Blockchain Papers

Chunlei Liu

Stake systems which issue stakes as well as coins are proposed. Two subadditive stake systems are studied: one is the radical stake system, the other is the logarithmic stake system. Securities of both systems are analysed.

Chunlei Liu

A proof of balance plus transaction fees block-chain cash system as well as a proof of logarithmic stake block-chain system are proposed. Securities of both systems are analysed.

Chunlei Liu

Stake systems which issue stakes as well as coins are proposed. Two subadditive stake systems are studied: one is the radical stake system, the other is the logarithmic stake system. Securities of both systems are analysed.

Pontificia Univerisdad Javeriana, Bogotá-Colombia, Cra 7 no. 40-62, Colombia, Montes D. Juan, Rincón P. Andrés, Páez M. Rafael · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Shintaro Mori

This paper addresses a secure caching scheme for information-centric network (ICN)-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In order to achieve the above mechanism, we utilize both the public-key cryptography technique and the blockchain technique, which enable data to be safely gathered and the decentralized and crossverified sensing data to be copied and stored. In addition, we propose a protocol design for introducing the proposed structure into an ICN-based WSN system. Furthermore, we formulate statistical models and demonstrate numerical results by performing computer simulations and hardware-based experiments.

Meisser, Luzius, Luzius Meisser, Ronald Kogens

We propose to use the terms Verfügungsmacht (power to dispose, analogous to possession) and Verfügungsrecht (right to dispose, analogous to ownership) to discern whom a Bitcoin belongs to in case of a bankruptcy. Using the example of Tezos, we demonstrate that the storage location of private keys alone does not suffice to meaningfully answer the question to whom the foundation's assets belong. Instead, the context and the contractual arrangement, from which the right to these assets can be derived, also need to be taken into account. This view provides a legal basis for the storage of Bitcoins on behalf of a client without taking them onto one's balance sheet, ensuring that the client's assets are not included in the bankruptcy estate. Furthermore, we classify the Internet currency Bitcoin as a rival, fictive, intangible asset sui generis and opine that there is a gap in the law regarding Aussonderung (removing an asset from the bankruptcy estate and returning it to the rightful owner) and Admassierung (adding an asset to the bankruptcy estate from a third party) of Bitcoins. Courts and bankruptcy administrators are encouraged to fill this gap in accordance with article 1 of the Swiss Civil Code when faced with Bitcoins in a bankruptcy case.

Ana Reyna, Cristian Martín, Jaime Chen, Enrique Soler · 5 authors

In the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, conventional devices become smart and autonomous. This vision is turning into a reality thanks to advances in technology, but there are still challenges to address, particularly in the security domain e.g., data reliability. Taking into account the predicted evolution of the IoT in the coming years, it is necessary to provide confidence in this huge incoming information source. Blockchain has emerged as a key technology that will transform the way in which we share information. Building trust in distributed environments without the need for authorities is a technological advance that has the potential to change many industries, the IoT among them. Disruptive technologies such as big data and cloud computing have been leveraged by IoT to overcome its limitations since its conception, and we think blockchain will be one of the next ones. This paper focuses on this relationship, investigates challenges in blockchain IoT applications, and surveys the most relevant work in order to analyze how blockchain could potentially improve the IoT.

Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Ali Behrouz, Krishnendu Chatteriee

We present a secure approach for maintaining and reporting credit history records on the Blockchain. Our approach removes third-parties such as credit reporting agencies from the lending process and replaces them with smart contracts. This allows customers to interact directly with the lenders or banks while ensuring the integrity, unmalleability and privacy of their credit data. Most importantly, each customer is given full control over complete or selective disclosure of her credit records, eliminating the risk of privacy violations or data breaches such as the one that happened to Equifax in 2017. Moreover, our approach provides strong guarantees for the lenders as well. A lender can check both correctness and completeness of the credit data disclosed to her. This is the first approach that is able to perform all real-world credit reporting tasks without a central authority or changing the financial mechanisms.

Alexander Spiegelman, Idit Keidar, Moshe Tennenholtz

We formalize the current practice of strategic mining in multi-cryptocurrency markets as a game, and prove that any better-response learning in such games converges to equilibrium. We then offer a reward design scheme that moves the system configuration from any initial equilibrium to a desired one for any better-response learning of the miners. Our work introduces the first multi-coin strategic attack for adaptive and learning miners, as well as the study of reward design in a multi-agent system of learning agents.

