Abstract Could it be right to convict and punish defendants using only statistical evidence? In this paper, I argue that it is not and explain why it would be wrong. This is difficult to do because there is a powerful argument for thinking that we should convict and punish defendants using statistical evidence. It looks as if the relevant cases are cases of decision under risk and it seems we know what we should do in such cases (i.e., maximize expected value). Given some standard assumptions about the values at stake, the case for convicting and punishing using statistical evidence seems solid. In trying to show where this argument goes wrong, I shall argue (against Lockeans, reliabilists, and others) that beliefs supported only by statistical evidence are epistemically defective and (against Enoch, Fisher, and Spectre) that these epistemic considerations should matter to the law. To solve the puzzle about the role of statistical evidence in the law, we need to revise some commonly held assumptions about epistemic value and defend the relevance of epistemology to this practical question.
Felix Engelmann, Florian Glaser, Henning Kopp, Frank Kargl · 5 authors
Payment channel networks are supposed to overcome technical scalability limitations of blockchain infrastructure by employing a special overlay network with fast payment confirmation and only sporadic settlement of netted transactions on the blockchain. However, they introduce economic routing constraints that limit decentralized scalability and are currently not well understood. In this paper, we model the economic incentives for participants in payment channel networks. We provide the first formal model of payment channel economics and analyze how the cheapest path can be found. Additionally, our simulation assesses the long-term evolution of a payment channel network. We find that even for small routing fees, sometimes it is cheaper to settle the transaction directly on the blockchain.
Public key quantum money can be seen as a version of the quantum no-cloning theorem that holds even when the quantum states can be verified by the adversary. In this work, investigate quantum lightning, a formalization of "collision-free quantum money" defined by Lutomirski et al. [ICS'10], where no-cloning holds even when the adversary herself generates the quantum state to be cloned. We then study quantum money and quantum lightning, showing the following results: - We demonstrate the usefulness of quantum lightning by showing several potential applications, such as generating random strings with a proof of entropy, to completely decentralized cryptocurrency without a block-chain, where transactions is instant and local. - We give win-win results for quantum money/lightning, showing that either signatures/hash functions/commitment schemes meet very strong recently proposed notions of security, or they yield quantum money or lightning. - We construct quantum lightning under the assumed multi-collision resistance of random degree-2 systems of polynomials. - We show that instantiating the quantum money scheme of Aaronson and Christiano [STOC'12] with indistinguishability obfuscation that is secure against quantum computers yields a secure quantum money scheme
A number of information and resource sharing systems arise and become popular with the rapid development of communication technologies and mobile smart devices. The interactions between humans and machines are intense and their synergistic reactions have attracted special attention for the reason of forming so called Human–Machine Networks (HMN). HMNs refer to these networks where humans and machines work together to provide synergistic effects on their payoffs. Game theory, which can capture the interactions among players dexterously, has been widely used in solving various problems in HMN systems from the view of economics. In this paper, we extensively review the literature about game theoretical methods in HMNs, in particular focusing on its typical systems such as crowdsourcing, an elemental HMN and Internet of Things (IoT), a hybrid HMN, as well as Bitcoin. We propose a series of requirements to evaluate existing work. For reviewing and analyzing each system, we specify application purposes, players, strategies, game models and equilibria based on our proposed requirements. In the sequel, we identify a number of common and distinct open issues in HMNs and point out future research directions.
Indri Oktaviana, Lalu Hamdani Husnan, H. Ahmad Rifa’i
Assessment of Financial Performance for Local Government is an important thing to do to help improve the performance of government in the management of the Regional Budget (APBD) in a sustainable manner and to achieve the public accountability that is transparent and accountable. Local Government Financial performance is the ability of an area to explore and manage financial resources native to the area to meet their needs in order to support the passage of the government system, service to the community and regional development. Local government still relies on the transfer of funds than local revenue to finance government activities. Any delays in disbursement of funds transfers by the central government as a barrier to finance programs and activities that have been set in the budget. This study aimed to examine the effect of fiscal decentralization, fiscal stress and intergovernmental revenue on the financial performance of local governments in the province of West Nusa Tenggara (NTB). This study uses panel data from 9 regencies / cities and one province for 10 years (2006-2015). Analysis using panel data regression with Fixed Effect Model estimation method (FEM). The results showed that the decentralization of expenditure and fiscal stress has positive and significant effect on the financial performance of local governments while decentralization of revenue and intergovernmental revenue has significant and negative effect on the financial performance of local governments. This research is expected to provide input and benefit to the Local Government as policy makers in order to increase the potential of revenue derived from taxes, charges and the availability of natural resources are adequate to serve as a source of income and more attention to the allocation of sources of income into spending that oriented to the fulfillment of public service
A blockchain is a distributed transaction ledger, a disruptive technology that creates new possibilities for digital ecosystems. The blockchain ecosystem maintains an immutable transaction record to support many types of digital services. This paper compares the performance and scalability of a web-based groupware communication application using both non-blockchain and blockchain technologies. Scalability is measured where message load is synthesized over two typical communication topologies. The first is 1 to n network -- a typical client-server or star-topology with a central vertex (server) receiving all messages from the remaining n - 1 vertices (clients). The second is a more naturally occurring scale-free network topology, where multiple communication hubs are distributed throughout the network. System performance is tested with both blockchain and non-blockchain solutions using multiple cloud computing configurations. We analyze the empirical results from each configuration to identify the costs and overhead of blockchain technology.
