Blockchain Papers

Brennan Bennett

Telemedicine and blockchain technology share a core philosophy of empowering the individual. Blockchain solutions that focus on empowering patients and enhancing the workflows for the providers who treat them continue to make big headlines, as does enterprise investment and adoption of telehealth. Both models focus on direct-to-consumer health services, with a personalized care experience designed from the ground up to save time and money for everyone involved. The typical binding factor between the telehealth and HIT (health information technology) blockchain adoption is a patient centric, value-based care model. Therefore, it is as no coincidence that value-based care is at the center of the fastest growing (and operational) part of HIT blockchain adoption. For this reason, telehealth can demonstrate adoption synergies than most other lines of business in healthcare cannot.

Prateek Goorha

I propose a method for introducing ‘context’ within the contractual environment based on a simple and intuitive application of control theory. The approach permits looking at several interesting practical features of contracts, be they incomplete, complete or smart, within a single framework. I define a contextual environment with the help of an interaction between three distinct spaces: a market-based contractual space framed within a formal institutional space and an even larger cultural space. Each space is characterized by a governing law built on a selection of control mechanisms that differ in their approach as well as their reliance on information generated from feedback mechanisms. I suggest how these governing laws tie the contextual spaces together and present some ideas on how they evolve through their interactions with other spaces. JEL: D20, D86, P50, Z10

Olumide Malomo, Danda B. Rawat, Moses Garuba

No abstract is available for this record.

Brennan Bennett

Data stored in a blockchain is immutable and available for access by separate parties. The excellent potential residing in this technology includes security, verification, and expanded data management for healthcare records, making it ideal for a new interoperability standard. As it stands today, public blockchain technology (i.e. Bitcoin) is a secure P2P (peer-to-peer) ledger system that uses public key encryption to protect information. Once entries are created on the chain, they are immutable, making blockchain ideal for storing permanent records. Because of this, authorized members of a network are confident of their data's authenticity within the encrypted chains. The shared ledger structure provides an immutable audit trail for every transaction. In healthcare, organizations can create authenticated records and entries without needing a central authority. Each link in the chain verifies the next, traceable back to what’s called the Genesis block, a.k.a. the first block in the chain ever created.

Rohaifa Khaldi, Abdellatif El Afia, Raddouane Chiheb, Rdouan Faizi

The present study investigates the application of EEMD-ELMAN model to forecast the daily returns of the Bitcoin. More than seven years data were collected online from 18th July 2010 to 17th January 2018. Then the data signal was decomposed into several sub-signals using EEMD method. After, sub-signals were captured by different ELMAN models, and their output results were combined to generate the final forecast. Besides, the results of this study were compared against ELMAN and ARGARCH models. Hence, the statistical metrics revealed that the used model outperforms ELMAN network, and has approximately the same estimation error as ARGARCH, although the later model is prone to bad generalization due to the high gap between its approximation and generalization errors. Therefore, we can confirm that EEMD can be considered as a promising preprocessing technique, which enables to bring up the forecasting performance of ELMAN network with respect to highly volatile time series.

Yongyou Li

Although China¡¯s asymmetric fiscal decentralization system has been criticized for many years, there have been few studies giving direct evidence of its negative incentives on local government spending policies. By introducing the mechanism of asymmetric decentralization and fiscal transfers to the objective function of local government, this paper studies the incentive effects of asymmetric decentralization and fiscal transfers on spending policies of local governments, and uses the provincial panel data to carry out an empirical test. The conclusion shows that the asymmetric decentralization significantly weakens the incentives of local government to increase social expenditure, and as a solution to asymmetric decentralization, fiscal transfers fail to play a good role. Due to the relatively large income effect, the financing mechanism of fiscal transfers not only significantly reduces the incentives of local government to provide social public goods, but also weakens the constraint effect of fiscal competition on expenditure policies of local governments because of the increase in the relative cost. Although the distribution mechanism of fiscal transfers has a significant positive incentive to local government in regions where the net inflow of fiscal resources is more than zero, because of common pooling effects, the comprehensive effects of fiscal transfers in the distribution of incentives of local governments to provide social public goods are negative in all regions.

