Blockchain Papers

Yunsen Wang

No abstract is available for this record.

Urmimala Sarkar Munsi

No abstract is available for this record.

Gregorz Jan Blicharz

The paper seeks to broaden the legal studies on the sea loan by an analysis of the western legal tradition. It undertakes an attempt to find out whether the Roman concept of the sea loan is applicable nowadays. The revival of an ancient solution is more plausible thanks to the idea of the Project Finance and the ongoing process of the decodification of private law. The ancient legal institution of pecunia traiecticia and the modern idea of the Project Finance are good examples of the legal solutions that existed or exist outside the codified legal structure. A broad insight into the history of the sea loan shows how many different contracts were developed under the influence of the pecunia traiecticia. It was a fact in Roman law, in ius commune and in the common law tradition. The vivid development of contractual agreements concerning risky ventures: both on sea and on land was stopped, however, by the process of codification and by the rise of statutory liens, and insurance contracts. The market of risky investments has started to present a challenge to the process of codification once again in the 20th and 21st century. It has been driven by many soft law regulations and uncodified practical solutions. One of them is Project Finance that today seems to be the legal regulation that is the closest to the Roman sea loan. It is an uncodified way to finance and organize risky investments. The significant decentralization of legal systems in all their dimensions, or even in their breakdown into the independent systems makes the revival of pecunia traiecticia more plausible. It can be a useful, less risky alternative to the instruments of speculative investment, e.g. options contracts, forward contracts, hedge contracts, and a less complicated contract than a set of instruments used in the Project Finance. Flexibility of legal solutions used in the risky ventures, variety of legal sources and the openness to the legal tradition could make contemporary legal systems more just and effective than in the era of codification.

Byoung Hyo Moon

No abstract is available for this record.

Jean-Jacques Dethier

"Trash, Cities, and Politics" describes Indonesia's ADIPURA, an environmental program begun in the mid 1980s to focus on waste management, cleanliness and sanitation, and green spaces. The paper discusses the program within the larger context of Indonesia's urbanization and its environmental consequences, from the time of the New Order up to today's decentralization era. The essay describes ADIPURA's continuity and evolution, with respect to central and local governments, law enforcement, financing, and community and private sector participation. It also provides specific data from more than 300 cities, and presents statistics to reveal trends and disconnects and to examine the program's successes and failures. For example, the study found that the program's incentives are inadequate, given Indonesia's regional autonomy and decentralization; that government ministers' credibility may be too weak to encourage municipalities' participation and compliance; and that the program comprises an unmanageable number of targets and is excessively expensive to administer, especially the inspections. The study concludes that ADIPURA is potentially useful to clean up cities, but needs to be overhauled, modernized, and coordinated with other government policies, and further transformed to eliminate actual and potential corruption and manipulation.

Yuanyuan Zhang, Lulu Ren

In real life, there is a problem of capital fracture in some enterprises especially small and medium enterprises in the upstream and downstream of the supply chain. In order to research how retailers choose the optimal financing mode, this paper analyzes the double channel and three- stage supply chain under capital constraint of retailers, uses multi-objective nonlinear programming method, constructs the delayed payment financing model and the loan financing model respectively and gives the optimal decentralized decisions of suppliers, manufacturers and retailers under the two modes. The research shows that under the coexistence of the delayed payment financing model and the loan financing model, when the delayed payment rate is equal to the lending rate, if the retailers choose the delayed payment model, then it can not only increase the profits but also improve the market competitiveness and expand the market. This provides certain theory and numerical reference basis for retailers to choose a financing model.

Patrick McCorry, Ethan Heilman, Andrew Miller

No abstract is available for this record.