Muhammad Syafiq Mohd Pozi, Gopinath Muruti, Asmidar Abu Bakar, Adam Jatowt · 5 authors

Authorship contribution is often taken for granted. Internally, the contribution rate is usually known among all the authors of a given paper. However, this rate is hard to be verified by external parties, as the measurement of the authors' contribution is still not common and the way to measure it is unclear. In this paper, we propose a new blockchain based framework to assess the contribution of all authors of any scientific paper. Our framework can be implemented by anyone who is directly or indirectly involved in the publication of the paper, such as a principal researcher, grant funder, research assistant or anyone from relevant external bodies.

Camille Meyer, Marek Hudon

No abstract is available for this record.

Jasmin Hasić, Mahir Sijamija

The political system of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is rather complex and decentralized, and it consists of bicameral parliaments, established on the national level and in both entities, a collective executive body on the national level, governments in both BH entities, and an additional 10 governments and unicameral parliaments in 10 cantons. The chapter examines the research within the theoretical framework of party institutionalization and evolution of membership organizations. It focuses on definitions and understandings of party membership schemata, both within the legal framework and party statutes. The chapter explores the links between party membership and legal regulations related to the party registration and financing. It describes the evolution of the quality of party finance system, and focuses on relevant regulations on keeping membership records, membership fees, and also issuing the receipts for donations. Finally, the chapter deals with the links between party membership and legal regulations related to the party registration and financing.

Luciano Abelardo Ponce Vaca, Isidro Rolando Acuña Velázquez, Luis Enrique León Sánchez

The Ecuadorian State isorganized territorially in regions, counties, cantons and rural parishes. The county of Manabi located in the coastal region of the Ecuador, has 24 cantons, being part of its territory the cantons Jipijapa, Pajan and 24 Mayo, located in the south of the county. In this Andean country the two main commercial species of Coffea that are cultivated are: Arabic Coffea L. (Arabic coffee) and Coffea canephora former Pierre Froehner (robust coffee), being the low national production the central problem of the Ecuadorian coffeeculture, added it, the faulty public administration of the sector, that limits their reactivation. In this context the present work has as objective to sketch the main results of the diagnosis to determine the main problems and factors that influence in the process of administration of the coffeeculture and to suggest the implementation of a model of public administration on agroecologicals bases for its reactivation that leaves from the Decentralized Autonomous Governments, articulating and integrating to the coffee farmers to the organizations of producers and other key local actors linked to the coffee sector. For the development of the field work it was appealed to the method of investigation action - participative and to techniques of scientific investigation. The results show that the public administration is even faulty and disjointed, which impacts in the low production and productivity of the coffee, disorganization of the producers, low educational level, validity of an aged rural leadership and loss of credibility in the organizations is evidenced.

Lisa M. Rasmussen

No abstract is available for this record.

Andreas Freund, Danielle Stanko

Starting with BitTorrent and then Bitcoin, decentralized technologies have been on the rise over the last 15+ years, gaining significant momentum in the last 2+ years with the advent of platform ecosystems such as the Blockchain platform Ethereum. New projects have evolved from decentralized games to marketplaces to open funding models to decentralized autonomous organizations. The hype around cryptocurrency and the valuation of innovative projects drove the market cap of cryptocurrencies to over a trillion dollars at one point in 2017. These high valued technologies are now enabling something new: globally scaled and decentralized business models. Despite their valuation and the hype, these new business ecosystems are frail. This is not only because the underlying technology is rapidly evolving, but also because competitive markets see a profit opportunity in exponential cryptocurrency returns. This extracts value from these ecosystems, which could lead to their collapse, if unchecked. In this paper, we explore novel ways for decentralized economies to protect themselves from, and coexist with, competitive markets at a global scale utilizing decentralized technologies such as Blockchain.

Nicholas Weaver

Considering the inherent risks of cryptocurrency ecosystems.

Daniel Genkin, Dimitrios Papadopoulos, Charalampos Papamanthou

When it comes to anonymizing cryptocurrencies, one size most definitely does not fit all.

Jen-Hung Tseng, Yen-Chih Liao, Bin Chong, Shih-Wei Liao

As a trust machine, blockchain was recently introduced to the public to provide an immutable, consensus based and transparent system in the Fintech field. However, there are ongoing efforts to apply blockchain to other fields where trust and value are essential. In this paper, we suggest Gcoin blockchain as the base of the data flow of drugs to create transparent drug transaction data. Additionally, the regulation model of the drug supply chain could be altered from the inspection and examination only model to the surveillance net model, and every unit that is involved in the drug supply chain would be able to participate simultaneously to prevent counterfeit drugs and to protect public health, including patients.

