Blockchain Papers

Minhaj Ahmad Khan, Khaled Salah

No abstract is available for this record.

Camargo Rico, Luz Yenly

No abstract is available for this record.

Manish Kumar, N. Ch. S. N. Iyengar

No abstract is available for this record.

Anastasia Mavridou, Áron Lászka

The adoption of blockchain-based distributed computation platforms is growing\nfast. Some of these platforms, such as Ethereum, provide support for\nimplementing smart contracts, which are envisioned to have novel applications\nin a broad range of areas, including finance and Internet-of-Things. However, a\nsignificant number of smart contracts deployed in practice suffer from security\nvulnerabilities, which enable malicious users to steal assets from a contract\nor to cause damage. Vulnerabilities present a serious issue since contracts may\nhandle financial assets of considerable value, and contract bugs are\nnon-fixable by design. To help developers create more secure smart contracts,\nwe introduce FSolidM, a framework rooted in rigorous semantics for designing\ncon- tracts as Finite State Machines (FSM). We present a tool for creating FSM\non an easy-to-use graphical interface and for automatically generating Ethereum\ncontracts. Further, we introduce a set of design patterns, which we implement\nas plugins that developers can easily add to their contracts to enhance\nsecurity and functionality.\n

Gerald P. Dwyer

The Bitcoin blockchain is the primary innovation in Bitcoin that makes it practical. Blockchains have applications in many contexts other than cryptocurrencies. This note is an introduction to blockchains that requires no prior knowledge, including of Bitcoin. Blockchains are ledgers of transactions kept by a set of participants, none of which is accorded special status as the “correct one.” Instead, agreement is reached by a process of consensus. I show how this works for Bitcoin, discuss applications in many alternative settings and provide some detail about a very different proof-of-concept application of blockchains by the Japan Exchange Group.

Edgar Agaba, Sanjiban Ghosh, Jeffrey K. Griffiths

For countries looking to implement multisectoral nutrition plans, it is critical to understand what works and how programs should be delivered and scaled-up in each context. Programs can learn from each other on how to adapt to new information, evidence and events related to scaling-up and district stakeholders can play important roles in implementation of this multisectoral plan. As part of "Pathways-to-Better Nutrition" (PBN) case study conducted by USAID/SPRING Project, this research set out to explore district leaders' perceptions of the nutrition situation, programs and opportunities for integration. Qualitative data were collected through key-informant interviews and focus group discussions. Thirty-five district and local leaders belonging to district and sub-county multisectoral nutrition committees in Kisoro and Lira were interviewed. Grounded Theory Approach was used to identify themes for coding and key domains included: learning, adoption and evidence of scale-up; adoption of innovations/interventions to local context, financing of nutrition-sensitive activities and long-term planning. Additionally, quantitative data collected by Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Nutrition were analyzed in each of the districts to provide nutrition snapshots. Malnutrition in the study districts was worse than the national average for stunting, anemia and women's underweight. The majority (91%) of respondents were not familiar with these nutrition statistics. Both study areas have formed nutrition multisectoral working groups (District Nutrition Coordinating Committees) and have developed management structures to implement interventions. Government stakeholders from every nutrition-sensitive sector referred to the lack of clear government programs that support nutrition directly in local policy environment. Key agricultural-related programs are focusing on wealth creation, value-addition or increasing agricultural productivity without nutrition lens (not "nutrition sensitive"). Nutrition is not on the 'list' of key priorities of district health departments unlike HIV/AIDS, malaria or sexual reproductive health. About 69% respondents believe they lack operational capacities and soft-power skills to design, implement and manage nutrition interventions such as leveraging of resources and being able to convey evidence. The understanding of "Scaling-up Nutrition" also differed by respondent, and this has resulted in different goals and measurements. Challenges related to nutrition financing were also noted, including fiscal decentralization, use of Output-Based Financing mechanisms, limited flexibility to re-allocate funds for nutrition, and lack of standard reporting procedures or implementation strategy. Efforts to address malnutrition need to be multisectoral, coupled with increased coordination of different sectors and ministries for sustained impact on nutrition outcomes.

Jason Potts, Ellie Rennie, Jake Goldenfein

Abstract Drawing on economic transaction cost theory, this paper explores how blockchain and distributed ledger technology could shift the smart city agenda by altering transaction costs with implications for the coordination of infrastructures and resources. Like the smart city the crypto city utilizes data informatics, but can be coordinated through distributed rather than centralized systems. The data infrastructure of the crypto city can enable civil society to run local public goods and services, and facilitate economic and social entrepreneurship.

