An innovative software technology known as Bitcoin makes it easier for software to operate with some degree of financial autonomy. In a meaningful sense, it is now possible for software to conduct business on its own account, without using the traditional financial system as an intermediary and without a financial existence tied to an existing natural or legal person. This Essay explores this possibility and suggests that legally autonomous entities, such as a limited liability company (LLC) with no members, are a useful legal structure for factually autonomous systems.
This paper will discuss and evaluate the design features of Bitcoin in relation to the libertarian and metallist philosophies that have shaped the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has failed to be perfectly decentralized or particularly anonymous. Furthermore, its hyperdeflationary design features have made Bitcoin a currency dependent on outside, more stable currencies (e.g., the U.S. dollar), which serve as units of account. Finally, despite the view of money taken by its creators, this supposedly stateless currency is far from apolitical in nature. Although its creators tend to espouse apolitical accounts of money, Bitcoin has been from the beginning a political project -- an evolving, distributed constitutional project, with many goals, visions, and factions. Furthermore, depending on the shape of these political goals, Bitcoin advocates may or may not have a vested interest in creating mechanisms to stabilize the currency and make it a viable unit of account. This paper was written for Christine Desan's seminar, "The Constitutional Law of Money," at Harvard Law School.
Based on the concept of personalized service and Web3. 0 web development techniques,including Service-oriented architecture,personalized service technology,mobile learning technology,cloud computing core technology,etc.,the network teaching platform to meet the individualized learning needs is studied and designed. The framework of network teaching platform with personalized service in Web3. 0 era is constructed.
Ingrid Sperre Saunes, Anna Sagan, Ingrid Sperre Saunes
Norways five million inhabitants are spread over nearly four hundred thousand square kilometres, making it one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe. It has enjoyed several decades of high growth, following the start of oil production in early 1970s, and is now one of the richest countries per head in the world. Overall, Norways population enjoys good health status; life expectancy of 81.53 years is above the EU average of 80.14, and the gap between overall life expectancy and healthy life years is around half the of EU average. The health care system is semi decentralized. The responsibility for specialist care lies with the state (administered by four Regional Health Authorities) and the municipalities are responsible for primary care. Although health care expenditure is only 9.4% of Norways GDP (placing it on the 16th place in the WHO European region), given Norways very high value of GDP per capita, its health expenditure per head is higher than in most countries. Public sources account for over 85% of total health expenditure; the majority of private health financing comes from households out-of-pocket payments.The number of practitioners in most health personnel groups, including physicians and nurses, has been increasing in the last few decades and the number of health care personnel per 100 000 inhabitants is high compared to other EU countries. However, long waiting times for elective care continue to be a problem and are cause of dissatisfaction among the patients. The focus of health care reforms has seen shifts over the past four decades. During the 1970s the focus was on equality and increasing geographical access to health care services; during the 1980s reforms aimed at achieving cost containment and decentralizing health care services; during the 1990s the focus was on efficiency. Since the beginning of the millennium the emphasis has been given to structural changes in the delivery and organization of health care and to policies intended to empower patients and users. The past few years have seen efforts to improve coordination between health care providers, as well as an increased attention towards quality of care and patient safety issues. Overall, comparing mortality rates amenable to medical intervention suggests that Norway is among the better performing European countries. Despite having one of the highest densities of physicians in Europe, though, Norway still struggles to ensure geographical and social equity in access to health care.
Open access
Healthcare Policy and Management
Primary Care and Health Outcomes
Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
The important energy requirements for the desalination process impose especially in autonomous and decentralized plants supplied by Renewable Energy Sources (RES). In this paper, five alternative energy generation topologies of Reverse Osmosis desalination process are evaluated. The proposed topologies assessed in terms of economic, environmental, technological and societal indices are compared using multi-criteria analysis, namely the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment of Evaluations (PROMETHEE). Ranking of topologies resulted in the selection of direct connection and hybrid configuration as optimum solutions. In case economic priorities prevail diesel generation should also be considered.
Zero-knowledge proof protocol is a critical component of cryptography, which in recent years has raised increasing concern of many scholars.Its application field is very extensive,and it has made breakthrough progress in many aspects,including mathematics and network safety and so on. This article launches the elaboration from the concept, nature, mathematics theory, general proof process of the zero-knowledge proof, focusing on the application research of polynomial function root, graph isomorphism, cloud storage service, RFID, proxy digital signature and identity authentication etc.Finally, the direction for further research is summed up.The systematic introduction to zero-knowledge proof protocol has important theoretical guidance and practical significance on attracting more scholars involved in the research as well as expanding application fields. Keywords:zero-knowledge proof; identity authentication; digital signature; cloud storage; polynomial function root 1.
