The aim of this study is to review the literature growth and author productivity of Blockchain technology research from 2008 to March 2017. 801 articles were retrieved from Scopus database and analyzed with bibliometrics approach using different perspective views. The author productivity was derived using the Lotka’s law and K-S test was performed to verify the reliability. The result indicates that the number of literatures on Blockchain is still increasing. Three stages of Blockchain research change were discovered. In 2008 to 2013, the topics were related to the Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies; in 2014 to 2015, the number of Bitcoin literatures grew rapidly; after 2016, a lot of researchers are paying attention to the techniques of Blockchain and smart contract. Moreover, the distribution of author productivity meets the study of Lotka. This study presents state-of-the-art and abstract the trend of Blockchain research regarding several perspectives of bibliometrics analysis.
PETER MWIATHI SILAS, Nelson Wawire, Perez Ayieko Onono-Okelo
The Kenya government has instituted fiscal decentralization over the years to promote social economic development, reduce poverty and income inequality and ensure balanced regional development. Despite these efforts, poverty levels have remained high in Kenya. The literature on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and poverty has been rather inconclusive about the effects of fiscal decentralization on poverty. The main objective of this paper was to analyse the effects of fiscal decentralization on poverty in Kenya. Using cross-county panel data from 2002 – 2014 and published data from government agencies, UNDP reports and World Bank reports, the paper estimated various empirical models to analyse the effects intergovernmental transfers, sub-national own-source revenue and county expenditure on poverty in Kenya. The study established that the effect of fiscal decentralization on poverty depends on the nature of decentralization and the extent of fiscal decentralization as well as the county specifics. The paper therefore, recommends the need for for county governments to have adequate own-source revenue to finance their expenditure as opposed to relying on intergovernmental transfers from national government.
Cryptocurrencies are a type of digital currencies that are relying on cryptographic proofs for confirmation of transactions. Cryptocurrencies usually achieve a unique combination of three features: ensuring limited anonymity, independence from central authority and double spending attack protection. No other group of currencies, including fiat currencies, has this combination of features. We will define cryptocurrency ownership and account anonymity. We will define cryptocurrency ownership and account anonymity. We will introduce a classification of the types of approaches to regulation of cryptocurrencies by various individual countries. We will present the risks that the use of cryptocurrencies involves and the possibilities of prevention of those risks. We will present the possible use of cryptocurrencies for the benefit of the state. The conclusion addresses the implications of adoption of a cryptocurrency as a national currency.
Digital banking as an essential service can be hard to access in remote, rural regions where the network connectivity is unavailable or intermittent. The payment operators like Visa and Mastercard often face difficulties reaching these remote, rural areas. Although micro-banking has been made possible by short message service or unstructured supplementary service data messages in some places, their security flaws and session-based nature prevent them from wider adoption. Global-level cryptocurrencies enable low-cost, secure, and pervasive money transferring among distributed peers, but are still limited in their ability to reach people in remote communities. We propose a blockchain-based digital payment scheme that can deliver reliable services on top of unreliable networks in remote regions. We focus on a scenario where a community-run base station provides reliable local network connectivity while intermittently connects to the broader Internet. We take advantage of the distributed verification guarantees of the Blockchain technology for financial transaction verification and leverage smart contracts for secure service management. In the proposed system, payment operators deploy multiple proxy nodes that are intermittently connected to the remote communities where the local blockchain networks, such as Ethereum are composed of miners, vendors, and regular users. Through probabilistic modeling, we devise design parameters for the blockchain network to realize robust operation over the top of the unreliable network. Furthermore, we show that the transaction processing time will not be significantly impacted due to the network unreliability through extensive emulations on a private Ethereum network. Finally, we demonstrate the practical feasibility of the proposed system by developing Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled payment gateways on Raspberry-Pis, a mobile wallet application and mining nodes on off-the-shelf computers.