Hasini Gunasinghe, Elisa Bertino

We introduce a privacy preserving biometrics-based authentication solution by which users can authenticate to different service providers from mobile phones without involving identity providers in the transactions. Authentication is performed via zero-knowledge proof of knowledge, based on a cryptographic identity token that encodes the biometric identifier of the user and a secret provided by the user, making it three-factor authentication. Our approach for generating a unique, repeatable, and revocable biometric identifier from the user’s biometric image is based on a machine learning-based classification technique, which involves the features extracted from the user’s biometric image. We have implemented a prototype of the proposed authentication solution and evaluated our solution with respect to its performance, security, and privacy. The evaluation has been performed on a public data set of face images.

Hsin-Ke Lu, Liwei Yang, Peng-Chun Lin, Tzu‐Han Yang · 5 authors

Since the global financial crisis in 2008 had caused the global economic depression, the public were commonly losing confidence in monetary system and international fund associations. Thus, the concept of untraditional currency exchange was developed. Nakamoto (2008) designed bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency which is launched and traded on the Internet. Bitcoin is being gradually accepted by the public, which is attributed to the feature of decentralization and anonymity. The exchange rate of bitcoin reached to the peak price at $4425.30 USD on August 16th, 2017. However, due to the concern of the security challenges such as being stolen, the public lost the confidence of bitcoin and had a conservative attitude toward bitcoin. It also shows that the relevant technical application and transaction model of bitcoin still need to be improved.

Andrea Pinna, Simona Ibba

Temporary work is an employment situation useful and suitable in all occasions in which business needs to adjust more easily and quickly to workload fluctuations or maintain staffing flexibility. Temporary workers play therefore an important role in many companies, but this kind of activity is subject to a special form of legal protections and many aspects and risks must be taken into account both employers and employees. In this work we propose a blockchain-based system that aims to ensure respect for the rights for all actors involved in a temporary employment, in order to provide employees with the fair and legal remuneration (including taxes) of work performances and a protection in the case employer becomes insolvent. At the same time, our system wants to assist the employer in processing contracts with a fully automated and fast procedure. To resolve these problems we propose the D-ES (Decentralized Employment System). We first model the employment relationship as a state system. Then we describe the enabling technology that makes us able to realize the D-ES. In facts, we propose the implementation of a DLT (Decentralized Ledger Technology) based system, consisting in a blockchain system and of a web-based environment. Thanks the decentralized application platforms that makes us able to develop smart contracts, we define a discrete event control system that works inside the blockchain. In addition, we discuss the temporary work in agriculture as a interesting case of study.

Avi Garg

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence systems can be justified by the success in the field of machine learning. This is due to increase in knowledge (data) which leads to increase in intelligence. Similarly, the blockchain has a power to transform the artificial intelligence systems. The blockchain can be defined as a peer-to-peer transaction database which maintains the integrity of information through the distributed open ledger. It is a decentralized way to store value transactions across the nodes in the network. Every node in the network has access to the ledger. The blockchain has a wide range of applications including digital currency or crypto-currencies, smart assets, contracts, voting, etc. When it comes to artificial intelligence, the smart contract can be used to create an artificial intelligence system or it can be helpful in reaching a consensus during a dilemma through voting. A peer-to-peer model training can also be implemented using a blockchain network. The blockchain database can be helpful in improving the quantity and quality of data.

Ren Zhang, Bart Preneel

Bitcoin has not only attracted many users but also been considered as a technical breakthrough by academia. However, the expanding potential of Bitcoin is largely untapped due to its limited throughput. The Bitcoin community is now facing its biggest crisis in history as the community splits on how to increase the throughput. Among various proposals, Bitcoin Unlimited recently became the most popular candidate, as it allows miners to collectively decide the block size limit according to the real network capacity. However, the security of BU is heatedly debated and no consensus has been reached as the issue is discussed in different miner incentive models. In this paper, we systematically evaluate BU's security with three incentive models via testing the two major arguments of BU supporters: the block validity consensus is not necessary for BU's security; such consensus would emerge in BU out of economic incentives. Our results invalidate both arguments and therefore disprove BU's security claims. Our paper further contributes to the field by addressing the necessity of a prescribed block validity consensus for cryptocurrencies.