Pradip Kumar Sharma, Jong Hyuk Park

No abstract is available for this record.

Tianyu Ray Li, Anup S. Chamrajnagar, Xander R. Fong, Nicholas R. Rizik · 5 authors

In this paper, we analyze Twitter signals as a medium for user sentiment to predict the price fluctuations of a small-cap alternative cryptocurrency called \emph{ZClassic}. We extracted tweets on an hourly basis for a period of 3.5 weeks, classifying each tweet as positive, neutral, or negative. We then compiled these tweets into an hourly sentiment index, creating an unweighted and weighted index, with the latter giving larger weight to retweets. These two indices, alongside the raw summations of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment were juxtaposed to $\sim 400$ data points of hourly pricing data to train an Extreme Gradient Boosting Regression Tree Model. Price predictions produced from this model were compared to historical price data, with the resulting predictions having a 0.81 correlation with the testing data. Our model'€™s predictive data yielded statistical significance at the $p < 0.0001$ level. Our model is the first academic proof of concept that social media platforms such as Twitter can serve as powerful social signals for predicting price movements in the highly speculative alternative cryptocurrency, or ``alt-coin'', market.

Leslie Mertz

Work is already underway to bring blockchain technology to the healthcare industry, and hospital administrators are trying to figure out what it can do for them, their clinicians, and their patients. That includes administrators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a leading academic medical center located in Boston.

Hsing‐Chung Chen, Shyi-Shiun Kuo, Han-Mi Chen

Due to the popularity of multimedia and constantly growing capacity of network, digital media demanding is increasingly high in last decade. The digital media with copyrighted contents, such as pictures, videos, audios, and 3D-model materials, etc., are more important in today's e-commerce. In recent years, the digital media content service by using OTT (over-the-top) platform is an emerging e-commerce model. The traditional website of the digital media content (DMC) always provides the transaction platform for both content producer and content provider to upload their DMC products. Then, clients (consumers) could browse their interesting products on the website, and download DMCs after payment. However, the transaction of these copyrighted DMCs on the platform is still carried out by means of the traditional payment, e.g. credit cards, debit cards and the ACH (Automated Clearing House). This paper proposes an innovative secure private OTT (p-OTT) platform in which the transaction process could deal with the credible and customizable services by adopting blockchain technology. One of the key features of the blockchain technique is smart contract. Thus, each DMC product could be pre-defined a template of data contract. After negotiation process by using the smart contract, the real data contract (RDC) will be created and outputted by smart contract. According to the predefined template of data contract, the content producer or provider could easily implement his transaction policy. In addition, we design an online authentication key for each member and a shadow key pair for each booked DMC during a transaction period. Therefore, this paper presents a secure OTT model with blockchain technology. Finally, we shows that it is not only a secure OTT platform but also a flexible transaction via preforming smart contract.

Chaoyue Gao, Yanchao Ji, Jianze Wang, Xiangyv Sai

With the increasing popularity of photovoitaic power generation, the traditional power supply mode in the future will gradually evolve into the balance between production and sales in the community. Users in the microgrid also play the role of producer, seller and consumer. In view of this mode, this paper first introduces the application of blockchain technology in the field of energy Internet, and illustrates the necessity of introducing blockchain technology and the limitations of current application based on the current research results. Then, made a concise and comprehensive introduction to blockchain technology, proposed a P2P technology based on blockchain technology trading model to effectively solve the cost of centralized management agencies to solve the problem of trust in the P2P model for the future blockchain technology in the energy Internet for further reference.

