Blockchain Papers

Jason T. Parker, Philip Schniter, Volkan Cevher

No abstract is available for this record.

Helmut Herwartz, Yabibal M. Walle

No abstract is available for this record.

Елена, Rusu

The sustainable development became a goal for knowledge society, but one of the main question in literature remains as how close is the relationship between economic dvelopment, knowledge society and local governments' level. Given the great diversity of situations and frameworks both across countries and within them in the European Union, I consider that each country must have own policies designed to implement process of decentralization with the commitment of "healthy" economy in a society dominated by the technology and innovation. In this context, the problem occurs in decentralization should be managed on two levels: on the one hand in terms of central-local budgets relations, and on the other hand, in the local public finance structural plan. The paper will try to emphasize the connection between decentralization, local economic sustainable development and knowledge society, taking into account an overview of this three aspects and empirical evidences. In this regard, I will use the background offered by literature and the official statiscal data for analysis to identify the variables which explain decentralization and local economic development in the knowledge society. I estimate the analysis to confirm the hypothesis that there are good aspects, but also deficiencies that require solutions and budgetary policy options as part undisputed positioning local government finance as an engine of development of the whole nation. I consider that the paper can be a useful viewpoint in understanding local public finances in decentralization, which allows researchers to include other sources of information for researching an in a much more complex approach.

Fajiang Yu, Chen Jing, Xiang Yang, Zhu Jiacheng · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Abrahan Elias Zambrano Vélez, Javier Vicente Pazmiño Palma

Human talent is the most valuable resource organizations have because it is the engine that carry out the activities and functions of any institution; for this reason, this research was conducted in order to make a diagnosis of Organizational Culture in the departments of Human and Legal Talent of the Autonomous Decentralized Government in Chone Canton-province of Manabi; in order to improve the service. The research has five chapters, beginning with the statement of the problem and identification of objectives, which led to the theoretical framework where reference were made to all literature sources that serve as guide and support to the topic under study. Surveys, interviews Cameron and Quinn, test and Organizational Climate analysis were applied to assist the proposal as research process methods such as descriptive, and inductive and deductive techniques used to improve the plan and strengthen the organizational culture of the public. The results of the research were presented in a consistent manner through tables, graphs and figures, which identified the true causes and sub-causes that threatened the professional development of the staff in the institution, allowing to obtain different conclusions which are: the culture predominates in the departments mentioned above is the clan, and the opinions and suggestions of the staff are helpful when making a decision.

Daisuke Mashima, Arnab Roy

Fine-grained energy usage data made available by recent advancement of smart grid technologies benefit not only electricity utility companies but also customers. Nowadays customers can utilize various services by sharing their own energy usage data. At the same time, such utilization and sharing of electricity usage data with a variety of third party service providers may cause privacy concerns. In this paper, we discuss a privacy preserving mechanism for customers' sharing of energy usage data with third parties using non-interactive zero-knowledge proof systems. Under our scheme, a customer can, for each data sharing and disclosure, add noise to her electricity usage data without entirely losing verifiability of data authenticity, thereby retaining utility of data at third parties even for billing or accounting purposes.

Danushka Jayasinghe, Konstantinos Markantonakis, Keith Mayes

Fair-exchange and anonymity are two important attributes in e-commerce. It is much more difficult to expect fairness in e-commerce transactions using Bit coin due to anonymity and transaction irreversibility. Genuine consumers and merchants who would like to make and receive payments using Bit coin may be reluctant to do so due to this uncertainty. The proposed protocol guarantees strong-fairness while preserving anonymity of the consumer and the merchant, using Bit coin as a payment method which addresses the aforementioned concern. The involvement of the trusted third party (TTP) is kept to a minimum, which makes the protocol optimistic and the exchanged product is not revealed to TTP. It achieves dispute resolution within the protocol run without any intervention of an external judge. Finally we show how the protocol can be easily adapted to use other digital cash systems designed using public ledgers such as Zerocoin/Zerocash.

Presiana Nenkova

The changes in the system of intergovernmental fiscal relations in Bulgaria commenced at the beginning of the 1990s with the enactment of legislation on local self-governance and the first timid attempts at an expenditure and revenue assignment between the levels of government. The process began to gather momentum in 2002 when the government adopted a Concept paper on fiscal decentralization and an action plan on its implementation. A number of key reforms were legislated with the aim of broadening the municipal own-sources revenue base and increasing local government revenue autonomy. Dedicated action to set a decentralized public finance system in place resulted in a visible improvement of financial self-sufficiency of local authorities. Although still low in a European context, the values of fiscal decentralization indicators have gradually risen over the years, which is indicative of the success of the reform. The purpose of this paper is to overview the development of the process of fiscal decentralization in Bulgaria in the period 2003-2012 through examining its key aspects – expenditure responsibilities, revenue assignment and intergovernmental transfers – and to assess the policy options for addressing the current problems of local finance system. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p342

Michael Miller

No abstract is available for this record.

