Blockchain Papers

Alban Thomas, Vera Zaporozhets

No abstract is available for this record.

Abodou Athanase Adomon, Gogbe Téré, Koffi Lazare Atta

Since 1980, municipalities are in the center of decentralization policy in Côte d'Ivoire. More than thirty years later, the elected representatives are still in search of strategy to satisfy needs for the populations. In spite of the difficulties of financing, investments were realized. These boosted the local development to Alépé through the metamorphosis of the urban landscape, the dynamism of economic activities, the increase of infrastructures and equipments, etc. But, they do not take into account concerns of the populations. Where from their disappointment.

Sébastien Philippe, R.J. Goldston, Alexander Glaser, Francesco d’Errico

Zero-knowledge proofs are mathematical cryptographic methods to demonstrate the validity of a claim while providing no further information beyond the claim itself. The possibility of using such proofs to process classified and other sensitive physical data has attracted attention, especially in the field of nuclear arms control. Here we demonstrate a non-electronic fast neutron differential radiography technique using superheated emulsion detectors that can confirm that two objects are identical without revealing their geometry or composition. Such a technique could form the basis of a verification system that could confirm the authenticity of nuclear weapons without sharing any secret design information. More broadly, by demonstrating a physical zero-knowledge proof that can compare physical properties of objects, this experiment opens the door to developing other such secure proof-systems for other applications.

Dev Gangjee

This chapter provides a legal framework for deciding when a geographical indication (GI) has crossed over the line into generic usage, as the common name for a type of product (such as cheddar cheese). Genericide is a process and one that is highly controversial. While Art 24.6 of TRIPS has emerged as the international reference point, it is remarkably underdeveloped. The question of whether a designation has become the ‘common name’ for a type of product requires an empirically informed answer. However, when setting out the test for genericide, there are opportunities for normative inflections to be introduced. Section 2 sets out the history of this controversial area and the commercial stakes which influence legal determinations. Section 3 identifies the four main structural issues to be addressed (which regime to opt for; who bears the burden of proof; what is the threshold or tipping point for genericide; and how the factors should interact). Section 4 proceeds to analyse the categories of evidence, drawing on comparative experiences with such categories in operation. Here the perception of the target audience (consumers or the general public, as informed by trade and expert opinion) must be gauged against the contextual backdrop of market conditions, legislative or bureaucratic classifications of the term and the actions of the rights holder. Section 5 concludes with a review of the options for preventing generic use in sui generis GI regimes, while also suggesting the avenues for reviving terms that were formerly GIs but have been declared generic. The comparative analysis is offered as a practical resource for decision makers, while also serving as a reminder that the overarching enquiry should remain focused on the public perception of the term, as opposed to the competing commercial interests at stake.

Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi · 6 authors

While showing great promise, Bitcoin requires users to wait tens of minutes for transactions to commit, and even then, offering only probabilistic guarantees. This paper introduces ByzCoin, a novel Byzantine consensus protocol that leverages scalable collective signing to commit Bitcoin transactions irreversibly within seconds. ByzCoin achieves Byzantine consensus while preserving Bitcoin's open membership by dynamically forming hash power-proportionate consensus groups that represent recently-successful block miners. ByzCoin employs communication trees to optimize transaction commitment and verification under normal operation while guaranteeing safety and liveness under Byzantine faults, up to a near-optimal tolerance of f faulty group members among 3f + 2 total. ByzCoin mitigates double spending and selfish mining attacks by producing collectively signed transaction blocks within one minute of transaction submission. Tree-structured communication further reduces this latency to less than 30 seconds. Due to these optimizations, ByzCoin achieves a throughput higher than PayPal currently handles, with a confirmation latency of 15-20 seconds.

Joichi Ito

No abstract is available for this record.

Patricia Craig

The candidate selection process in the United States has been, since the second half of the 20th century, one of the most inclusive and decentralized among the developed democracies. While such systems often presuppose party weakness or lack of control over the process, this article shows that patterns of campaign finance indicate that party weakness over candidate selection in the U.S. case may be overestimated. It also argues that a very open selection process offers opportunities for insurgent movements within parties that bring new ideas and demands. Finally, it suggests that political culture may mediate the relationship between party strength and democratized selection methods.

Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Nicolas Gailly, Ismail Khoffi · 6 authors

While showing great promise, Bitcoin requires users to wait tens of minutes\nfor transactions to commit, and even then, offering only probabilistic\nguarantees. This paper introduces ByzCoin, a novel Byzantine consensus protocol\nthat leverages scalable collective signing to commit Bitcoin transactions\nirreversibly within seconds. ByzCoin achieves Byzantine consensus while\npreserving Bitcoin's open membership by dynamically forming hash\npower-proportionate consensus groups that represent recently-successful block\nminers. ByzCoin employs communication trees to optimize transaction commitment\nand verification under normal operation while guaranteeing safety and liveness\nunder Byzantine faults, up to a near-optimal tolerance of f faulty group\nmembers among 3f + 2 total. ByzCoin mitigates double spending and selfish\nmining attacks by producing collectively signed transaction blocks within one\nminute of transaction submission. Tree-structured communication further reduces\nthis latency to less than 30 seconds. Due to these optimizations, ByzCoin\nachieves a throughput higher than PayPal currently handles, with a confirmation\nlatency of 15-20 seconds.\n

John Fry, Eng-Tuck Cheah

No abstract is available for this record.

Gareth Baxendale

Gareth Baxendale FBCS CITP, Head of Technology at the NIHR Clinical Research Network, asks whether bitcoin’s blockchain technology can revolutionise electronic patient records (EPRs).

Jude Umeh

Something very exciting is happening on the internet and, depending on whom you ask, it could be as game changing as the internet itself, or as mundane as just another protocol layer on it. The noise, hype and media coverage surrounding blockchain has reached fever pitch over something that is conceptually simple, technically straightforward and potentially super-disruptive. BCS DRM blogger Jude Umeh brings some clarity and perspective on the blockchain and explores what is required for it to either live up to the game-changing expectations or end up as yet another faddish internet bubble.

Joel Z. Garrod

Although it is still in early stages, many commentators have been quick to note the revolutionary potential of next-generation or Bitcoin 2.0 technology. While some have expressed fear that the widespread application of these technologies may engender the rise of a Terminator-style Skynet, others believe that it represents the coming of a decentralized autonomous society (DAS) in which humans are freed from centralized forms of power through the proliferation of distributed autonomous organizations or DAOs. Influenced by neoliberal theory that stresses privatization, open markets, and deregulation, Bitcoin 2.0 technologies are implicitly working on the assumption that 'freedom' means freedom from the state. This neglects, however, that within capitalist societies, the state can also provide freedom from the vagaries of the market by protecting certain things from commodification. Through an analysis of (1) class and the role of the state; (2) the concentration and centralization of capital; and (3) the role of automation, I argue that the vision of freedom that underpins Bitcoin 2.0 tech is one that neglects the power that capital holds over us in both organizing the structure of our lives, and informing our idea of what it means to be human. In neglecting these other forms of power, I claim that the DAS might be a far more dystopian development than its supporters comprehend, making possible societies that are commodities all the way down.

Winston Moore, Jeremy Stephen

In most countries, the central bank is required to hold reserve assets as a means of providing credibility for the value of the fiat currency. These assets can be in the form of gold, foreign exchange or some other internationally recognised reserve asset and are held to permit the country to engage in international transactions. Within recent years, cryptocurrencies have been increasingly utilised for international transactions, and it is possible that the use of these cryptocurrencies might expand in the future. This paper therefore examines the potential role of digital currency balances as part of the portfolio of external assets held by a central bank. Using the case of Barbados, the paper also provides a simulation of the effect holding some proportion of their asset-base would have had on the stability of the foreign reserves as well as the return on the portfolio of assets.

Arash Kiadeh

No abstract is available for this record.

Primavera De Filippi

version anglaise de Crowdfunding baseado em blockchain: qual seu impacto sobre a produção artística e o consumo de arte?, Observatorio/ITAU cultural,n°19

Atalay Mert İleri, Halil Ibrahim Ozercan, Alper Gundogdu, Ahmet K. Senol · 6 authors

Rate of growth of the amount of data generated using the high throughput sequencing (HTS) platforms now exceeds the growth stipulated by Moore's Law. The HTS data is expected to surpass those of other "big data" domains such as astronomy, before the year 2025. In addition to sequencing genomes for research purposes, genome and exome sequencing in clinical settings will be a routine part of health care. The analysis of such large amounts of data, however, is not without computational challenges. This burden is even more increased due to the periodic updates to reference genomes, which typically require re-analysis of existing data. Here we propose Coin-Application Mediator Interface (Coinami) to distribute the workload for mapping reads to reference genomes using a volunteer grid computer approach similar to Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). However, since HTS read mapping requires substantial computational resources and fast analysis turnout is desired, Coinami uses the HTS read mapping as proof-of-work to generate valid blocks to main its own cryptocurrency system, which may help motivate volunteers to dedicate more resources. The Coinami protocol includes mechanisms to ensure that jobs performed by volunteers are correct, and provides genomic data privacy. The prototype implementation of Coinami is available at http://coinami.github.io/.