Takeshi Miyamae, Takeo Honda, Masahisa Tamura, Motoyuki Kawaba

In preparation for improving the consortium blockchain’s performance for financial business applications, the current authors first surveyed typical records of transaction rates for various financial systems and the performance capacity of several known consortium blockchains at this moment in time. The blockchain itself does not offer any performance advantage, but rather sacrifices performance to achieve tamper resistance. The average transaction rates for blockchain technologies, however, are continuously improving and have already reached around 1,000–2,000 transactions per second (TPS), which is equivalent to the transaction rate for the Zengin System, the common name for Japanese Banks’ Payment Clearing Network. Next, the current authors analysed and improved the transaction rate for Hyperledger, a Linux Foundation Project, and Fabric, one of the open source software tools for implementing consortium blockchain. The current authors found that inefficient message transfer between the platform container and the application container was the main cause of Fabric’s performance bottleneck. Therefore, the current authors have introduced more efficient application programming interface (API) between the containers and improved the transaction rate from 725 to 1,350 TPS (an 86% increase). Finally, the current authors analysed Fabric’s performance under artificial network latency. This paper determines that Fabric running over a wide area network might be required to replace its consensus algorithm to improve its transaction rate because other causes of performance deterioration, including the consensus algorithm, seem to become dominant.

Akihiro Ida

No abstract is available for this record.

Chenhan Xu, Kun Wang, Guoliang Xu, Peng Li · 6 authors

With the emergence of edge computing in various applications domains, end users are now surrounded by a fast growing volume of data from edge devices belonging to different stakeholders. However, these edge devices cannot cooperate to share big data because of the distrust among them. In this paper, the blockchain is deployed in collaborative edges by exploiting the non-repudiation and non-tampering properties to enable trust. First, we develop a blockchain based big data sharing framework in collaborative edges for adapting to the limited computational and storage resources in edge devices. Then, a consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Collaboration (PoC) is proposed for computational resources reduction in our proposed framework, where edge devices offer their credits of PoC to compete for the block generation. Moreover, we put forward a futile transaction filter algorithm for transaction offloading, greatly reducing the storage resources occupied by the blockchain in edges. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposal.

Muhammad Saad, Aziz Mohaisen, Charles Kamhoua, Kevin Kwait · 5 authors

In this paper, we look at the use of hash-based, one-time signatures in the context of the Blockchain systems and demonstrate how the replacement of currently utilized schemes into a one-time signature can help deter double-spending. Towards this goal, we make the following contributions. 1) We introduce a notion of double- spending deterrence, a form of malleability that does not require pre-authorization from the signer to create a signature on an arbitrary message using two previously signed messages. It is used as a penalty to deter double-spending and disincentivize forgery. 2) We study features of various one-time signature schemes, and we demonstrate their effectiveness in thwarting double-spending. 3) We explore the design space of applying our methodology to the Blockchain system with a clear example and design options to deter double-spending. The results reported in this paper are promising, and open several new directions.

Peggy Joy Lu, Lo‐Yao Yeh, Jiun‐Long Huang

Thanks to the growth of cloud computing and network technology, different organizations might want to share data and resources between each other. However, cross-organizational authentication systems usually need a central control system, which must be fully trusted. Thus, we use blockchain technology to store the access control list of users due to its tamper-proof and decentralized feature. Our system also provides authentication/authorization/accounting functions by using a virtual coin exe_coin to achieve accounting function. The method of one-way hash chain is used to securely adapt to the transparency feature of blockchain. In authentication system, the transparency may lead to the linkability problem. In our scheme, attackers cannot get the linkability between the transactions and the particular user. To the best of our knowledge, our scheme is the first blockchain-based authentication system with the merits of unlinkability and accounting.