Yingjie Xia, Fubiao Xia, Xuejiao Liu, Xin Sun · 6 authors

The increasing demand in promoting cloud computing in either business or other areas requires more security of a cloud storage system. Traditional cloud storage systems fail to protect data integrity information (DII), when the interactive messages between the client and the data storage server are sniffed. To protect DII and support public verifiability, we propose a data integrity verification scheme by deploying a designated confirmer signature DCS as a building block. The DCS scheme strikes the balance between public verifiable signatures and zero-knowledge proofs which can address disputes between the cloud storage server and any user, whoever acting as a malicious player during the two-round verification. In addition, our verification scheme remains blockless and stateless, which is important in conducting a secure and efficient cryptosystem. We perform security analysis and performance evaluation on our scheme, and compared with the existing schemes, the results show that our scheme is more secure and efficient.

Alessandro Caiani, Antoine Godin, Eugenio Caverzasi, Luca Riccetti · 8 authors

We present an agent based stock flow consistent macroeconomic model with heterogeneous agents interacting through a decentralized matching process across multiple markets with multiple assets. The model is consistent across both the micro and macroeconomic levels, by providing a detailed, comprehensive, and rigorous accounting of real and financial flows and stocks. We implement the model using a brand new Java programming platform, explicitly designed for AB-SFC models.

Leila Doshmangir, Arash Rashidian, Hamid Ravaghi, Amirhossein Takian · 5 authors

Background: In 2004, the health system in Iran initiated an organizational reform aiming to increase the autonomy 
\nof teaching hospitals and make them more decentralized. The policy led to the formation of a board of trustees in 
\neach hospital and significant modifications in hospitals’ financing. Since the reform aimed to improve its predecessor 
\npolicy (implementation of hospital autonomy began in 1995), it expected to increase user satisfaction, as well as 
\nenhance effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare services in targeted hospitals. However, such expectations were 
\nnever realized. In this research, we explored the perceptions and views of expert stakeholders as to why the board of 
\ntrustees’ policy did not achieve its perceived objectives.
\nMethods:We conducted 47 semi-structured face-to-face interviews and two focus group discussions (involving 8 
\nand 10 participants, respectively) with experts at high, middle, and low levels of Iran’s health system, using purposive 
\nand snowball sampling. We also collected a comprehensive set of relevant documents. Interviews were transcribed 
\nverbatim and analyzed thematically, following a mixed inductive-deductive approach. 
\nResults: Three main themes emerged from the analysis. The implementation approach (including the processes, views 
\nabout the policy and the links between the policy components), using research evidence about the policy (local and 
\nglobal), and policy context (health system structure, health insurers capacity, hospitals’ organization and capacity 
\nand actors’ interrelationships) affected the policy outcomes. Overall, the implementation of hospital decentralization 
\npolicies in Iran did not seem to achieve their intended targets as a result of assumed failure to take full consideration 
\nof the above factors in policy implementation into account. 
\nConclusion:The implementation of the board of trustees’ policy did not achieve its desired goals in teaching hospitals 
\nin Iran. Similar decentralization policies in the past and their outcomes were overlooked, while the context was not 
\nprepared appropriately and key stakeholders, particularly the government, did not support the decentralization of 
\nIran’s health system.

Stefano Pepe

No abstract is available for this record.

Authors unavailable

No abstract is available for this record.

Xin Liu, Anwitaman Datta, Ee-Peng Lim

The Information Age has made publishing, distributing and collecting information easier, resulting in the exponential growth of information available to us. Databases were once ledgers written by hand by a single person; today they can be vast stores of data agglomerated from a myriad of disparate sources. The mass media, formerly limited to newspapers and television programs held to strict journalistic standards, has expanded to include collaborative content such as blogs, wikis and message boards. Documents covering Judging of Sources nearly every topic abound on the Internet, but the authors are often anonymous and the accuracy uncertain.

Malte Möser, Rainer Böhme

No abstract is available for this record.

Kurt Holukoff

In this dissertation, the author argues that constructivist foundations of political liberalism require a rarely recognized sort of pluralism—not only the familiar pluralism between ideas about how we ought to live that are the stock in trade of standard accounts of liberalism, but a pluralism about political foundations as well. The author argues that making sense of this requires revision to the way we sometimes understand key concepts (such as obligation), and develops an inconsistency-tolerant, pluralism friendly deontic logic for this purpose. 
\n A pluralist friendly obligation is argued to be one that represents moral and political principles in contrastive terms (analogous to contrastive explanation from Bas Van Fraassen), in virtue of the need to order acting upon prescriptions. The author develops a class of mathematical objects choices to model answers to why we should choose one policy over alternatives.
\n Constructivist foundations also turn out to be prima facie pluralist foundations, in virtue of the nature of the norms guiding abstraction. This leads to a proof that, in a weakest base logic, legitimate moral or political codes in a pluralist context must reference each other. Upon explicating the distinction between perspectives that could consider unrealizable plans and perspectives that are themselves unrealizable, the author proves that in our world liberalism is itself an unrealizable plan. These results clearly illuminate what is at stake when justifying foundations for a liberal state.