William Pourmajidi, Andriy Miranskyy

During the normal operation of a Cloud solution, no one usually pays attention to the logs except technical department, which may periodically check them to ensure that the performance of the platform conforms to the Service Level Agreements. However, the moment the status of a component changes from acceptable to unacceptable, or a customer complains about accessibility or performance of a platform, the importance of logs increases significantly. Depending on the scope of the issue, all departments, including management, customer support, and even the actual customer, may turn to logs to find out what has happened, how it has happened, and who is responsible for the issue. The party at fault may be motivated to tamper the logs to hide their fault. Given the number of logs that are generated by the Cloud solutions, there are many tampering possibilities. While tamper detection solution can be used to detect any changes in the logs, we argue that critical nature of logs calls for immutability. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based log system, called Logchain, that collects the logs from different providers and avoids log tampering by sealing the logs cryptographically and adding them to a hierarchical ledger, hence, providing an immutable platform for log storage.

Xavier Boyen, Christopher Carr, Thomas Haines

Blockchain-based replicated ledgers, pioneered in Bitcoin, are effective against double spending, but inherently attract centralised mining pools and incompressible transaction delays.

Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Kevin Li

This study proposes a strategy to make the lookback option cheaper and more practical, and suggests the use of its properties to reduce risk exposure in cryptocurrency markets through blockchain enforced smart contracts and correct for informational inefficiencies surrounding prices and volatility. This paper generalizes partial, discretely-monitored lookback options that dilute premiums by selecting a subset of specified periods to determine payoff, which we call amnesiac lookback options. Prior literature on discretely-monitored lookback options considers the number of periods and assumes equidistant lookback periods in pricing partial lookback options. This study by contrast considers random sampling of lookback periods and compares resulting payoff of the call, put and spread options under floating and fixed strikes. Amnesiac lookbacks were priced with Monte Carlo simulations of Gaussian random walks under equidistant and random periods. Results were compared to analytic and binomial pricing models for the same derivatives. Simulations show diminishing marginal increases to the fair price as the number of selected periods is increased. The returns correspond to a Hill curve whose parameters are set by interest rate and volatility. We demonstrate over-pricing under equidistant monitoring assumptions with error increasing as the lookback periods decrease. An example of a direct implication for event trading is when shock is forecasted but its timing uncertain, equidistant sampling produces a lower error on the true maximum than random choice. We conclude that the instrument provides an ideal space for investors to balance their risk, and as a prime candidate to hedge extreme volatility. We discuss the application of the amnesiac lookback option and path-dependent options to cryptocurrencies and blockchain commodities in the context of smart contracts.

Shuyang Tang, Sherman S. M. Chow

Most cryptocurrency systems mint new coins according to a predetermined rate, which contributes to inflation instead of solely by the actual demand. On the other hand, the blockchain, or whatever distributed consensus protocol underlying the cryptocurrency, can only process a limited number of transactions in a given time interval. To address both of these two issues, we propose a methodology that connects the coin minting with the prosperity of a cryptocurrency. Specifically, when there are fewer transactions, any cryptocurrency adopting our methodology will introduce a greater inflation to motivate transactions. Moreover, this methodology provides deflations and turns the currency towards a reserve of value when the network burden is too heavy.

Maoning Wang, Meijiao Duan, Jianming Zhu

The blockchain is an emerging technology. Because of its efficiency and functionality, it is widely considered to have revolutionary application prospects. As a supporting part of the data structure, the hash function is important for ensuring the availability and security of the blockchain. To evaluate the security of blockchain technology it is important to analyze several security criteria of the hash functions used in the blockchain. This paper focuses on two security criteria-hiding and puzzle-friendliness-that the hash function should satisfy in the blockchain proposed by Narayanan et al. (Narayanan A, Bonneau J, Felten E, et al. Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction. Princeton University Press, 2016). Under the framework of Rogaway?Shrimpton's theory, their definitions are mathematically described and their relation is proved. Also, comparisons between the two criteria and traditional ones in hash functions are made. The conclusions of this paper point out that for hash functions, it is harder to break hiding and puzzle-friendliness than to break preimage resistance, which shows that hash functions proven to be preimage-resistant or tested by preimage cryptanalysis like SHA256 tend to be enough to be used in the corresponding parts of the blockchain design. At the same time, from the attackers' view the conclusions can provide a theoretical basis for studying the potential attacks on and defects that may exist in the structure of the hash functions applied in the blockchain.

Tuyet Duong, Alexander Chepurnoy, Lei Fan, Hong-Sheng Zhou

We design and implement TwinsCoin, the first cryptocurrency based on a provably secure and scalable public blockchain design using both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake mechanisms. Different from the proof-of-work based Bitcoin, our construction uses two types of resources, computing power and coins (i.e., stake). The blockchain in our system is more robust than that in a pure proof-of-work based system; even if the adversary controls the majority of mining power, we can still have the chance to secure the system by relying on honest stake. In contrast, Bitcoin blockchain will be insecure if the adversary controls more than 50% of mining power.