Wenlin Xie, Wei Zhou, Lanju Kong, Xiangdong Zhang · 7 authors

Improving efficiency and performance is an important topic in the world today. As it is well-known, cooperative computing is an effective and traditional approach, and it is widely used in various fields. Inspired by this idea, take E-commerce for example, Security is one of its important indicators. In E-commerce, the security technology has become a major issue restricting the rapid development and popularization of E-commerce. Existing solutions leverage blockchain protocols to improve the credibility of transactions, but most of them have some limitations, such as a lower throughput and higher consensus latency, and these problems make blockchain technology difficult to be widely used. This paper presents a trusted framework (ETT F) using blockchain protocol in E-commerce to achieve a higher credible trading. ETTF includes a peer blockchain protocol (PBP) based on a peer blockchain architecture to support the storage of massive transactions and instant transactions. In PBP, the throughput scales are nearly linearly increased with the computation: the more computing power available, the more blocks are selected per unit time. Besides, in order to ensure a higher security of transactions we have introduced a strong consensus algorithm(ECA) in E-commerce. ETTF is also efficient because the number of messages it requires is nearly linear in the network size. Compared to Bitcoin-derived blockchain, ETTF shows better performance on throughput, latency, and capacity in E-commerce.

Songze Li, Seyed Mohammadreza Mousavi Kalan, A. Salman Avestimehr, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

No abstract is available for this record.