Venkata Marella

Bitcoin is a social movement in the financial industry. It came into existence at a time when investors were looking for an alternative system for the traditional financial institutions. They wanted a system, which offers high transparency, low transaction fee, and high returns on their investment. Bitcoin is a decentralized system, which reveals all the transactions to the investors, providing a high degree of transparency. It operates without a centralized authority, so the transaction fee will be lower than the traditional financial institutions. The value of the Bitcoin can increase over a period and investors can expect high returns on their investment. As the market for the Bitcoin expanded, Bitcoin exchanges were formed, where investors can trade the fiat currencies for Bitcoins and vice versa. They became targets for the cyber criminals and lost bitcoins worth of millions of dollars in cyber-attacks, diminishing the value of Bitcoin. There is a lack of transparency in disclosing the details of the cyber-attacks to their customers by the exchanges. Bitcoin is failing to provide a solution for these issues and is operating like a traditional financial institution. In this paper, we will discuss how Bitcoin is a social movement using framing theory, examine various kinds of cyber-attacks that occurred on Bitcoin exchanges, their impact on Bitcoin, and make suggestions for the Bitcoin community to continue as a social movement in the financial industry.

Yunhua He, Hong Li, Xiuzhen Cheng, Yan Liu · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Muoi Tran, Loi Luu, Min Suk Kang, Iddo Bentov · 5 authors

Bitcoin provides only pseudo-anonymous transactions, which can be exploited to link payers and payees -- defeating the goal of anonymous payments. To thwart such attacks, several Bitcoin mixers have been proposed, with the objective of providing unlinkability between payers and payees. However, existing Bitcoin mixers can be regarded as either insecure or inefficient. We present Obscuro, a highly efficient and secure Bitcoin mixer that utilizes trusted execution environments (TEEs). With the TEE's confidentiality and integrity guarantees for code and data, our mixer design ensures the correct mixing operations and the protection of sensitive data (i.e., private keys and mixing logs), ruling out coin theft and address linking attacks by a malicious service provider. Yet, the TEE-based implementation does not prevent the manipulation of inputs (e.g., deposit submissions, blockchain feeds) to the mixer, hence Obscuro is designed to overcome such limitations: it (1) offers an indirect deposit mechanism to prevent a malicious service provider from rejecting benign user deposits; and (2) scrutinizes blockchain feeds to prevent deposits from being mixed more than once (thus degrading anonymity) while being eclipsed from the main blockchain branch. In addition, Obscuro provides several unique anonymity features (e.g., minimum mixing set size guarantee, resistant to dropping user deposits) that are not available in existing centralized and decentralized mixers. Our prototype of Obscuro is built using Intel SGX and we demonstrate its effectiveness in Bitcoin Testnet. Our implementation mixes 1000 inputs in just 6.49 seconds, which vastly outperforms all of the existing decentralized mixers.

Maria Letizia Perugini

Italian Abstract: Questo studio si propone di analizzare il complesso delle novità introdotte al sistema dei pagamenti e al trasferimento di diritti da Distributed Ledger e Blockchain, in una prospettiva che tenga conto delle applicazioni di mercato di queste innovazioni tecnologiche e della tutela giuridica degli interessi economici e delle posizioni soggettive che ne derivano. In particolar modo, l’opera vuole stimolare la discussione volta alla definizione di un quadro normativo socialmente adeguato che sostenga l’efficienza di questi strumenti in un’ottica di scambio economico globalizzato. English Abstract: This essay aims at analyzing the ensemble of innovation introduced by Distributed Ledger and Blockchain to the payment system and the transfer of rights, in a perspective considering the market applications of these new technologies and the legal protection of deriving economics interests and individual rights. Purposely, our dissertation aspires to encourage the discussion for the definition of a socially adequate legal framework sustaining the efficiency of these instruments in a global exchange perspective.