Kuresellesen dunyada 1960’li yillarda teknik ve teknolojik alanda yasanan gelismeler insanoglunun tarihsel gelisimde onemli bir rol oynayan parayi da etkilemistir. Siber/dijital dunyada sanal bir para biriminin ortaya cikmasi kuresel ticarette yeni bir devrim niteligindedir. Bitcoin, sanal para birimlerinin oncusu olarak kabul edilmektedir. Bu makalede elektronik para (sanal para, dijital para, kripto para vb.) gibi bircok adlandirmaya sahip olan para birimlerinden bahsedilecek, ilklerden olan Bitcoin analiz edilecek olup, uluslararasi iliskilerde hayat sahasi bulan devletler uzerindeki yansimalari karsilastirmali olarak ele alinacaktir. Bu calismadaBitcoin hakkinda literatur taramasi yapilmis olup, guncel kaynaklardan elde edilen nicel veriler ile makale desteklenmeye calisilmistir. Ayrica belli basli devletler bu makale de secilerek, Bitcoin hakkindaki duzenlemeleri karsilastirmali olarak ortaya konulmaya calisilmistir.
Els conceptes de cadenes de blocs (blockchains) i contractes intel·ligents (smart contracts) ofereixen una alternativa sostenible en educació superior. Des d’aquest objectiu, es presenta una revisió d’ambdós conceptes i la seva relació amb els termes bitcoin, ledger, edublock i educoin. En un segon moment, s’atén a les xarxes en educació superior basades en tecnologia de cadenes de blocs, el seu vincle amb els contractes intel·ligents i les possibilitats a dia d’avui.
Once again the manufacturers of dreams and cotton candy are at work, finding fertile Despite its clearly virtual origin, bitcoin has become a trap of mythological finance capable of deluding all as easily achievable, but absolutely uncertain,wealth that will end in drama, as the financial and speculative bubbles taught us, and as evidenced by history and the facts, but obscured by the infinite greed of the King Midas syndrome . As always, the unfathomable capacity of human psychology to be drawn into the drama by a subtle, and in this case, invisible thread remains an enigmaground in which to throw the magic hook wisely trafficked as possibility and truth; the term cryptocurrency itself contributes to giving it an esoteric qualification, reminiscent of the dream of the philosopher's stone.
Elli Androulaki, Artem Barger, Vita Bortnikov, Christian Cachin · 21 authors
Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (www.hyperledger.org). Fabric is the first truly extensible blockchain system for running distributed applications. It supports modular consensus protocols, which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Fabric is also the first blockchain system that runs distributed applications written in standard, general-purpose programming languages, without systemic dependency on a native cryptocurrency. This stands in sharp contrast to existing blockchain platforms that require "smart-contracts" to be written in domain-specific languages or rely on a cryptocurrency. Fabric realizes the permissioned model using a portable notion of membership, which may be integrated with industry-standard identity management. To support such flexibility, Fabric introduces an entirely novel blockchain design and revamps the way blockchains cope with non-determinism, resource exhaustion, and performance attacks. This paper describes Fabric, its architecture, the rationale behind various design decisions, its most prominent implementation aspects, as well as its distributed application programming model. We further evaluate Fabric by implementing and benchmarking a Bitcoin-inspired digital currency. We show that Fabric achieves end-to-end throughput of more than 3500 transactions per second in certain popular deployment configurations, with sub-second latency, scaling well to over 100 peers.
Permission-less blockchains can realise trustless trust, albeit at the cost of limiting the complexity of computation tasks. To explain the implications for scalability, we have implemented a trust model for smart contracts, described as agents in an open multi-agent system. Agent intentions are not necessarily known and autonomous agents have to be able to make decisions under risk. The ramifications of these general conditions for scalability are analysed for Ethereum and then generalised to other current and future platforms.
