This thesis is one in a group of several theses that are researching different subjects in the development of a new cryptocurrency. For a few years now, the cryptocurrency market has grown dramatically, in the lead of the original cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Today, most cryptocurrencies' validation-technology, including Bitcoin's, are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW), i.e., a system where transaction validation is made by servers calculating mathematical problems. PoW results in high energy consumption and slow transaction speed. In this cryptocurrency, the validation mechanism will build on a technology called Proof-of-Stake (PoS). PoS does not yield as high energy consumption and often leads to faster transaction speed. The specific technique for validation in this system is that validators bet their coins to validate transactions and get rewards in the form of transaction fees if they end up conforming the transactions that reach consensus among the validators. In particular, the purpose of this report is to research the risk and reward for validators in the betting process and from this develop a reward policy which yields a fast and secure validation. The methods used for solving the problems are simulations based on Monte Carlo methods. From the simulations, the results are discussed and compared. Also, this report will cover economic theories behind cryptocurrencies, mainly focusing on monetary policy and the transaction markets. The findings of this report are several risk functions for different topologies and winning conditions considered during the development of the cryptocurrency. Further, a conclusion was that the expected value of profit for validators need to be constant, independent of when the bets are made with regard to previous bets. From this, a reward function which distributes rewards between winning validators was formed. Another, economical conclusion from this was that, in the long run, the expected value of profit of betting should converge to zero due to a perfect competition market.
The advancements of AI techniques and its transformation made an intelligent automated process using Internet of Things (IoT), machine optimization in various industrial applications. One of the notable change happens in the healthcare industry witnessed significant progress, leading to the emergence of Health 4.0. This new era encompasses a wide range of cutting-edge technologies including the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Services (IoS), Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Health Cloud, Health Fog etc. The largest barrier to electronic healthcare is securing all medical equipment that are connected to the internet. Blockchain, a distributed and immutable ledger or database, has gained popularity across various sectors, including healthcare, due to its efficiency and reliability by offering features such as decentralization, enhanced security, and immutability. This chapter aims to explore the advantages and challenges associated with implementing blockchain technology in healthcare 4.0 by providing factual evaluation of block chain's progress in healthcare.
Daniel Haberly, Duncan MacDonald-Korth, Michael Urban, Dariusz Wójcik
While contemporary technological disruption is increasingly conceptualized in terms of the logic and paradoxes of the digital platform economy, discussions of “FinTech” have only engaged to a limited extent with these debates—particularly from an economic geographic standpoint. Here we fill this gap by proposing an adapted Global Financial Network (GFN) framework for conceptualizing the organizational and geographic logic of the digital platform economy in finance, and applying it to examine the impact of the digital platform model on asset management. As we will show, asset management is being profoundly disrupted by what we dub digital asset management platforms—or DAMPs—which encompass services including index fund and ETF provision, robo-advising, and analytics and trading support. Like other digital platforms, DAMPs do not so much leverage technology to enhance their competitiveness within markets, as to radically restructure the market itself. Also, like other platforms, their rise has produced a winner-take-all paradox of centralization through democratization that defies predictions of technology-enabled industry decentralization. However, the logic and implications of the rise of DAMPs diverges, in other respects, from non-financial digital platforms, as finance has long possessed an informational intensity and regulatory and organizational fluidity characteristic of the digital platform economy. Consequently, the digital platform model has mostly developed endogenously in asset management through incremental innovation by major financial firms—in a process that has reinforced the position of leading incumbent asset management centers, and above all New York—rather than being introduced from the outside by upstart technology firms and clusters.
After 2001 Serbia started the process of democratization and socio-economic transition. Within the overall reform of public administration and the public finance system, the process of fiscal decentralization has started to strengthen the position of local self-governments. Decentralization in every respect, and especially fiscal, is the most important assumption of local development. In order for the decentralized state to function well, it is important that these three forms of decentralization: political, administrative and fiscal, be well coordinated with one another. Fiscal decentralization refers to the collection and consumption of funds at various levels of government. The paper outlines the reasons justifying the process of fiscal decentralization, as well as the reasons that are against fiscal decentralization, i.e. the reasons that speak of the limitations it carries with it. The goal of properly implemented fiscal decentralization is to strengthen the role of cities and municipalities, as well as their fiscal autonomy, that the Republic entrusted the local authorities with numerous important competencies and that the local budgets are multiplied. Decentralization in Serbia has not progressed satisfactorily. Serbia put fiscal decentralization at the heart of public administration reform. Local self-government financing in Serbia changed in this period, which led to instability. Only in the period between 2008 and 2015 the legal frameworks of the system of financing of local self-governments changed several times and thus the process of budget execution and financial management at the local level was impaired. The mentioned changes in the legal framework for the ultimate consequence had the reduction of the budgets of local governments, which jeopardized their ability to perform their communal, investment and other functions.