Virtual currencies are online payment systems that may function as real currencies but are not issued or backed by central governments. As demonstrated by recent events, virtual currencies present regulators with significant challenges. On May 23, 2013, the U.S. federal government brought an indictment against the operators of Liberty Reserve, a popular virtual currency, charging the operators with money laundering and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. The same month, the Government Accountability Office ("GAO") made public a report exploring the potential tax-compliance risks associated with virtual currencies and economies. Legislators have also taken particular interest in one type of virtual currency-Bitcoin. On August 13, 2013, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security announced plans to start an inquiry aimed at establishing a regulatory framework for Bitcoin. This short Essay describes the mechanisms by which "cryptocurrencies"-a subcategory of virtual currencies-could replace tax havens as the weapon-of-choice for tax-evaders. I argue that it is reasonable to expect this shift to occur in the foreseeable future due to the contemporary convergence of two unrelated, yet parallel, processes. The first process is the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin is the most widely recognized example. Unlike other virtual currencies that are associated with the existence of a virtual economy-usually in computer games-cryptocurrencies "function as a unique currency with [their] own free-floating exchange." Over the past three years, Bitcoin gradually gained the confidence of consumers, retailers, and service providers, and it is now effectively functioning as a currency in the real world. In fact, in August 2013, Bitcoin was officially recognized as a legal form of tender in Germany. Only two weeks earlier, a federal judge ruled that for purposes of U.S. securities regulation, Bitcoin is indeed "money."
Cryptocurrencies are digital alternatives to traditional governmentâissued paper monies. Given the current state of technology and skepticism regarding the future purchasing power of existing monies, why have cryptocurrencies failed to gain widespread acceptance? I offer an explanation based on network effects and switching costs. In order to articulate the problem that agents considering cryptocurrencies face, I employ a simple model developed by Dowd and Greenaway (1993) (Dowd, K., and D. Greenaway. âCurrency Competition, Network Externalities, and Switching Costs: Towards an Alternative View of Optimum Currency Areas.â The Economic Journal , 103(420), 1993, 1180â89). The model demonstrates that agents may fail to adopt an alternative currency when network effects and switching costs are present, even if all agents agree that the prevailing currency is inferior. The limited success of bitcoinâalmost certainly the most popular cryptocurrency to dateâserves to illustrate. After briefly surveying episodes of successful monetary transition, I conclude that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are unlikely to generate widespread acceptance in the absence of either significant monetary instability or government support. ( JEL E40, E41, E42, E49)
The blockchain paradigm when coupled with cryptographically-secured transactions has demonstrated its
utility through a number of projects, not least Bitcoin. Each such project can be seen as a simple application on a decentralised, but singleton, compute resource. We can call this paradigm a transactional singleton machine with shared-state.
Ethereum implements this paradigm in a generalised manner. Furthermore it provides a plurality of such resources, each with a distinct state and operating code but able to interact through a message-passing framework with others. We discuss its design, implementation issues, the opportunities it provides and the future hurdles we envisage.
We maintain that the crypto-currency bitcoin is a practical application of what is termed âmemoryâ in the monetary economics literature. After reviewing the theoretical literature on money and memory, we offer a brief overview of the bitcoin protocol and argue that, like memory, bitcoin functions as a public record-keeping device. Finally, we provide evidence that â in line with the standard theoretical account of memory â bitcoin use has soared as the expected cost of storing traditional monies increased.
Marcin Andrychowicz, Stefan Dziembowski, Daniel Malinowski, Ĺukasz Mazurek
AbstractâBitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, intro-duced in 2008, that has recently gained noticeable popularity. Its main features are: (a) it lacks a central authority that controls the transactions, (b) the list of transactions is publicly available, and (c) its syntax allows more advanced transactions than simply transferring the money. The goal of this paper is to show how these properties of Bitcoin can be used in the area of secure multiparty computation protocols (MPCs). Firstly, we show that the Bitcoin system provides an attractive way to construct a version of âtimed commitmentsâ, where the committer has to reveal his secret within a certain time frame, or to pay a fine. This, in turn, can be used to obtain fairness in some multiparty protocols. Secondly, we introduce a concept of multiparty protocols that work âdirectly on Bitcoinâ. Recall that the standard definition of the MPCs guarantees only that the protocol âemulates the trusted third partyâ. Hence ensuring that the inputs are correct, and the outcome is respected is beyond the scope of the definition. Our observation is that the Bitcoin system can be used to go beyond the standard âemulation-basedâ definition, by constructing protocols that link their inputs and the outputs with the real Bitcoin transactions. As an instantiation of this idea we construct protocols for secure multiparty lotteries using the Bitcoin currency, without relying on a trusted authority (one of these protocols uses the Bitcoin-based timed commitments mentioned above). Our protocols guarantee fairness for the honest parties no matter how the loser behaves. For example: if one party interrupts the protocol then her money is transferred to the honest participants. Our protocols are practical (to demonstrate it we performed their transactions in the actual Bitcoin system), and can be used in real life as a replacement for the online gambling sites. We think that this paradigm can have also other applications. We discuss some of them. Keywordsâbitcoin; multiparty; lottery; I.