Mark Longaker

In the 1980s, Deirdre McCloskey argued that economists should look beyond their mathematical formulas and their positivist methodologies. If “economic style appeals in various ways to an ethos worthy of belief,” then economists should “give up their quaint modernism and open themselves to a wider range of discourse… . [They should] examine their language in action and converse more politely with others in the conversation of humanity” (McCloskey Rhetoric, 11, 167). Much broader than her original “rhetoric of economics,” McCloskey’s recent “humanomics,” asks us to consider cultural as well as economic forces when investigating human prosperity (Bourgeois, 553–559). McCloskey’s humanomics is one example of the rhetoric of economics clearing the way for new scholarly efforts in the social sciences. The articles in this special collection move in another direction, towards rhetorical analysis and historical inquiry. Like McCloskey’s humanomics, the historical inquiry into rhetoric and economics is a worthy sequel to McCloskey’s pioneering efforts.Robert McDonald’s “From “Incentive Furie” to “Incentives to Efficiency,” or the Movement of “Incentive” in Neoclassical Thought,” for instance, rhetorically analyzes works by Jeremy Bentham, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson. Echoing McCloskey’s rhetoric of economics, McDonald suggests a modest disciplinary conclusion about the rhetorical constitution of economic science. He notes the “poetical” quality of incentives, their “call to act rationally,” and their rhetorically objectified constitution as “the desired object that provides the key to unlocking a universal analysis of social reality” (this issue). But, instead of drawing conclusions about the discipline of economics or rhetoric’s economic function, McDonald asks: What does poetically constituted “incentive” do in our common conversations and our daily deliberations? The “rhetoric of economics” was a critical inquiry, part of the larger Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry that McCloskey and others began (1980) at the University of Iowa. McCloskey’s humanomics is a human science including cultural criticism, philosophical rumination, and statistical formulas. McDonald’s critical analysis of economic arguments is an historical inquiry into the local constitution and the specific function of public discourse. Like McDonald, the authors featured in this special issue share McCloskey’s two key insights. We all agree that economics is rhetorically constituted, and rhetoric is economically effective. But we attend to specific arguments, their rhetorical form, and their historical function.McDonald’s essay traces a common rhetorical turn across two centuries of argumentation. The first major segment of his argument explores the etymology of “incentive,” showing that the anthimeric movement from adjective to noun happened simultaneously in university hallways and vulgar conversations. Samuelson wasn’t the only twentieth-century voice chattering about “incentives.” We all were. McDonald’s etymology follows the evolution of a rhetorical commonplace. His analysis highlights its social effects: “the supersession of society by the economy” (this issue). He concludes with a question about contemporary policies. “[W]hat is repressed, negated, and transformed when incentives become a universal object”? (this issue).McDonald’s “incentive” has a centuries-old pedigree. Other topics of economic argumentation seem less senescent. In his contribution to this special issue, William O. Saas charts an important shift in U.S. presidential rhetoric: from the Keynesian definition of federal debt (a way to support publicly favored economic initiatives) to the neoliberal definition of a balanced budget (an eternal moral good, irrespective of federal obligations or economic imperatives). The analogy between the U.S. federal budget and a family’s finances became widespread during national conversations about Reaganite supply-side economics. The “pump priming” and “printing money” metaphors (both describing federal deficit spending during a recession) seem no older than the Federal Reserve System (1913). Yet the lines of argument that Saas analyzes have a long history.Writing in 1695, Secretary to the Treasury of Great Britain under William III, William Lowndes bickered with mercantilists who defined the balance of trade as a moral good. They further opposed revaluation of English specie (the early-modern version of “printing money”) on the grounds that such an action would lead to inflation. Mercantilists believed that England’s monetary problems could only be rectified by correcting the balance of trade and attracting foreign silver to English shores. Lowndes conceded his opponents’ definition, allowing that “the Ballance [sic] of Trade must be Rectified” (91). Exactly ten years later, based on a proto-Keynesian definition of federal debt, John Law (of Mississippi Company fame) suggested that the Scottish government allow monetization of land titles, essentially “printing money” to spur domestic industry. According to Law, “[a]n addition to the money adds to the value of the country, so long as money gives interest, it is imployed [sic]; and money imployed brings profit” (21–22). There are some important differences, of course, between the twentieth-century arguments that Saas analyzes and their seventeenth-century analogues. Saas looks at the Reaganite argument that a balanced budget, not balanced trade, is a moral good. And John Law may have presaged the Keynesian pump-priming metaphor, but he did not take the argument as far as the neo-Keynesians whom Saas favors. Nonetheless, this quick comparison shows a line of economic rhetoric stretching from seventeenth-century monetary arguments to twentieth-century fiscal disagreements.I do not have to demonstrate a storied