Wei Liang, Jing Long, Xuhui Chen, Yongkai Fan · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

H. S. V. S. Kumar Nunna, Amit Mohan Saklani, Anudeep Sesetti, Swathi Battula · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Nesrine Khernane, Maria Potop-Butucaru, Claude Chaudet

Advances in wearable and implementable of wireless sensors have enable the development of tiny and intelligent sensors called body sensors. Monitoring the vital body parameters in real-time using wireless body area network (WBAN) has shown great potential in improving healthcare quality not only for patients but also for medical staff. However, security and privacy are still an important issue in WBANs especially in multi-hop architectures. Considering the constraints of the body sensors (namely energy, memory, computational power, etc.). In this paper, we propose and present the design and the evaluation of a secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme BANZKP based on an efficient cryptographic protocol, Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and a commitment scheme. ZKP is used to confirm the identify of the sensor nodes, with small computational requirement, which is favorable for body sensors given their limited resources, while the commitment scheme is used to deal with replay attacks and hence the injection attacks by committing a message and revealing the key later. BANZKP reduces the memory requirement by 56,13% compared to TinyZKP [10], the comparable alternative so far for Body Area Networks. Also, the simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is 17 and 5 times more efficient in term of execution time, and uses 94.11% and 80% less energy compared to TinyZKP and W-ECDSA [16], respectively.

Yuswanto Yuswanto

As a fiscal policy within the framework of regional autonomy, the allocation of DAU is an act that very important. It was meant to address financing capability gap between regions. The reason is because the DAU is the largest component of balance funds, namely the lack of 26% of the net domestic income in the state budget the amount of DAU scheme is not limiting, because it can only grow with the size of the authority delegated to the regions. DAU legal standing as a regional income in the financial relationship between the center and the regions based on the principle of autonomy is as a subsidy coming from the state revenue in the state budget that is allocated to local revenue in the budget based on fiscal decentralization. Keywords: General Allocation Fund, autonomy, regional autonomy

Nesrine Khernane, Maria Potop-Butucaru, Claude Chaudet

-Wireless body area network(WBAN) has shown great potential in improving\nhealthcare quality not only for patients but also for medical staff. However,\nsecurity and privacy are still an important issue in WBANs especially in\nmulti-hop architectures. In this paper, we propose and present the design and\nthe evaluation of a secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication\nscheme BANZKP based on an efficient cryptographic protocol, Zero Knowledge\nProof (ZKP) and a commitment scheme. ZKP is used to confirm the identify of the\nsensor nodes, with small computational requirement, which is favorable for body\nsensors given their limited resources, while the commitment scheme is used to\ndeal with replay attacks and hence the injection attacks by committing a\nmessage and revealing the key later. Our scheme reduces the memory requirement\nby 56.13 % compared to TinyZKP [13], the comparable alternative so far for Body\nArea Networks, and uses 10 % less energy.\n

Jacek Binda

The money is a widely accepted commodity, by means of which it is possible to determine the economic value of purchased goods and services and make payments. Over the centuries, "money" has evolved many times. Their constantly changing character, generates questions on their future aspect. In the reference to the cryptocurrencies questions are focused on their nature and compliance with the definition of money.

L.V. Tirbah

Subject of research is fiscal decentralization. The goal of this research paper is the analysis of the dynamics and status of fiscal decentralization. Methods which were used in course of research: generalization, comparative analysis method, statistical method and other methods. Study results. Characterized and analyzed Application of results: Ministry of Finance of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Conclusions. Decentralization in terms of expansion of powers at the local level leads to high efficiency of public administration at the lowest level, and to improve the efficiency and quality of public services. But the significant transfer of powers and functions from state to local levels without adequate financial security can lead to negative financial results. It is therefore particularly important is finding the optimum between the volume of granted powers, and their support by adequate financial resources.

Sayan Basu Roy, Shubhendu Bhasin, Indra Narayan Kar

Convergence of controller parameters in standard model reference adaptive control (MRAC) requires the system states to be persistently exciting (PE), a restrictive condition to be verified online. A recent data-driven approach, concurrent learning, uses information-rich past data concurrently with the standard parameter update laws to guarantee parameter convergence without the need of the PE condition. This method guarantees exponential convergence of both the tracking and the controller parameter estimation errors to zero, whereas, the classical MRAC merely ensures asymptotic convergence of tracking error to zero. However, the method requires knowledge of the state derivative, at least at the time instances when the state values are stored in memory. The method further assumes knowledge of the control allocation matrix. This paper addresses these limitations by using a memory-based finite-time system identifier in conjunction with a data-driven approach, leading to convergence of both the tracking and the controller parameter estimation errors without the PE condition and knowledge of the system matrices and the state derivative. A Lyapunov based stability proof is included to justify the validity of the proposed data-driven approach. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the suggested method.