E.M. Shishkov, E.O. Soldusova, A.V. Pronichev

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Philip Treleaven, Bogdan Batrinca

Efficient financial regulation is crucial to the future success of the financial services industry and especially the rapidly evolving new financial technology (FinTech) area. The concept of “algorithmic regulation, ” modelled on “algorithmic trading systems” [Treleaven et al. (2013)], is to stream compliance, social networks data, and other kinds of information from different sources to a platform where compliance reports are encoded using distributed ledger technology and regulations are “codifiable” and “executable” as computer programs, using the same technology being developed for blockchain smart contracts. In this paper, five areas are discussed: a) an “intelligent regulatory advisor” as a front-end to the regulatory handbook; b) “automated monitoring” of online and social media to detect consumer and market abuse; c) “automated reporting” using online compliance communication and big data analytics; d) “regulatory policy modeling” using smart contract technology to codify regulations and assess impact before deployment; and e) “automated regulation” employing blockchain technology to automate monitoring and compliance. We refer to algorithmic regulation for systems that facilitate compliance and regulation decision-making in financial services using advanced mathematical tools and blockchain technology.

Shehar Bano, Mustafa Al-Bassam, George Danezis

No abstract is available for this record.

О.Е. Радутний, А. Э. Радутный, O. E. Radutniy

The article deals with the certain aspects of the criminal law measures appliedto legal entities, the phenomenon of electronic legal entities (Decentralized Autonomous Organization or Decentralized Autonomous Corporation), the possibility of applying criminal law measures to electronic legal entities.

Tessa Holtzman

In 1994 Bolivia passed one of the most comprehensive political decentralization reforms in Latin America. It broke down a unitary government into 314 semi-autonomous municipalities. In the wake of this change, indigenous populations increased their political engagement. Did the 1994 decentralization reform affect ethno-political mobilization in Bolivia? Some political decentralization theorists argue that high levels of political decentralization create or increase ethnic political mobilization, while others argue that political decentralization reform decreases ethnic political mobilization. In this paper, I add to the conversation by exploring the effects of decentralization reform on ethno-political mobilization at the local level. I argue that, at the local level, decentralization triggered ethno-political mobilization by lowering barriers to participation and by giving local governments control of resources. Additionally, the level of pre-existing social organization has positive effects on the ability of indigenous groups to politically mobilize after decentralization occurred. To support my argument, I use a sequential exploratory research design. I test my argument through qualitative fieldwork including semi-structured interviews with academics and government officials in Bolivia and quantitative regression analysis to test for the impact of pre-existing levels of organization and rurality on ethno-political mobilization. Overall, I find evidence that decentralization incentivizes ethno-political mobilization, but that the outcome is participation in the formal political arena only when there are strong levels of pre-existing social organization.

María José Vázquez Cueto, Francisco Gutiérrez López

espanolEl funcionamiento de la Administracion de Justicia en Espana es actualmente muy cuestionado. Muchos profesionales de la justicia sostienen que esta es la Cenicienta de las administraciones y que es la carencia de medios la causa que justificaria el mal funcionamiento, solicitando, por ello, mayor gasto como medio preferente para mejorarlo. Para conocer si esta afirmacion se puede sustentar cientificamente, hemos analizado 3 indicadores troncales (gasto publico, medios personales a su servicio y funcionamiento del sistema judicial) tanto a nivel nacional como de las Comunidades Autonomas, porque debe tenerse en cuenta que la organizacion de la Administracion de Justicia en Espana esta desconcentrada y descentralizada, lo que condiciona su gestion. EnglishThe functioning of the administration of Spanish justice is being increasingly questioned. Many legal practitioners think that is the Cinderella of the Public Administration and that is the lack of financial resources the reason of its bad malfunctions. In order of to know if these affirmations have scientific basis we have analyzed three focus indicators (public spending, justice personal resource, judicial system operation) both national level as autonomous communities level, because it have to be take in a count that the administration organization of justice in Spain is decentralized and deconcentrated, and these reasons affect their management.

Areej M. Abduldaim

Innovative idea using ring theory is raised to build a new algorithm for zero knowledge (ZK) cryptosystem. In this paper we introduce an algorithm for zero knowledge protocol based on a specific kind of rings named weak Armendariz. On the other hand, the aim of this paper focuses on the category of noncommutative algebraic structures to describe a new algebraic scheme of zero knowledge proof using weak Armendariz rings. As a result, we employ for the first time weak Armendariz rings in the science of cryptographic which regards as a new application of this class of rings. Finally, we present a novel idea combining between abstract algebra and cryptography.

