunity to rapidly detect, prevent and mitigate such attacks, a novel contribution which should encourage further future work.

Shenglan Ma, Hao Wang, Hong‐Ning Dai, Shuhan Cheng · 6 authors

Risk and Information System Control Framework in business includes the methods and processes to manage risks and seize opportunities which involve identifying particular risk events relevant to the objectives, assessing them in terms of likelihood and magnitude of impact, determining a response strategy, and monitoring progress. In order to provide better support for the backtracking, traceability, irreversibility, and credible requirements of risk registration table data in the framework, this paper proposes a blockchain-based risk and information system control framework. A risk association tree is designed for combining summarized risk item ledgers with risk assessment ledgers and risk response ledgers based on the Merkle Tree. Three proposed smart contracts are used in risk identification, risk assessment, risk response and mitigation, and risk and control monitoring and reporting processes. We implement a prototype for this framework.

Robert Herian

The article discusses the nature of law in cyberspace. Topics discussed include distinction between regulation as infringement of private autonomy and regulation as a collaborative enterprise; blockchain regulatory conundrum; and neoliberal market-complementing regulation. Also being discussed is the regulation for economic efficiency and consumer choice.

Daniel Gama e Colombo, Jorge Martínez-Vázquez

The objective of this paper is to examine whether the level of fiscal decentralization of a country is a relevant variable to explain public investment in innovation (measured as the share of research and development (R&D) spending in total government budget) and the intensity of basic research within the public R&D bundle. To assess the effects of decentralization, we present a theoretical model where a 'benevolent government' invests in R&D aiming at maximizing net income available in the country (central government) or in the respective region (subnational government), states compete to attract capital investment, and R&D results are subject to interregional knowledge spillovers. According to the model, decentralization leads to a lower share of basic research in government innovation spending. The impact on total R&D is ambiguous, although it tends to be negative. The conclusions of the model are tested through an empirical analysis using country aggregate data. Confirming the predictions of the model, we find evidence that expenditure decentralization leads to lower intensity of basic research within public R&D, and that both types of decentralization negatively affect the size of innovation spending. Our findings suggest that deepening fiscal decentralization should be considered along with measures to compensate for innovation spending decrease, and that the central government should play a greater role in financing or carrying out basic research.

Zhaofeng Ma, Weihua Huang, Wei Bi, Hongmin Gao · 5 authors

Upon flaws of current blockchain platforms of heavyweight, large capacity of ledger, and time-consuming of synchronization of data, in this paper, we proposed a new paradigm of master-slave blockchain scheme (MSB) for pervasive computing that suitable for general PC, mobile device such as smart phones or PADs to participants in the working of mining and verification, in which we separated traditional blockchain model in 2 layer defined as master node layer and a series of slavery agents layer, then we proposed 2 approaches for partially computing model(P-CM) and non-computing of model(NCM) in the MSB blockchain, Finally large amounts of simulations manifest the proposed master-slave blockchain scheme is feasible, extendible and suitable for pervasive computing especially in the 5G generation environment, and can apply in the DRM-related applications.

Xiaoli Wang, Liu Yun, Gui Bing-Xiu, Meijian Yang · 6 authors

In many countries of the world, government procurement is a powerful tool for reflecting national strategic intentions and promoting scientific and technological innovation. Based on the perspective of the institutional structure and the method of policy for bibliometrics, we analyzed Chinese policies of government procurement to promote scientific and technological innovation, revealed the policymaking characteristics, and concluded that the Ministry of Finance should appropriately decentralize the policymaking work to other relevant departments of the State Council. This paper compares the main policy tools from five dimensions among China and other typical countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, France, and so on. Five aspects, which include establishing the database for vendors of micro, small, and medium enterprises; developing the grade system and the post evaluation system; formulating detailed implementation methods of innovative products and services; carrying out classification management for imported products; and setting mandatory insurances. In general, for the policies of government procurement to promote scientific and technological innovation, this paper provides an effective reference for organizing the agencies and formulating the detail measures. The research framework of this paper could be applied to analyze other policies.

Courtney Morris

The vision for ARTiFACTS sprang from the realization that distributed ledger technology/blockchain technology could be applied directly to scholarly communications. Blockchain fits our current system of citation currency. As Eugene Garfield said decades ago, “The Mertonian description of normal science describes citations as the currency of science. Scientists make payments, in the form of citations, to their preceptors”. To work properly, scientists must be able to create, claim ownership, share novel works, and assign proper attribution to prior work at all phases of their research. However, the existing process of disseminating research and scientific discoveries is skewed towards published articles. Communication, sharing, and the ability to give or receive attribution are delayed far downstream - oftentimes several years – from the actual time when discoveries are made and formally communicated. Distributed ledger technology can deliver transformative value and efficiency in facilitating real-time sharing of the outputs of each step of the research process while providing comprehensive and immutable, break-proof attribution and linking for all relevant research artifacts. Ultimately, this technology will empower the scientific and scholarly communities to affect positive change. This paper briefly discusses some of the early learnings from their recent introduction of the ARTiFACTS system.