ďťżA bona fide currency functions as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account, but bitcoin largely fails to satisfy these criteria. Bitcoin has achieved only scant consumer transaction volume, with an average well below one daily transaction for the few merchants who accept it. Its volatility is greatly higher than the volatilities of widely used currencies, imposing large short-term risk upon users. Bitcoinâs daily exchange rates exhibit virtually zero correlation with widely used currencies and with gold, making bitcoin useless for risk management and exceedingly difficult for its owners to hedge. Bitcoin prices of consumer goods require many decimal places with leading zeros, which is disconcerting to retail market participants. Bitcoin faces daily hacking and theft risks, lacks access to a banking system with deposit insurance, and it is not used to denominate consumer credit or loan contracts. Bitcoin appears to behave more like a speculative investment than a currency.
Arthur Gervais, Ghassan Karame, Vedran Äapkun, SrÄjan Äapkun
Bitcoin has achieved large-scale acceptance and popularity by promising its users a fully \ndecentralized and low-cost virtual currency system. However, recent incidents and observations \nare revealing the true limits of decentralization in the Bitcoin system. In this article, we \nshow that the vital operations and decisions that Bitcoin is currently undertaking are not \ndecentralized. More specifically, we show that a limited set of entities currently control the \nservices, decision making, mining, and the incident resolution processes in Bitcoin. We also \nshow that third-party entities can unilaterally decide to âdevalueâ any specific set of Bitcoin \naddresses pertaining to any entity participating in the system. Finally, we explore possible \navenues to enhance the decentralization in the Bitcoin system.
The Bitcoin digital currency depends for its correctness and stability on a combination of cryptography, distributed algorithms, and incentivedriven behavior. We examine Bitcoin as a consensus game and determine that it relies on separate consensus about the rules and about game state. An important aspect of Bitcoinâs design is the mining mechanism, in which participants expend resources on solving computational puzzles in order to collect rewards. This mechanism purportedly protects Bitcoin against certain technical problems such as inconsistencies in the systemâs distributed log data structure. We consider the economics of Bitcoin mining, and whether the Bitcoin protocol can survive attacks, assuming that participants behave according to their incentives. We show that there is a Nash equilibrium in which all players behave consistently with Bitcoinâs reference implementation, along with infinitely many equilibria in which they behave otherwise. We also show how a motivated adversary might be able to disrupt the Bitcoin system and âcrash â the currency. Finally, we argue that Bitcoin will require the emergence of governance structures, contrary to the commonly held view in the Bitcoin community that the currency is ungovernable. 1
Authentication is a process by which an entity, which could be a person or intended computer, establishes its identity to another entity. In private and public computer networks including the Internet, authentication is commonly done through the use of logon passwords. Knowledge of the password is assumed to guarantee that the user is authentic. Internet business and many other transactions require a more stringent authentication process. The aim of this paper is to propose two authentication schemes based on general non-commutative rings. The key idea of the schemes is that for a given non-commutative ring; one can build polynomials on additive structure and takes them as underlying work structure. By doing so, one can implement authentication schemes, one of them being zero-knowledge interactive proofs of knowledge, on multiplicative structure of the ring. The security of the schemes is based on the intractability of the polynomial symmetrical decomposition problem over the given non-commutative ring.
VĂctor B. Penchaszadeh, Francisco A. Leone, Mario Rovere
The modern health system of Argentina was developed in 1945-1955, a period of economic bonanzacharacterized by industrialization, rapid urbanization and activist labor organizations. During the ensuingyears it evolved in three sectors: public, social security and private, with separate services, populationcoverage and funding. While the national Ministry of Health is nominally responsible for general healthpolicies and regulations, overseeing the general operation of health services, designing preventive medicineprograms and negotiating the coverage and fees of health insurance plans, it has in fact very low leverage toenforce decisions in the provinces, which are autonomous, as well as in the social security and private sectors,which are weakly regulated if at all. While the health workforce, medical facilities and level of spending areacceptable, the fragmentation and segmentation of the system render it highly inequitable and inefficient.During the 1980s and 1990s, the health system has experienced further transformations, as neoliberalpolicies took hold in the country and dictated a reduction of state involvement in social services in favor ofprivatization and decentralization of health care. The result has been increased fragmentation, inequity andinefficacy, as health care is increasingly prey to the economic interests of private corporations (insuranceand pharmaceutical industries), trade union bureaucracies and the medical professional and technologyestablishments. The expectation of popular sectors of society are that progressive polices recently enactedby Congress, and being implemented in the fields of education, retirement pensions and the media, will befollowed with much needed public health policies based on equity and efficiency.
Open access
Public Health in Brazil
Healthcare Policy and Management
Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
Abstract This article elaborates on the understanding of New York's public fiscal position. The choice of counting rules has a dramatic impact on the understanding of the size of government and interpretation of its fiscal health. The decentralized character of New York's public fiscal position derives from impacts of policy practices in four key areas: social welfare, education, public employee pensions, and collective bargaining. Debt is both a useful and respected tool of public finance and a dangerous temptation for elected officials. New York is among the most heavily indebted states in the nation. With respect to Medicaid and public assistance, the City of New York and virtually all counties favor increased state financing. The area with the greatest potential for change is the heavy decentralization of public fiscal matters in New York.