Chandra Kishan Bissa

For any industry or company, to be a competent in market needs increase in performance in all possible ways. Quick response to market and sufficient production as per requirement is the only way to increase the returns, which require critical planning and production systems. For this co-ordination between business units or workstations is essential. Many of the executive managers in industries has to instruct only the task flows to its subordinates, that is a single straightforward production planning process is followed as executed from top level of organization; their capacity as per their education level is not utilized more than 10%. The use of multi-agent system allows physical distribution of the decisional system and procures a hierarchical organization structure with decentralized control that guarantees the autonomy of each entity and flexibility of network. Our study focuses on managers/partners that adapt together their local planning process to face different requirements of supply chain environment using different planning strategies, when decisions are supported by distributed planning systems. The agent based system has the advantage of making collaborative management of disturbances in supply chain as the agents has the advantage of making autonomous decisions in a distributed network. Because each partner can choose different behavior and all behavior has an impact on the overall performance, it is difficult to know which is preferable for each partner to increase their performance. Thus, in this paper study of Multi-behavior planning agent model is done using different planning strategies when decisions are supported by distributed planning system.

CompTIA

Get foundational knowledge about blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. Understand how this technology, the trend and market forces surround...

Ravi Kiran Raman, Lav R. Varshney

Blockchain uses the idea of storing transaction data in the form of a distributed ledger wherein each node in the network stores a current copy of the sequence of transactions in the form of a hash chain. This requirement of storing the entire ledger incurs a high storage cost that grows undesirably large for high transaction rates and large networks. In this work we use the ideas of secret key sharing, private key encryption, and distributed storage to design a coding scheme such that each node stores only a part of the entire transaction thereby reducing the storage cost to a fraction of its original cost. When further using dynamic zone allocation, we show the coding scheme can also improve the integrity of the transaction data in the network over current schemes. Further, block validation (bitcoin mining) consumes a significant amount of energy as it is necessary to determine a hash value satisfying a specific set of constraints; we show that using dynamic distributed storage reduces these energy costs.

Asem Othman, John Callahan

Most user authentication methods and identity proving systems rely on a centralized database. Such information storage presents a single point of compromise from a security perspective. If this system is compromised it poses a direct threat to users' digital identities. This paper proposes a decentralized authentication method, called the Horcrux protocol, in which there is no such single point of compromise. The protocol relies on decentralized identifiers (DIDs) under development by the W3C Verifiable Claims Community Group and the concept of self-sovereign identity. To accomplish this, we propose specification and implementation of a decentralized biometric credential storage option via blockchains using DIDs and DID documents within the IEEE 2410-2017 Biometric Open Protocol Standard (BOPS).

Nick van de Luijtgaarden

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to look at how blockchain technology can be used for the core business processes of an asset management company and what the best tools are to set up a blockchain. This study followed a qualitative and quantitive case study research methodology at a small to mediumsized asset management company. This paper argued that Corda was the best blockchain platform because of scalability, auditing for regulators and offering a specific consensus between firms. However, it was evident that blockchain platforms are still in constant development, thus it is important to use the framework provided in this study to evaluate blockchain platforms in a changing industry. Keywords Blockchain, distributed ledger technology, financial sset management, blockchain platforms

Zelong Yi, Yulan Wang, Ying‐Ju Chen

In this study, we consider a decentralized agricultural supply chain consisting of a capital-constrained smallholder farmer and an intermediary platform. The smallholder farmer sells the agricultural products through the intermediary platform but lacks the financial resources for production. In addition to the traditional solution of bank financing (provided by a bank) as a source of finance for the capital-constrained farmer to ensure the sustainable production of the agricultural goods, the intermediary platform can also provide loans directly to the smallholder farmer (known as direct financing) or serve as a guarantor if the capital-constrained farmer has insufficient creditworthiness to obtain bank loans (known as guarantor financing). The farmer can thus obtain a loan through three methods: bank financing, guarantor financing, and direct financing. We find that the smallholder farmer produces the most under direct financing and the least under bank financing, and that the intermediary platform prefers direct financing over guarantor financing in a weak sense. Specifically, when the farmer’s production cost is low, the intermediary platform prefers financing the farmer directly; when the cost is in an intermediate range, the platform prefers either direct or guarantor financing; and when the cost is high, it is in the best interest of the intermediary platform to encourage the farmer to raise funds from the banking market. We also assess the best financing format for profitability of the smallholder farmer and the sustainability of the whole supply chain, and find that the farmer prefers bank financing while the preference of the supply chain as a whole depends on the cost. Interestingly, under both guarantor financing and direct financing, the smallholder farmer’s level of production can be higher than that under a centralized chain (where the farmer and the intermediary platform belong to the same entity) regardless of whether the chain encounters financial constraints. Moreover, the decentralized supply chain can be coordinated under direct financing when the farmer’s production cost is relatively low.