legacy for the economic arguments that William Rodney Herring analyzes because he starts in the early eighteenth century. Herring’s historical scope aside, “Neither Pistols nor Sugar-Plumbs: The Rhetoric of Finance and the 1720 Bubbles” offers something else to the study of economic rhetoric: an attention to financial instruments as persuasive devices. Herring claims that early eighteenth-century offers to buy stocks at rates above or below par (face-value, as distinct from market value) were a kind of symbolic action, an effort to influence buyers’ choices by changing their perceptions. Herring’s contribution is twofold. In an analytical register, he contends that financial instruments themselves are rhetorical. In an historical register, he notes that financial instruments have historically held a rhetorical function. His analysis leads to contemporary political questions, not unlike those raised by McDonald and Saas. Herring asks, What persuasive force do financial instruments exert? McDonald ponders, How did Bentham’s anthimeria change into Samuelson’s common sense? Saas wonders, How have we defined credit and debt? While exploring common lines of economic argumentation, some explicitly discursive and others implicitly persuasive, all three articles indulge a wide historical scope and allow some political reflection.The remaining three articles in this collection, by contrast, present robust political implications supported by some historical reflection. The shared mix of history and advocacy—inquiry and argument—characterizes the new historical inquiry into rhetoric and economics.Joshua S. Hanan and Jeffrey St. Onge discuss the common antithesis between Wall Street and Main Street in their analysis of the 2015 movie The Big Short. Hanan and St. Onge point to a more fundamental antithesis between the oikos and the polis, arguing that the ancient Greeks privileged the polis, seeing the oikos as a “supplementary background” and the polis as “a sovereign domain of action” (this issue). Their genealogical inquiry reveals that moderns have reconfigured this order. The metonymic “Main Street” recedes into the background, while “Wall Street” becomes a “sphere of emergent freedom and autarky” (this issue). Hanan and St. Onge scrutinize an antithesis, adulating one economic class and its privileged sphere of activity while relegating the other to inconsequence.Such rhetorical antithesis, however, is neither peculiar to present-day finance, nor specific to modish Hollywood. Two moments remind us that the antithesis discussed by Hanan and St. Onge can be found in the infancy and midlife of modern economic argumentation. In late seventeenth-century England, land-owning gentry imagined their agricultural sphere as the productive arena where political action should take place, and they sneered at new financiers who invented financial instruments such as the Million Lottery Act and the Bank of England (1694). Like many English mercantilists and French Physiocrats, John Briscoe assumed that the truly “productive” sphere was agriculture, so the empowered political class should be the noble “Landed-Men,” not the usurious “monied-men” (19). He juxtaposed a privileged, agricultural, and aristocratic polis against the nonproductive (financial) oikos. Briscoe’s argument is classical in form, repeated through the ages, separating a productive from an unproductive sphere and depending on class interest. Two-and-a-half centuries later, John Maynard Keynes argued that global bankers had become a privileged class, global finance a dominant polis, to the detriment of the industrial oikos. Like the Wall Street/Main Street opposition, Keynes’s rentier/producer antithesis asserts an injustice, this time with the rentier unfairly in the privileged sphere and the manufacturer all but erased. According to Keynes, gradually eliminating interest (making “capital goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero”), would likewise eliminate “many of the objectionable features of capitalism.” Full employment would result from low (effectively zero) interest rates. The “rentier,” no longer able to make a living, would vanish. Entrepreneurial industrialists would become the properly privileged class. “[T]here would still be room … for enterprise and skill in the estimation of prospective yields” (221), so industry would become the new polis.I point to a long history behind the antithesis that Hanan and St. Onge locate in their contemporary analysis. But I want to emphasize that they find something more than a tired rhetorical juxtaposition of warring classes. Their genealogy explains that rhetorical activity is invested in the privileged polis (Wall Street) while the ambient background of necessity (Main Street) remains. They are analyzing an old trope while explaining its new turn, its contemporary economic effects. They add a new awareness: the dialectical structure of the oikos and the polis (Main Street and Wall Street) excludes the oikos; the rhetorical form diminishes Main Street’s agency. Something similar can be said about the topics discussed in Catherine Chaput’s and Crystal Broch Colombini’s articles. While Chaput and Colombini seek out old lines of economic argumentation, they find much more than tired commonplaces applied to present circumstances.Chaput and Colombini analyze supplemental arguments that shore up the economist’s dryly rational proof. Again, the historical precedence is not hard to find. Thomas Malthus’ demographic arguments inspired Thomas Carlyle’s oft-repeated characterization of economics: “the dismal science.” Harriet Martineau supplemented Malthus’s tomes about cyclical overpopulation and famine. She created characters who embodied rational prudence while suffering economic hardship. In one of Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–1834), Ella of Garveloch, a rich