Enrico Scacco

No abstract is available for this record.

Omri Y. Marian

This Essay proposes a conceptual framework for the regulation of transactions involving cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies offer tremendous opportunities for innovation and development but are also uniquely suited to facilitate illicit behavior. The regulatory framework suggested herein is intended to support (or at least not impair) cryptocurrencies’ innovative potential. At the same time, it aims to disrupt cryptocurrencies’ criminal utility. To achieve these purposes, this Essay proposes a regulatory framework that imposes costs on the characteristics of cryptocurrencies that make them especially useful for criminal behavior (in particular, anonymity) but does not impose costs on characteristics that are at the core of cryptocurrencies’ generative potential (in particular, the decentralization of value-transfer processes). Using a basic utility model of criminal behavior as a benchmark, this Essay explains how regulatory instruments can be so designed. One such regulatory instrument is proposed as an example — an elective anonymity tax on cryptocurrency transactions in which at least one party is not anonymous.

Alex Biryukov, Ivan Pustogarov

Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated by a distributed set of miners and transaction are broadcasted via a peer-to-peer network. While Bitcoin provides some level of anonymity (or rather pseudonymity) by encouraging the users to have any number of random-looking Bitcoin addresses, recent research shows that this level of anonymity is rather low. This encourages users to connect to the Bitcoin network through anonymizers like Tor and motivates development of default Tor functionality for popular mobile SPV clients. In this paper we show that combining Tor and Bitcoin creates an attack vector for the deterministic and stealthy man-in-the-middle attacks. A low-resource attacker can gain full control of information flows between all users who chose to use Bitcoin over Tor. In particular the attacker can link together user's transactions regardless of pseudonyms used, control which Bitcoin blocks and transactions are relayed to the user and can \ delay or discard user's transactions and blocks. In collusion with a powerful miner double-spending attacks become possible and a totally virtual Bitcoin reality can be created for such set of users. Moreover, we show how an attacker can fingerprint users and then recognize them and learn their IP address when they decide to connect to the Bitcoin network directly.

Nicole Mirjanich

Bitcoin, a virtual currency created in 2009, has resulted in the unlikely pairing of the underworld criminals with the Harvard educated Winklevoss brothers. The online currency can be obtained by “mining” through solving complex equations, and can be bought and sold on Bitcoin Exchanges. It is primarily utilized for investment in Bitcoin financial products as well as speculating on the value of the currency. It is also used as a method of payment for legal and illegal goods and services. This comment addresses the regulatory issues Bitcoin faces, namely the regulation and taxation of financial products. After providing a fundamental definition of Bitcoin and how it operates, this Comment explores issues stemming from anonymity, price volatility, and use in criminal activity. It then provides an analysis of classifying and regulating Bitcoin as currency and examines how FinCEN and Treasury Regulations issued by the IRS will reduce criminal activity stemming from anonymity. Next, it discusses how SEC and CFTC regulations could stabilize Bitcoin’s volatile market value, and explains why the IRS was incorrect to classify Bitcoin as property. It concludes by addressing the policy implications of classifying Bitcoin as currency under various regulatory laws.

Antoinette L. Smith, Miriam F. Weismann

Increasingly, companies and customers are beginning to hear, “We accept all major credit cards and Bitcoins.” Virtual or digital currency is a new financial “black box” product that has seeped into the retail market and is slowly becoming the currency of choice for nation states like Iceland. As the cash or treasury manager of your organization, are you ready to take on Bitcoin currency—or any virtual currency, for that matter?

Elżbieta Chrabonszczewska

Abstract The aim of the paper is to present the phenomenon of the new virtual currency bitcoin, and analyse its economic significance. The paper examines the origin, notion, functions and mechanism of emission of the BTC. The theoretical aspects of creation of the BTC and its advantages and weakness are also explained. The results of the analysis show that bitcoin does not eliminate current problems of traditional currency but also generates new risks for its users. The risks could as well affect the central banks (the legal risk, the risk to payment system stability, and the reputation risk). Three contributions of this paper to the problem of the BTC are worth distinguishing. Firstly, the scientific literature lacks information and data about the BTC - the main source of information is the Internet which reliability cannot be fully guaranteed. Secondly, periodical examination of development of the risk connected with the BTC is necessary. Thirdly, it is a basis to begin discussion on the new virtual currency which bitcoin is.

Marta Aguilar Gil, José María Bleda García

Spain’s Transition to Democracy set the stage for the organization of a national healthcare system. The adoption of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 was a political milestone that led to the recognition of every citizen’s right to healthcare and the right of autonomy of the different regions that make up the SpanishState. The most distinctive characteristic of the healthcare model set up in those early years of political transition was the decentralization of the healthcare system which transferred political and administrative power on matters of public health to the 17 autonomous communities. It took more than 20 years to complete this decentralization process. Due to the economic crisis and the election of a conservative government, the National Healthcare System is being seriously questioned, its very sustainability in doubt as reform measures are being taken that are considered a threat by many institutions and organizations to public welfare.