J. Alvarez-Ramirez, Eduardo Rodríguez, Carlos Ibarra-Valdez

No abstract is available for this record.

Austin Elliott

After granting permission to the Internal Revenue Service to serve a digital exchange company a summons for user information, the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California created some uncertainty regarding the privacy of cryptocurrencies. The IRS views this information gathering as necessary for monitoring compliance with Notice 2014-21, which classifies cryptocurrencies as property for tax purposes. Cryptocurrency users, however, view the attempt for information as an infringement on their privacy rights and are seeking legal protection. This Issue Brief investigates the future tax implications of Notice 2014-21 and considers possible routes the cryptocurrency market can take to avoid the burden of capital gains taxes. Further, this Issue Brief attempts to uncover the validity of the privacy claims made against the customer information summons and will recommend alternative actions for the IRS to take regardless of whether it succeeds in obtaining the information.

Zhen Hong, Zehua Wang, Wei Cai, Victor C. M. Leung

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is becoming an increasingly important technology in future networks with the climbing demand for local services. For instance, resource sharing in the D2D network features ubiquitous availability, flexibility, low latency and low cost. However, these features also bring along challenges when building a satisfactory resource sharing system in the D2D network. Specifically, user mobility is one of the top concerns for designing a cooperative D2D computational resource sharing system since mutual communication may not be stably available due to user mobility. A previous endeavour has demonstrated and proven how connectivity can be incorporated into cooperative task scheduling among users in the D2D network to effectively lower average task execution time. There are doubts about whether this type of task scheduling scheme, though effective, presents fairness among users. In other words, it can be unfair for users who contribute many computational resources while receiving little when in need. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based credit system that can be incorporated into the connectivity-aware task scheduling scheme to enforce fairness among users in the D2D network. Users’ computational task cooperation will be recorded on the public blockchain ledger in the system as transactions, and each user’s credit balance can be easily accessible from the ledger. A supernode at the base station is responsible for scheduling cooperative computational tasks based on user mobility and user credit balance. We investigated the performance of the credit system, and simulation results showed that with a minor sacrifice of average task execution time, the level of fairness can obtain a major enhancement.

Fatlum Nurja

<strong>Abstract</strong><br> Many reforms have been undertaken in local governance after the collapse of the<br> totalitarian, centrist and bureaucratic regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Albania<br> has demonstrated that decentralization is a major development tool. More than two<br> decades of decentralization activities have revealed that the decentralization process has<br> brought about changes in the operation of institutions and delivery of services, even<br> though this change has taken place gradually. Fiscal decentralization is one of the three<br> dimensions that characterize the decentralization process. Local finance issues are an<br> everyday topic in countries in transition and should be addressed by means of an approach<br> that favors consolidation of local autonomy. Local governments in Albania have lacked,<br> and continue to lack, the fiscal capacity to deliver on the promise of decentralization<br> to improve public services and to promote and nurture local economic development.<br> Decentralization can promote economic development and improve citizens’ welfare<br> and living standards when service delivery and the quality of the decisions over how<br> public resources are deployed are improved, but local governments remain hampered<br> by inadequate transfers from the central government and from restraints imposed on<br> various revenue-generating options. However, inadequate financial instruments,<br> especially those of intergovernmental transfers, have affected regional disparities. In this<br> paper, through comparative analysis, analyzing a part of the Region (Qark) of Lezha’s<br> LGUs, economic development indicators, will approve the need for reform of these LGUs’<br> financial instruments in order to narrow the gap of regional disparities in Albania.

Pedro Jorge Melgo Vieira

No abstract is available for this record.

James Nicholson

This article considers Bitcoin as a system of exchange, and the block chain technology it is built on, in the context of supporting developing nations. If integrated correctly Bitcoin could have far reaching applications, from tackling corruption to empowering women. This article found Bitcoin to be a feasible option, with support from real world applications and global endorsement from users. The discussion is then applied in the context of corruption as it puts forward this emerging technology as an alternative to traditional centralised fiscal systems. The article posits that public libraries could be potential facilitators and a crucial component of this integration.