literary character, wisely steers her family through a wretched famine. Surrounded by suffering, she proclaims, in terms far more convincing than anything Malthus ever mouthed, “Evil is palliated by the caution of the prudent, by the emigration of the enterprising, and by other means which may yet remain” (102). Martineau’s characters are ethical arguments about how people should behave once they understand rational principles, such as “the operation of the principle of increase within narrow bounds” (Martineau 103). Ayn Rand, writing a century later, offered pathetic appeals to supplement the arid libertarian arguments of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Rand even theorized the necessity of her pathetic supplement, saying that her nakedly pro-capitalist novels were meant to emotionally convey a “sense of life” to a reader who would then induce “an intense, profoundly personal … value-meaning,” a meaning that might be deduced rationally but without the force of conviction (35). We could reason our way toward a belief in the free market, said Rand, or we could gaze upon the “artist’s view of man” (67), a sculpted Howard Roark or a daring Dagny Taggart. Rand and Martineau shared the belief that pathetic and ethical argumentation supplements rational economic deduction. Colombini’s and Chaput’s analyses present the ethical and the emotional appeals as not merely supplemental to the economic claim but rather as integral to the political economy.Colombini analyzes a moral argument commonly repeated during the recent housing market collapse. As she explains, the economist’s wholly rational definition of “strategic default” explains why a prudent person possessing an underwater mortgage should simply forfeit the property. But such rational action, if widespread, would harm banks and might cripple the financial sector. As a result, in public discourse, an ethically supplemental definition was added: Mortgage holders were said to be “walking away” from their homes and their responsibilities. The Martineau and Rand examples suggest that economic arguments require an ethical and pathetic sugarcoating to sweeten the rational pill. Colombini’s analysis of “walking away” suggests that the supplement is more than decoration. Without these moral public arguments, “rational” neoliberalism would not function. Rendered unpersuasive by its own cold ratiocination and unsustainable by its victims’ rational actions, neoliberalism depends upon the rhetorical strategies that Colombini discusses.Chaput explores Donald Trump’s economic arguments. She explains that an irrational and inconsistent Trumponomics mobilizes affect, that fluttery sensitivity and jittery responsivity energized by social media, image ads, and wearable technology. Working “along ontological axes,” Chaput illuminates a new pathetic appeal in a new rhetorical role (this issue). Trump’s pathos does not supplement his rational appeal. His affect is the argument. The “epistemic focus of the rhetoric of economic arguments” emphasized logos. Chaput picks up where McCloskey left off, by analyzing the affectively suasive dimension. Understanding affect requires Chaput’s “ontological focus” (this issue). Rand and Martineau offered ethical and pathetic supplements. Colombini and Chaput theorize ethical and pathetic economics. Aristotle once observed that rhetoric must appeal to the whole person. Chaput and Colombini suggest that our present-day economy enlists every felt conviction and mobilizes every bodily corpuscle. Like all persuasive efforts, rational economic theory requires ethical and pathetic appeals. Colombini and Chaput add to the classical maxim a contemporary reflection: Economic systems cannot survive without economic argumentation. Chaput directly states this when remarking that the neoliberal economy itself, like Trump’s zigzagging affective appeals, “not only moves in a decidedly nonlinear path, it produces a bodily thinking” (this issue). Affect is not just a rhetorical appeal; it’s a bio-political factory and an economic engine.At the twentieth century’s close, Deirdre McCloskey averred that the rhetoric of economics was not “intrinsically revolutionary or intrinsically conservative” (Knowledge 339). Her last and longest book, before the bourgeois virtue trilogy, circled back to a methodological conclusion: “Perhaps the time has come, after a useful childhood spent in positivism, for economists to grow up too” (Knowledge 396). While the authors featured in this special issue often separate their approach to economic rhetoric from McCloskey’s rhetoric of economics, they all owe her a significant debt. Once she had cleared the positivist brush, other inquiries, such has her humanomics, could take seed. Like McCloskey’s initial and most recent program, the articles in this special issue require neither a neo-Marxian nor a neo-Keynesian tilt. Nonetheless, the historical analysis of economic rhetoric requires that we engage politics. Two decades ago, when she proclaimed her partisan neutrality, McCloskey was dodging typical accusations of postmodern relativism and radical nihilism, the alleged epistemological bedfellows of socialism, communism, and anarchism. Critically analyzing economic arguments can similarly avoid a partisan but not a political tilt. Historically situating and tracing economic arguments recalls an older paradigm—political economy—a paradigm that refused to separate public discourse from social science or partisan bickering from expert advice. In this introduction, I have argued that all the arguments analyzed in this special issue have long historical traditions. But more than these traditions of economic argumentation, the refusal to throw out the political baby with the positivist bathwater makes the contributions to this special issue properly rhetorical, fully humanist, and thoroughly historical.