Jorge Bernal Bernabé, José L. Hernández-Ramos, Antonio Skármeta

Security and privacy concerns are becoming an important barrier for large scale adoption and deployment of the Internet of Things. To address this issue, the identity management system defined herein provides a novel holistic and privacy-preserving solution aiming to cope with heterogeneous scenarios that requires both traditional online access control and authentication, along with claim-based approach for M2M (machine to machine) interactions required in IoT. It combines a cryptographic approach for claim-based authentication using the Idemix anonymous credential system, together with classic IdM mechanisms by relying on the FIWARE IdM (Keyrock). This symbiosis endows the IdM system with advanced features such as privacy-preserving, minimal disclosure, zero-knowledge proofs, unlikability, confidentiality, pseudonymity, strong authentication, user consent, and offline M2M transactions. The IdM system has been specially tailored for the Internet of Things bearing in mind the management of both users’ and smart objects’ identity. Moreover, the IdM system has been successfully implemented, deployed, and tested in the scope of SocIoTal European research project.

Marc Cavaliero

In the context of the two-stage procedure undertaken by UEFA in respect of match-fixing, UEFA is entitled to take an administrative measure—non-admission to a competition for one season—followed by a subsequent disciplinary procedure. Nevertheless, despite the administrative measure not being of a purely sanctioning nature, a certain standard of proof must be met. In case the competent body, on the basis of all the factual circumstances and information available, is not comfortably satisfied of a direct or indirect involvement of the club in match-fixing activities, the club shall be declared eligible and be admitted to the competition. Another competitor may appeal the decision admitting a club into a competition, only if it can demonstrate that it is directly or legally affected by the decision at stake. Thus, not all competitors in a competition are automatically deemed affected. In the event that the competition is already underway, the required evidence of a sufficient interest is even stricter as any replacement measure is considered as disruptive and would fall under the competence of the Emergency Panel to deal with in the scope of its margin of discretion and bearing in mind a smooth running and integrity of the competition.

Ludo W. van Meeuwen, Floris P. Verhagen, Perry J. den Brok

No abstract is available for this record.

Aris Rusyiana, Mujibur Rahman Khoirul Muluk, Sujarwoto Sujarwoto

Radical decentralization reform works or does not work for reducing communal conflict is still debatable. This study examines the linkage between decentralization policy and communal conflict in Indonesia. Two measurement of decentralization: administrative decentralization, and fiscal decentralization is examined. Data come from the Village National Census (Podes) 2003-2014 (N=301.974). Results of twolevel logit regression show that fiscal decentralization not significantly associated with reducing communal conflict. The findings suggest that decentralization work for reducing communal conflict through better capacity of local bureaucrats rather than through financing capacity in delivering public services and district proliferation policy

David Lee Kuo Chuen

No abstract is available for this record.

Dominik Harz

Blockchains address trust through cryptography and consensus. Bitcoin is the first digital currency without trusted agents. Ethereum extends this technology by enabling agents on a blockchain, via smart contracts. However, a systemic trust model for smart contracts in blockchains is missing. This thesis describes the ecosystem of smart contracts as an open multi-agent system. A trust model introduces social control through deposits and review agents. Trust-related attributes are quantified in 2,561 smart contracts from GitHub. Smart contracts employ a mean of three variables and functions and one in ten has a security-related issue. Moreover, blockchains restrict computation tasks. Resolving these restrictions while maintaining trust requires verifiable computation. An algorithm for verifiable computation is developed and implemented in Solidity. It uses an arbiter enforcing the algorithm, computation services providing and verifying solutions, and a judge assessing solutions. Experiments are performed with 1000 iterations for one to six verifiers with a cheater prior probability of 30%, 50%, and 70%. The algorithm shows linear complexity for integer multiplication. The verification depends on cheater prior probability and amount of verifiers. In the experiments, six verifiers are sufficient to detect all cheaters for the three prior probabilities.