An atomic cross-chain swap is a distributed coordination task where multiple parties exchange assets across multiple blockchains, for example, trading bitcoin for ether. An atomic swap protocol guarantees (1) if all parties conform to the protocol, then all swaps take place, (2) if some coalition deviates from the protocol, then no conforming party ends up worse off, and (3) no coalition has an incentive to deviate from the protocol. A cross-chain swap is modeled as a directed graph ${\cal D}$, whose vertexes are parties and whose arcs are proposed asset transfers. For any pair $({\cal D},L)$, where ${\cal D} = (V,A)$ is a strongly-connected directed graph and $L \subset V$ a feedback vertex set for ${\cal D}$, we give an atomic cross-chain swap protocol for ${\cal D}$, using a form of hashed timelock contracts, where the vertexes in $L$ generate the hashlocked secrets. We show that no such protocol is possible if ${\cal D}$ is not strongly connected, or if ${\cal D}$ is strongly connected but $L$ is not a feedback vertex set. The protocol has time complexity $O(diam({\cal D}))$ and space complexity (bits stored on all blockchains) $O(|A|^2)$.
With development of Big Data technology these years, Internet financial companies in China started trying using big data technology to do credit investigation instead of traditional methods. But there is some limitation and problem in terms of data acquisition channel, information asymmetry and data privacy protection, etc. Block chain, characterized in unalterability and decentralization comes into people's sight. This paper will introduce block chain technology, explore the use of block chain technology in Internet financial credit investigation, and put forward an internet financial credit data sharing model based on block chain, which mainly composed by the Fin-tech Federate Servers group (FFS), the user data storage structure and a distributed database system (DDBS). By combining DPoS and re-encryption technology, the model has the characteristics of non-tampering, authorized access and convenient accountability. Through this model, the user data is recorded by the trusted agent, encrypted by asymmetric encryption technology, and anchored to the chain of the block periodically.
Siti Rohaya Mat Rahim, Zam Zuriyati Mohamad, Juliana Abu Bakar, Farhana Hanim Mohsin · 5 authors
This study examines the two important aspect of latest technology issues in Islamic finance that related to artificial intelligence (AI) and smart contract. AI refers to the ability of machines to understand, think, and learn in a similar way to human beings, indicating the possibility of using computers to simulate human intelligence. Smart contract is a computer code running on top of a block-chain containing a set of rules under which the parties to that smart contract agree to interact with each other. The main objectives of this article are to evaluate the operations of AI and smart contract, to make comparison between the operations of AI and smart contract. This article concludes that AI and smart contract will have a huge impact in future for Islamic Finance industry.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the value-at-risk and related measures for the Bitcoin and to compare the findings with Standard and Poor’s SP500 Index, and the gold spot price time series. Design/methodology/approach A GJR-GARCH model has been implemented, in which the residuals follow the standardized Pearson type-IV distribution. A large variety of value-at-risk measures and backtesting criteria are implemented. Findings Bitcoin is a highly volatile currency violating the value-at-risk measures more than the other assets. With respect to the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision Accords, a Bitcoin investor is subjected to higher capital requirements and capital allocation ratio. Practical implications The risk of an investor holding Bitcoins is measured and quantified via the regulatory framework practices. Originality/value This paper is the first comprehensive approach to the risk properties of Bitcoin.