Nick Hynes, David Dao, David Yan, Raymond Cheng · 5 authors

In this work, we demonstrate Sterling, a decentralized marketplace for private data. Sterling enables privacy-preserving distribution and use of data by using privacy-preserving smart contracts which run on a permissionless blockchain. The privacy-preserving smart contracts, written by data providers and consumers, immutably and irrevocably represent the interests of their creators. In particular, we provide a mechanism for data providers to control the use of their data through automatic verification of data consumer contracts, allowing providers to express constraints such as pricing and differential privacy. Through smart contracts and trusted execution environments, Sterling enables privacy-preserving analytics and machine learning over private data in an efficient manner. The resulting economy ensures that the interests of all parties are aligned. For the demonstration, we highlight the use of Sterling for training machine learning models on individuals' health data. In doing so, we showcase novel approaches to automatically appraising training data, verifying and enforcing model privacy properties, and efficiently training private models on the blockchain using trusted hardware.

Jonathan Coignard, Eric Munsing, Jason MacDonald, Jonathan Mather

The increased penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) on the distribution network creates local challenges in balancing consumption and generation. To coordinate the roll-out and the operation of DERs, distribution-level energy markets have been proposed, but there are currently few tools for simulating the operation of DERs in these proposed markets. We present a framework which utilizes a grid co- simulation platform (Mosaik) to simulation DER operation, while simulating market clearing operations with a blockchain network (Ethereum). The use of blockchains, an emerging technology for decentralized computing and data storage, allows us to model secure decentralized execution of market clearing functions and payment processes. By unifying simulation of market clearing rules and the physical grid, we are able to ensure that economic incentives are aligned with physical constraints, helping facilitate the development of more effective distributed energy markets. We demonstrate the use of this new simulation platform on a small feeder, for which a market mechanism to incentivize DER integration is explored.

Weigbin Hong, Yefan Cai, Ziru Yu, Xiangyang Yu

This paper starts from the food quality problem and proposes a traceability system for agricultural products based on lot and blockchain technology. The architecture of the system is given and some existing problems are discussed. By using the consortium blockchain as the basic network and the IoT devices as the recorder, a more reliable, trustable and extendable traceability system can be achieved.

Jiafeng Li, Fuyang Qu, Xin Tu, Tingfei Fu · 6 authors

Focusing on the overlapping areas of the logistics industry with a large number of mature blockchain applications and the public welfare industry that requires high transparency and credibility, this paper designs and implements an innovative philanthropy logistics platform based on blockchain technology through the Ethereum platform. Our platform makes use of the open, transparent, and irrevocable features of the blockchain, combined with a unique Responsibility Relay System and Evaluation and Reporting Mechanism, and can achieve the consistency of the data on the chain with real-world status, as well as the authenticity and transparency of philanthropy logistics data. This paper also establishes a model for evaluating philanthropy material donations for social welfare based on the classic network maximum flow algorithm. After four months of empirical analysis, we have concluded that the blockchain platform can greatly increase the user's trust in the project, enhance the system's cleanliness coefficient and increase the quality of philanthropically raised materials, thereby improving the public welfare of charitable donations. The paper draws the conclusion that this blockchain platform is a technical solution for maximizing social welfare.

Bin Li, Yijie Wang, Peichang Shi, Huan Chen · 5 authors

Blockchain is a distributed system with efficient transaction recording and has been widely adopted in sharing economy. Although many existing privacy-preserving methods on the blockchain have been proposed, finding a trade-off between keeping speed and preserving privacy of transactions remain challenging. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Fast and Privacy-preserving method based on the Permissioned Blockchain (FPPB) for fair transactions in sharing economy. Without breaking the verifying protocol and bringing additional off-blockchain interactive communication, FPPB protects the privacy and fairness of transactions. Additionally, experiments are implemented in EthereumJ (a Java implementation of the Ethereum protocol) to measure the performance of FPPB. Compared with normal transactions without cryptographic primitives, FPPB only slows down transactions slightly.

Ziyan Wang, Xinghua Dong, Yi Li, Li Fang · 5 authors

It is a research hotspot that using blockchain technology to solve the security problems of the Internet of Things (IoT). Although many related ideas have been proposed, there are very few literatures with theoretical and data support. This paper focuses on the research of model construction and performance evaluation. First, an IoT security model is established based on blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). In this model, many security risks of traditional IoT architectures can be avoided, and system performance is significantly improved in distributed large capacity storage, concurrency and query. Secondly, the performance of the proposed model is evaluated through the average latency and throughput, which are meaningful for further research and optimization of this direction. Analysis and test results demonstrate the effectiveness of the blockchain-based security model.

Bonnie Lawlor

This paper offers an overview of the highlights of the NFAIS Conference, Blockchain for Scholarly Publishing, that was held in Alexandria, VA from May 15–16, 2018. The goal of the conference was to take a close look at the initiatives that have emerged as a result of the increasing global acceptance of blockchain technology. This technology, chiefly known as the foundation of Bitcoin and originally introduced as a means of securely managing cryptocurrency, has proven to have practical applications beyond finance. The basic technology is that of a distributed ledger and it is being broadly-adopted by multiple industries, including the scholarly publishing community. The capabilities of this new technology are prompting a direct exchange among stakeholders, as blockchain promises a more structured, decentralized, and immutably secure approach that has the potential to significantly impact researcher workflows - from data collection to peer review to access and published work. The technology inspires passion - there are those who believe that it will ultimately transform our lives while others are completely skeptical. The NFAIS conference provided a look at both sides of the coin (no pun intended).