区块链是一种去中心、去信任的分布式账本技术，起源于比特币。其被业界广泛认为是具有颠覆性潜力的技术，将会重塑行业标准，改变社会和生活，也将为供应链金融带来革命性的影响。在系统阐述区块链概念、关键技术和运行原理的基础上，对当前供应链金融发展过程中所面临的痛点进行分析。提出区块链技术如何能够更好地解决供应链金融上的中小企业融资难、商业汇票和银行汇票使用场景受限、银行对供应链核心企业资金风控成本居高不下等问题。最后，给出了易见股份推出的“易见区块”平台案例研究。 Blockchain is a decentralized and trusted distributed book processing technology, originated from Bitcoin. Its industry is widely regarded as a potentially disruptive technology that will reshape industry standards, change society and life, and will have a revolutionary impact on supply chain finance. On the basis of systematic exposition of the concept, key technology and operation principle of Blockchain, this paper analyzes the pain points in the financial development process of current supply chain and puts forward the solutions to better solve the problems in supply chain finance such as the difficulty in small and medium-sized enterprises’ financing, limited usage scenarios of commercial bills and bank drafts, and funds risk control issues of supply-chain core enterprise. Finally, a case study of “e-visible” platform is presented.
Public-key infrastructures (PKIs) are an integral part of the security foundations of digital communications. Their widespread deployment has allowed the growth of important applications, such as, internet banking and e-commerce. Centralized PKIs (CPKIs) rely on a hierarchy of trusted Certification Authorities (CAs) for issuing, distributing and managing the status of digital certificates, i.e., unforgeable data structures that attest to the authenticity of an entity’s public key. Unfortunately, CPKI’s have many downsides in terms of security and fault tolerance and there have been numerous security incidents throughout the years. Decentralized PKIs (DPKIs) were proposed to deal with these issues as they rely on multiple, independent nodes. Nevertheless, decentralization raises other concerns such as what are the incentives for the participating nodes to ensure the service’s availability.
Blockchain technology has provided a platform for the decentralized execution of smart contracts. A smart contract is an agreement that is automatically executed when certain conditions have been met. The immutability, decentral nature, and consensus mechanisms that are characteristic to blockchain technology make the smart contract and its development cycle a new field of study in software engineering. A novel economic and defensive thinking is needed to develop workable, secure smart contracts. Motivated by the need for a novel approach to development, this thesis proposes a model-driven approach to smart contract development.\nModel-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an approach to information system development in which models and model technologies are applied to raise the level of abstraction at which developers create and evolve software, with the goal of both simplifying and formalizing the various activities and tasks that comprise the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is a framework for this approach. This thesis aims to apply this framework to create a method which describes the development phase from domain knowledge to smart contract foundation.\nThe creation of a method has two main aims, namely (i) to bridge the semantic gap between domain knowledge and smart contract by lowering the threshold for domain experts, and (ii) support developers in creating less vulnerable smart contracts that accurately represent the problem domain. This is done by constructing a model-driven method based on existing research that applies MDE to smart contract development. A literature study into this field yields the requirements and techniques for the method, which is consequently constructed based on these requirements and techniques.\nThe method is evaluated in twofold. First, the value is assessed through a case study, which shows that the developer benefits from a structured approach and the reduction of manual programming. Second, by an experiment which shows that people are better able to comprehend and communicate about models containing functional aspects of the smart contract if a computational independent model is included. By doing so it fulfills the aim of lowering the threshold for domain experts to participate in the smart contract development cycle.
Kuo‐Hui Yeh, Chunhua Su, Jia-Li Hou, Wayne Chiu · 5 authors
Recently, the popularity and universality of smart-devices has led to rapid advancement in the development of applications for mobile commerce around the world. Novel mobile payment schemes, such as Apple pay, Android pay, and Samsung pay are becoming an increasingly popular ways to conduct online transactions, no matter what type of smart devices are used. Due to the attendant growth in the importance of security, significant attention has been devoted to the challenge of designing and implementing a robust mobile payment scheme for securing online transactions. In this paper, we demonstrate a robust mobile payment scheme based on sturdy certificateless signatures with bilinear pairing. We elegantly refine the proposed mobile payment scheme to make it suitable for computation-constrained mobile devices. The practicability of the proposed mobile payment scheme is then certified via a rigorous security analysis and thorough performance evaluation using the Raspberry PI as the implementation platform for our proposed scheme. Furthermore, we implement a transaction repository with the aid of smart contract technology. The simulation results, based on Ethereum, demonstrate the feasibility of employing the smart contract technology to secure mobile payments.