Purpose This paper aims to gather together the minimum units of users’ identity in the Bitcoin network (i.e. the individual Bitcoin addresses) and group them into representations of business entities, what we call “super clusters”. While these clusters can remain largely anonymous, the authors are able to ascribe many of them to particular business categories by analyzing some of their specific transaction patterns (TPs), as observed during the period from 2009 to 2015. The authors are then able to extract and create a map of the network of payment relationships among them, and analyze transaction behavior found in each business category. They conclude by identifying three marked regimes that have evolved as the Bitcoin economy has grown and matured: from an early prototype stage; to a second growth stage populated in large part with “sin” enterprise (i.e. gambling, black markets); to a third stage marked by a sharp progression away from “sin” and toward legitimate enterprises. Design/methodology/approach Data mining. Findings Four primary business categories are identified in the Bitcoin economy: miners, gambling services, black markets and exchanges. Common patterns of transaction behavior between the business categories and their users are a “one-day” holding period for bitcoin transactions is somewhat typical. That is, a one-day effect where traders, gamblers, black market participants and miners tend to cash out on a daily basis. There seems to be a strong preference to do business within the bitcoin economy in round lot amounts, whether it is more typical of traders exchanging for fiat money, gamblers placing bets or black market goods being bought and sold. Distinct patterns of transaction behavior among the business categories and their users are flows between traders and exchanges average just around 20 BTC, and traders buy or sell on average every 11 days. Meanwhile, gamblers wager just 0.5 BTC on average, but re-bet often within the same day. Three marked regimes have evolved, as the Bitcoin economy has grown and matured: from an early prototype stage, to a second growth stage populated in large part with “sin” enterprises (i.e. gambling, black markets), to a third stage marked by a sharp progression away from “sin” and toward legitimate enterprises. This evolution of the Bitcoin economy suggests a trend toward legitimate commerce. Originality/value The authors propose a new theoretical framework that allows investigating and exploring the network of payment relationships in the Bitcoin economy. This study starts by gathering together the minimum units of Bitcoin identities (the individual addresses), and it goes forward in grouping them into approximations of business entities, what is called “super clusters”, by using tested techniques from the literature. A super cluster can be thought of as an approximation of a business entity in that it describes a number of individual addresses that are owned or controlled collectively by the same beneficial owner for some special economic purposes. The majority of these important clusters are initially unknown and uncategorized. The novelty of this study is given by the pure user group and the TP analyses, by means of which the authors are able to ascribe the super clusters into specific business categories and outline a map of the network of payment relationships among them.
The emergence of a cryptocurrencies in the economic circulation is a challenge for legal systems. The response of a legal system depends on social, political and international determinants. The first attempts to understand cryptocurrencies usually concerns tax law, which, however, are related to the civilian understanding of the phenomenon. In the Polish legal system, we had a lack of regulation directly related to cryptocurrencies, which caused them to be strictly qualified as an instrument whose exchange for money was not exempt from VAT as Bitcoin was not classified as money. This situation has changed as a result of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which has recognized Bitcoin as an alternative means of payment. Recently, new statutory regulations have been introduced in non-European legal systems, i.e. in Japan and Arizona, which regulate cryptocurrencies in a wider way. This allows us to propose classification of legal systems based on the relationship they have towards cryptocurrencies.
This paper investigates the power of quantum statistical zero knowledge interactive proof systems in the relativized setting. We prove the existence of an oracle relative to which quantum statistical zero-knowledge does not contain UP intersect coUP, and we prove that quantum statistical zero knowledge does not contain UP relative to a random oracle with probability 1. Our proofs of these statements rely on a bound on output state discrimination for relativized quantum circuits based on the quantum adversary method of Ambainis, following a technique similar to one used by Ben-David and Kothari to prove limitations on a query complexity variant of quantum statistical zero-knowledge.
For the last century, academics and business leaders have been shaping the practice of modern management. The main theories, tenets, and behaviors have enabled managers to build corporations, which have largely been hierarchical, insular, and vertically integrated. However, we believe that the technology underlying digital currencies such as bitcoin—technology commonly known as blockchain—will have profound effects on the nature of companies: how they are funded and managed, how they create value, and how they perform basic functions such as marketing, accounting, and incentivizing people. In some cases, software will eliminate the need for many management functions.