Five billion people in the world do not have the kind of ledgers that provide the documented information that allows them to transfer, partition, and aggregate assets and talents in such a way that they can be scaled up, secure investment, guarantee credit, certify reputation, and capture abstract surplus value. The difficulty that most people have in making combinations is a major cause of global inequality and unnecessary poverty.
Supply chains can be seen as cyber-physical networks grounded on object identification and tracking. Conventional trust models featuring centralized information management architectures and simplistic things classification lend two of the most relevant limitations to current solutions. Blockchain introduces novel and a valuable trust approaches while semantic technologies better permit a things description. This paper introduces a semantic-enhanced blockchain platform allowing a flexible object discovery. It is based on validation by consensus of smart contracts and adopt a semantic matchmaking between queries and object annotations expressed w.r.t. ontology models. Early experiments assess the good behaviour of the proposed framework.
Hoang Tam Vo, Lenin Mehedy, Mukesh Mohania, Ermyas Abebe
In this paper, we demonstrate a blockchain-based solution for transparently managing and analyzing data in a pay-as-you-go car insurance application. This application allows drivers who rarely use cars to only pay insurance premium for particular trips they would like to travel. One of the key challenges from database perspective is how to ensure all the data pertaining to the actual trip and premium payment made by the users are transparently recorded so that every party in the insurance contract including the driver, the insurance company, and the financial institution is confident that the data are tamper-proof and traceable.
In this paper, we propose a zero-knowledge proof for a special case of the hidden subset sum problem. This problem was presented by [Boyko et al. 1998] as the underlying problem of methods for generating random pairs of the form (x, gx (mod p)) using precomputations. The proof we propose is an adaptation of a zero-knowledge protocol for the subset sum problem presented by [Blocki 2009].
Antonio Fernández Anta, Chryssis Georgiou, Nicolas Nicolaou
In his PODC’2017 keynote address, Maurice Herlihy pointed out that despite the hype about blockchains and distributed ledgers, no formal abstraction of these objects has been proposed. To face this issue, in this paper we provide a proper formulation of a distributed ledger object. In brief, we define a ledger object as a sequence of records, and we provide the operations and the properties that such an object should support. We then provide a variation of the ledger – the validated ledger – which requires that each record in the ledger satisfies a particular validation rule. A (validated) ledger is distributed if it is implemented on top of multiple (possibly geographically dispersed) computing devices.
Saurabh Raje, Shyamal Vaderia, Neil Wilson, Rudrakh Panigrahi
This paper describes the design and development of a decentralized firewall system powered by a novel malware detection engine. The firewall is built using blockchain technology. The detection engine aims to classify Portable Executable (PE) files as malicious or benign. File classification is carried out using a deep belief neural network (DBN) as the detection engine. Our approach is to model the files as grayscale images and use the DBN to classify those images into the aforementioned two classes. An extensive data set of 10,000 files is used to train the DBN. Validation is carried out using 4,000 files previously unexposed to the network. The final result of whether to allow or block a file is obtained by arriving at a proof of work based consensus in the blockchain network.