Adamenko Iryna P., Sobchuk Serhii I.

The article is aimed at disclosing the methodological and practical provisions of formation of budget expenditures in the conditions of institutional modernization of the country’s economy together with developing recommendations for their improvement. The basic principles of institutional transformation of the system of budgetary financing of socio-economic development are defined. An analysis of the budget policy of Ukraine in the sphere of expenses is carried out. The features of the budget expenditures structure according to their functional and economic classification are disclosed. The expediency of use of the program-target method of management of expenses on planning and performance of the budget for the medium-term perspective is substantiated. The features of formation of budget deficit and the structure of sources of its financing are characterized. The basic approaches to improvement of the mechanism of formation of expenditure part of local budgets through decentralization of the budget funds management are developed.

Roman Graf, Ross King

Protecting Critical Infrastructure (CI) against increasing cyber threats has become as crucial as it is complicated. To be effective in identifying and defeating cyber attacks, cyber analysts require novel distributed detection and reaction methodologies based on information security techniques that can automatically analyse incident reports and securely share analysis results between Critical Infrastructure stakeholders. Our goal is to provide solutions in real-time that could replace human input for cyber incident analysis tasks (triage) to classify cyber incident reports, find related reports in a fast and scalable way, eliminate irrelevant information, and automate reporting life- cycle management. Our effective and fast incident management method is based on artificial intelligence and can support cyber analysts in establishing cyber situational awareness, and allow them to quickly adopt suitable countermeasures in the case of an attack. In this paper, we evaluate deep autoencoder neural network supported by Blockchain technology as a system for incident classification and management, and assess its accuracy and performance. This approach should reduce the number of manual operations and save storage space. We used a Blockchain smart contract technique to provide an automated trusted system for incident management workflow that allows automatic acquisition, classification and enrichment of incident data. We demonstrate how the presented techniques can be applied to support incident handling tasks performed by security operation centres.

Shi-Cho Cha, Kuo‐Hui Yeh

In this study, we utilize a blockchain network as the underlying communication architecture to construct an ISO/IEC 15408-2 compliant security auditing system. The proposed system is an evolutionary paradigm not only seamlessly integrating the advantages, i.e., de-centralization, robustness and tamper-resistance, of the blockchain network, but fulfilling the critical auditing requirements identified by ISO/IEC 15408-2. Versatile intelligent applications, including IoT (Internet of Things) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) robots, are highly suitable to adopt our security auditing system.

Ahmed E. Kosba, Charalampos Papamanthou, Elaine Shi

Many cloud and cryptocurrency applications rely on verifying the integrity of outsourced computations, in which a verifier can efficiently verify the correctness of a computation made by an untrusted prover. State-of-the-art protocols for verifiable computation require that the computation task be expressed as arithmetic circuits, and the number of multiplication gates in the circuit is the primary metric that determines performance. At the present, a programmer could rely on two approaches for expressing the computation task, either by composing the circuits directly through low-level development tools; or by expressing the computation in a high-level program and rely on compilers to perform the program-to-circuit transformation. The former approach is difficult to use but on the other hand allows an expert programmer to perform custom optimizations that minimize the resulting circuit. In comparison, the latter approach is much more friendly to non-specialist users, but existing compilers often emit suboptimal circuits. We present xJsnark, a programming framework for verifiable computation that aims to achieve the best of both worlds: offering programmability to non-specialist users, and meanwhile automating the task of circuit size minimization through a combination of techniques. Specifically, we present new circuit-friendly algorithms for frequent operations that achieve constant to asymptotic savings over existing ones; various globally aware optimizations for short- and long- integer arithmetic; as well as circuit minimization techniques that allow us to reduce redundant computation over multiple expressions. We illustrate the savings in different applications, and show the framework's applicability in developing large application circuits, such as ZeroCash, while minimizing the circuit size as in low-level implementations.

Shipra Saxena

Abstract: Other than the paper currency or physical currency, the innovative developments have lead to the emergence of a virtual currency, referred to as cryptocurrency. It can be briefly described as a digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central bank. Cryptocurrency made the leap from being an academic concept to (virtual) reality with the creation of Bitcoin in 2009. For crypto currencies to become more widely used, they have to first gain widespread acceptance among consumers. While the number of merchants who accept crypto currencies has steadily increased, they are still very much in the minority. The concept is still unknown to many except for the technologically adept. The study aims at analyzing the future of cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin in India. It also tries to review it as as Innovative investment alternative alongwith the risk associated with it. The paper provides further scope for analyzing the invasion of digital currency on a continuum basis.