Abstract Cryptocurrencies are expected to have a significant impact on banking, finance, and monetary systems. Due to the uncertainty as to the possible future trajectories of the evolving cryptocurrency ecosystem, governments have taken a relatively hands-off approach to regulating such currencies. This approach may be justified within the theoretical information-economics framework of this paper, which draws parallels between the information economics of money and quasi-money creation within the current central banking, commercial banking, and shadow banking systems with that of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In particular, drawing lessons from the literature on the role of information in creating ‘safe assets’, in this paper the authors find that by building on symmetric (common) knowledge as to the inner workings of the Bitcoin Blockchain—though in a different way—bitcoin possesses a degree of endogenous information insensitivity typical of safe assets. This endogenous information insensitivity could support bitcoin’s promise of maturing into a viable store of value and a niche medium of exchange. This finding should not be overlooked in the policy discussions for potential future regulatory interventions in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) are the internal mechanism used in many cryptocurrencies to represent coins. Such representation has some clear benefits, but also entails some complexities that, if not properly handled, may leave the system in an inefficient state. Specifically, inefficiencies arise when wallets (the software responsible for transferring coins between parties) do not manage UTXOs properly when performing payments. In this paper, we study three cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, by analysing the state of their UTXO sets, that is, the status of their sets of spendable coins. These three cryptocurrencies are the top-3 UTXO-based cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Our analysis shows that the usage of each cryptocurrency presents some differences, and led to different results. Furthermore, it also points out that the management of the transactions has not always been performed efficiently and therefore, the current state of the UTXO sets is far from ideal.
Modern retail banking creates a kind of panopticon for consumer behaviour, ultimately promising to implement a mechanism that binds all of the financial activities undertaken by an individual to a single, unitary identity. In the age of Big Data, consumers have legitimate reasons to resist such surveillance, particularly in cases wherein monitoring is carried out without their knowledge and judgments based upon such monitoring are used to disincentivise or punish legitimate activities. The risk to consumers increases with the ever-increasing share of financial transactions that are performed electronically. Cryptocurrencies offer an alternative to traditional methods of electronic value exchange, promising anonymous, cash-like electronic transfers, but in practice they fall short for several key reasons. We consider the false choice between total surveillance, as represented by banking as currently implemented by institutions, and impenetrable lawlessness, as represented by privacy-enhancing cryptocurrencies as currently deployed. We identify a range of alternatives between those two extremes, and we consider two potential compromise approaches that offer both the auditability required for regulators and the anonymity required for users
Cryptocurrencies based on blockchain infrastructures have shown their advantages such as double-spending resistance and decentralization. Each transaction of cryptocurrency requires a certain amount of computation and attracts transaction fees. Often, in practice, many transactions are small; therefore, they add computation and transmission overheads to the system. In this paper, we introduce a cost-saving approach, which significantly reduces transaction time and storage for small amount of payment, i.e. micropayment. In our approach, with the notion of ‘transaction commitment’, the computation of each transaction is much more efficient. Therefore, our approach has advantages in comparison of other cryptocurrency systems such as the bitcoin system. Our approach can be applied to other existing cryptocurrency systems.
Cryptocurrencies are digital tokens built on blockchain technology. This allows for a product that is fully decentralized, with no need for a third-party intermediary like a government or financial institution. Cryptocurrency creators use initial coin offerings (ICOs) to raise capital to build their tokens. Cryptocurrency ICOs are problematic because they do not fit neatly within either of two traditional categories—securities or commodities. Each of these categories has their own regulatory agency: the SEC for securities and the CFTC for commodities. At first blush, ICOs seem to be a sale of securities subject to regulation by the SEC, but this is far from clear and creates regulatory difficulties. This is because the Howey test, which determines whether an asset is a security or not, does not cleanly apply to nontraditional assets, like tokens. This Note argues for a revised standard that reconciles Howey with cryptocurrencies. This standard would require cryptocurrency creators to show how essential blockchain technology is to their token if they want to fall beyond the scope of the Howey test, and consequently SEC regulation. This standard would still preserve regulatory protections from fraud, which the CFTC provides for investors while loosening regulatory restrictions on the cryptocurrencies that leverage blockchain technology most usefully.
Abstract This study investigates the profitability of an algorithmic trading strategy based on training SVM model to identify cryptocurrencies with high or low predicted returns. A tail set is defined to be a group of coins whose volatility-adjusted returns are in the highest or the lowest quintile. Each cryptocurrency is represented by a set of six technical features. SVM is trained on historical tail sets and tested on the current data. The classifier is chosen to be a nonlinear support vector machine. The portfolio is formed by ranking coins using the SVM output. The highest ranked coins are used for long positions to be included in the portfolio for one reallocation period. The following metrics were used to estimate the portfolio profitability: %ARC (the annualized rate of change), %ASD (the annualized standard deviation of daily returns), MDD (the maximum drawdown coefficient), IR1, IR2 (the information ratio coefficients). The performance of the SVM portfolio is compared to the performance of the four benchmark strategies based on the values of the information ratio coefficient IR1, which quantifies the risk-weighted gain. The question of how sensitive the portfolio performance is to the parameters set in the SVM model is also addressed in this study.