As the core issue of blockchain, the mining requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle, which is resource expensive to implement in mobile devices due to the high computing power needed. Thus, the development of blockchain in mobile applications is restricted. In this paper, we, for the first time, consider the edge computing as the network enabler for mobile blockchain. In particular, we study optimal pricing-based edge computing resource management to support mobile blockchain applications where the mining process can be offloaded to an Edge computing Service Provider (ESP). We adopt a two-stage Stackelberg game to jointly maximize the profit of the ESP and the individual utilities of different miners. In Stage~I, the ESP sets the price of edge computing services. In Stage~II, the miners decide on the service demand to purchase based on the observed prices. We apply the backward induction to analyze the sub-game perfect equilibrium in each stage for uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. Further, the existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg game are validated for both pricing schemes. At last, the performance evaluation shows that the ESP intends to set the maximum possible value as optimal price for profit maximization under uniform pricing. In addition, the discriminatory pricing helps the ESP to encourage higher total service demand from miners and achieve greater profit correspondingly.
Money in the digital era: the rise of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency industry and sectors. Considerations on Bitcoin: a monetary and financial analysis. Financial analysis on Bitcoin returns.
History of Bitcoin. A brief history on money. Layout of digital cryptocurrencies. Peer-to-Peer electronic system. Analysis of the empirical application. Bitcoinocracy and replacement of physical entities. Legality of Bitcoin around the world.
At present, the cloud storage used in searchable symmetric encryption schemes (SSE) is provided in a private way, which cannot be seen as a true cloud. Moreover, the cloud server is thought to be credible, because it always returns the search result to the user, even they are not correct. In order to really resist this malicious adversary and accelerate the usage of the data, it is necessary to store the data on a public chain, which can be seen as a decentralized system. As the increasing amount of the data, the search problem becomes more and more intractable, because there does not exist any effective solution at present. In this paper, we begin by pointing out the importance of storing the data in a public chain. We then innovatively construct a model of SSE using blockchain(SSE-using-BC) and give its security definition to ensure the privacy of the data and improve the search efficiency. According to the size of data, we consider two different cases and propose two corresponding schemes. Lastly, the security and performance analyses show that our scheme is feasible and secure.
Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) – a term intentionally mirroring Initial Public Offerings (IPO) – seem to be the new hype of the virtual currency community leading to an all-time high of the bitcoin of almost 5,000$ this year1. There is indeed a frenzy developing around ICOs reaching a record high of $1.7 billion in 20172 sparking an increasing interest from regulators on the American and Asian continents. Thus, ICOs have become a venture capital-raising tool for start-ups developing projects and applications on the blockchain and trying to escape the constraints of regulation.
Regulation however seems to chatch up with ICOs. This paper analyzes ICOs from a legal perspective with a particular focus on European and French law.
In the rapid development of Chinese higher vocational education, large gaps have appeared in the scale of development and resource generation among the provinces, among regions in the provinces, and among higher education institutions in the provinces. Balanced regional development and provincial-level coordination have become policy focal points, but a discussion of the relationship between the two has been lacking in the academic world. Based on 2009 data on vocational colleges in China, the quantitative analysis in this paper shows that there is a tension between the governance models of higher vocational education and balanced development of vocational colleges within provinces. Research findings show that school affiliation is related to the ability to attract public funding, appropriations for public schools are significantly higher than for private schools, and tuition for private schools is significantly higher than for public schools; school affiliation is related to output, and the new student registration rate and number of cooperating enterprises is higher for public schools than private schools; and there is a significant positive correlation between the ratio of prefecture-level city schools and the average number of cooperating enterprises for schools in a province, and a significant positive correlation between the ratio of private schools and the average tuition of schools in a province. This paper suggests that to achieve the dual objectives of balance and development, provincial-level governments should adjust their administrations and financing for higher vocational education and decentralize their authority to local governments, in order to build a diverse and flexible new model for higher vocational education governance.
With the ongoing reformation and now with the enactment of Law Number 23 Year 2014 on Regional Government, the regional development is directed to several development policies that describe the change of development and regional development as well as the management of financing through the reorganization of government institutions and local officials in carrying out their duties and functions in order to realize the implementation of democratic and decentralized development Innovation becomes a necessity that needs to be done so that the existence of government becomes meaningful. The hallmark of successful innovation is the creation and utilization of new processes, new products, new services and new delivery methods, resulting in significant improvements in efficiency, effectiveness and quality being meaningful to the public. Innovation of tourism becomes a necessity that must be done by local government in the development of investment and increase of regional income. In the development of tourism district Purworejo has been able to prepare a master plan for tourism development. Aspects used in the development of tourism include the marketing of the potential of tourism, management of tourism potential, development of tourism destinations, the development of tourism marketing, and the development of the tourism industry Keywords: Innovation, local, development, tourism
Community-based Tourism Development and Sustainability