Sepsis is a high mortality syndrome characterized by organ dysfunction due to a severe and dysregulated acute inflammatory response to infection. Research into therapies for this syndrome has historically ended in failure, which has largely been attributed to the elevated levels of subject heterogeneity. What may have been previously attributed to variability in sepsis may be due to mechanistic differences between patients. Endotypes are distinct subtypes of disease, where underlying causes such as mechanistic or pathway related differences manifest into phenotypes of disease. The lack of mechanistic understanding of immune mediator dynamics and the responses they trigger necessitates a mathematical modeling approach to analyze its complexities. A transfer function model is proposed to describe and cluster the dynamics of key inflammatory mediators. Five sepsis endotypes were discovered and revealed motifs of overwhelming inflammation, various levels of immunosuppression, sustained inflammation, and immunodeficiency. An accurate clinical tool was proposed to classify subjects into endotypes using six-hour trajectories of clinical data. A physiological ordinary differential equation model of sepsis is proposed that characterizes the interactions of inflammatory signaling molecules, neutrophils, and macrophages across the bone, blood, and tissue compartments of the body. This model used to generate individual subject fits against human sepsis data. Population-level parameter analysis implicated macrophage cell death and cytokine half- dynamics in endotype-level differences. Several proof-of-concept statistical models were introduced to demonstrate that it is possible to estimate the pre-hospital time of sepsis subjects and to quantify their sepsis-induced systemic tissue damage. A nearest-neighbor-based method was verified against animal and human data and revealed that identifying infection time-zero of sepsis patients can be quickly estimated with high accuracy using commonly measured clinical features. A logistic regression ensemble model demonstrated revealed early organ dysfunction were significant contributors to systemic damage and mortality. Knowledge of time-zero and systemic damage levels, in combination with an endotype classifier, provides clinicians with a clear depiction of where a subject is located on their sepsis trajectory. Such a decision support system enables therapy timing, early organ support, and targeted therapies to guide personalized treatment and shift patients towards better outcomes in sepsis.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic currency without central bank controlling. Nowadays, increasing amount of people are engaged in the mining of Bitcoin for great profits. However, in the Bitcoin system, the more participants in the system, the greater computation power of the whole network and the less efficiency in the output of the coin, since large computational power of the whole Bitcoin system will lead to increased difficulty for a single miner to mine a new data block. At the same time, when more than 51% computing power is controlled by a single node, it could destroy the Bitcoin system. In order to reduce ineffective mining behaviors, one would wish to employ the optimal selection mechanism of different miners. This paper will mainly develop the model in which small miners (those who have relative smaller computational power in a block mining) join the major ones based on revenue, computational power cost, and other elements of the process comparing to the current model (when they work separately).
Higher education in India has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. This growth has been mainly driven by private sector initiatives. There are genuine concerns about many of them being substandard and exploitative. Due to the government’s ambivalence on the role of private sector in higher education, the growth has been chaotic and unplanned. The regulatory system has failed to maintain standards or check exploitation instead, it resulted in erecting formidable entry barriers that have generated underside results. Voluntary accreditation seems to have no takers from amongst private providers and apparently serves little purpose for any of its stakeholders. The higher education system in India grew rapidly after independence. [1] By 1980, there were 132 universities and 4738 colleges in the country enrolling around five percent of the eligible age group in higher education. Today, while in terms enrolment, India is the third largest higher education system in the world (after China and the USA) with 17973 institutions (348 universities and 17625 colleges) and is the largest higher education system in the world in terms of number of institutions [2] There are different types of universities and colleges in the higher education system in the country. They vary terms of their academic, administrative and financial arrangements. Universities can either be established by an Act of Parliament or by the state legislatures. Those established by the Act of Parliament are the central universities and the ones set up by the state legislatures are state universities. Some higher education institutions are granted the ‘deemed university’ status by the central government through gazette notifications. A few institutions are established by the Parliament / state legislatures as institutions of national importance. Universities, deemed universities and institutions of national importance are degree-granting institutions. The expansion of higher education system in India has been chaotic and unplanned. The drive to make higher education socially inclusive has led to a sudden and dramatic increase in numbers of institutions without a proportionate increase in material and intellectual resources. As a result, academic standards have been jeopardized. There are many basic problems facing higher education in India today. These include inadequate infrastructure and facilities, large vacancies in faculty positions and poor faculty outmoded teaching methods, declining research standards, unmotivated students, overcrowded classrooms and widespread geographic, income, gender and ethnic imbalances. There is an inadequate and diminishing financial support for higher education from the government and from society. Many colleges established in rural areas are non-viable, are under enrolled and have extremely poor infrastructure and facilities with just a few teachers. Apart from these, the system of higher education has met several setbacks with regard to its regulatory framework, finding and frances and the much debated and controversial move of privatization of higher educational institutions. These underlying issues will be identified and addressed in the paper. Keywords—Higher Education, India. Research methodology A. Aims and Objectives The objectives of this paper is to identify the major issues and problems relating to the system of higher education in India. The researcher has narrowed down the scope of this paper to three main concerns relating to higher education viz., the present regulatory framework, and privatization and funding and financing. The paper examines various arguments, cases and recommendations in highlighting the issues concerned. B. Scope and Limitations The scope of this paper is limited to the identification and study of the major issues concerning the Indian higher education system. C. Mode of Citation A uniform mode of citation is used throughout the paper. D. Sources of Data This paper is based on researched complied from numerous articles, working papers, statistical data and case laws. E. Research Questions The following questions are sought to be addressed in the course of this paper : What are the major issues and problems affecting higher education in India ? Why is the existing regulatory mechanism problematic for the growth and development of higher education in the country ? How can student loans help in improving the accessibility of higher education? How can the issues discussed in the paper be addressed to resolve the existing conflicts ? F. Chapterization The paper is divided into three broad chapters : Chapter 1: The problems with the existing regulatory framework are identified along with a discussion of the recommendations of various committee. Chapter 2: This chapter deals with the issue of privatization of higher education in India. Chapter 3: The decline in public expenditure on higher education and the inextricable link between the present regulations and funding/finances of educational institutions is examined in the last chapter. II. CONCLUSION Government regulation of higher education has been the subject of an acrimonious debate across the policy spectrum. Proponents argue that regulation is essential for delivering quality education. Without regulation, they further argue, profit maximization rather than education would be the raison deter of private education institutions. In their opinion, the abysmal quality of most private institutions-despite decades of stifling regulations-justifies more government intrusion; not private institutions-despite decades of stifling regulations-justifies more government intrusion; non less, it is perceived to be State’s responsibility to protect those who avail of higher education. The inability to incentives quality in private institutions of higher learning is the key failure of India’s education regulators. Rather than improving quality, the state’s stranglehold on higher education has created an artificial shortage leading to an acute supply-demand mismatch. The demand for higher educational institutions then the growth in number of higher educational institutions. The regulatory process is thoroughly politicized; it is well documented that most private colleges are owned by politicians or well-connected business houses. The poor quality of such institutions offers a readymade excuse to impose even stronger government regulations, notwithstanding the fact that high entry barriers-ostensibly erected to improve quality of such institutions to thrive in the first place. While the regulatory bodies seek to guard the portals of higher education, and are entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring adherence to minimum guidelines by existing institutions, however, these regulations. In their current form are simply erecting entry-barriers rather than working to remove the asymmetry. Regulation, therefore, needs to be well structured and thoroughly researched to take full account of relevance, therefore, needs to be well structured and thoroughly researched to take full account of relevance, requirement, practical constraints and market realities. The objective of encouraging growth of educational institutions rather than restricting them should not be lost sight of higher education offers a wide variety of subjects and with continuing education it needs to be demand driven. Over the last few decades, higher education has been handled casually and, for the most part, is lacking in initiative or direction. In addition to this, the process of accreditation remains a strenuous bureaucratic exercise. While the bogus or poor quality colleges are a matter of concern for every regulator, the problem in India is that University Authorities do not have a proper monitoring and surveillance system for colleges. This leads to episodes of sudden de-recognition as in the case of Chattisgarh University an a large number of affiliated colleges which was very distressing for a large number of students. Another important measure to be undertaken is that of decentralization. The purpose of decentralization is to eliminate or reduce the cumbersomeness and inefficiency, to convert high costs per unit into low costs and replace diseconomies of scale. In the absence of decentralization, the introduction of new techniques becomes meaningless as the already over expanded monolithic system does not leave any room for improvement.