Blockchain Papers

Luis Antonio Loredo Camou

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, have recently become a conversation topic among the general population. This paper will explore the information available in Reddit regarding crypto assets. Unlike other social platforms, Reddit allows analyzing the general population sentiment while conveniently organizing information by topic. We study the benefit of sentiment variables derived from Reddit's crypto forums to forecast volatilities and returns. While volatility forecasts seem to benefit from Reddit sentiment variables consistently, results are not statistically different from a benchmark. In contrast, returns present mixed forecasting results but show statistical differences from the proposed benchmark. We also offer evidence that the Reddit variables gain importance in market-wide and asset-specific events.

Akash Dnyandeo Waghmare, Girish Kumar Patnaik

Nowadays, due to the high usage of social media-based global news, verification and authentication is a very challenging task. Most social media platforms are easily enabled to access news anytime, anywhere over the internet, but it also produces a lot of false news and false information simultaneously. Therefore, in such a case, it is necessary to determine whether available information is genuine, whether it is fake or real. This allows users to make confused and lose the trust of social media. A blockchain-based fake news detection can better handle such problems. The proposed classification algorithm is used to detect fake news in training and testing evolution. Another major objective of this work is to revoke the attackers who update the published news. The blockchain-based decentralized peer-to-peer environment has been used to protect the published data even in a vulnerable environment Various features extraction and selection techniques have been used to generate effective training rules and validate the test classifier accordingly. An extensive experimental analysis demonstrates the classification accuracy of fake news detection on the LIAR dataset. The system achieves 95.20% average accuracy for training as well as testing, which is higher than conventional machine learning algorithms like SVM, ANN, NB etc.

Shehan Edirimannage, Mohamed Nabeel, Charith Elvitigala, Chamath Keppitiyagama

Blacklists are a widely-used Internet security mechanism to protect Internet users from financial scams, malicious web pages and other cyber attacks based on blacklisted URLs. In this demo, we introduce PhishChain, a transparent and decentralized system to blacklisting phishing URLs. At present, public/private domain blacklists, such as PhishTank, CryptoScamDB, and APWG, are maintained by a centralized authority, but operate in a crowd sourcing fashion to create a manually verified blacklist periodically. In addition to being a single point of failure, the blacklisting process utilized by such systems is not transparent. We utilize the blockchain technology to support transparency and decentralization, where no single authority is controlling the blacklist and all operations are recorded in an immutable distributed ledger. Further, we design a page rank based truth discovery algorithm to assign a phishing score to each URL based on crowd sourced assessment of URLs. As an incentive for voluntary participation, we assign skill points to each user based on their participation in URL verification.

Nektarios Aslanidis, Aurelio F. Bariviera, Óscar G. López

This paper revisits the linkage between cryptocurrencies and public disclosed preferences, proxied by online searches. We show that cryptocurrencies are not related to a general uncertainty index as measured by the Google Trends data by Castelnuovo and Tran (2017). Instead, cryptocurrencies are linked to a Google Trends attention measure specific for this market. In particular, we find a bidirectional flow of information between Google Trends attention and cryptocurrency returns up to six days. Moreover, information flows from cryptocurrency volatility to Google Trends attention seem to be larger than those in the other direction. Finally, we report a significant tail dependence between cryptocurrency returns and Google Trends. These relations hold for the five cryptocurrencies analyzed and different compositions of the proposed Google Trends Cryptocurrency index.

Victor Chang, Karl Hall, Qianwen Xu, Le Minh Thao Doan · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

B. Ruby Rich

Say the words out loud: alpha—delta—omicron. Add whatever variant(s) have emerged since this article's deadline. Greek-alphabet letters, recited like a chant, singsong, may sound like a nursery rhyme. "Ring around the Rosie," perhaps: the song about the London plague of 1665, or 1347, or perhaps earlier or later, or somewhere else, its words recorded, they say, in 1881.All fall down indeed. In the world of cinema in early 2022, it was the film festivals that were falling down. Rotterdam was the first to cancel. Then, Palm Springs. Sundance was still holding on, with determined signals of a physical presence along with an expanded online platform, until just two weeks before showtime when omicron exploded and the in-person Utah festival folded: online only it would have to be. The Berlinale moved its market online but confirmed its intention to hold in-person screenings (at press time anyway).Suddenly, the hopeful summer of live festivals (Telluride!) was a distant memory, the anxious autumn (New York!) a faraway treasure, though the Saudis managed to stage a cultural splash, the Red Sea International Festival, in December. Back home, grounded, film curators without live audiences, filmmakers with closed sets, distributors with few outlets, professors with no students in classrooms, grounded scholars without a conference bar, Oscar voters with home screens and laptops—and this editor, with a new digital projector—all sought a route out of despair. Often that was a screening, temporarily acceptable with the aid of vaccination proofs or rapid tests, but more likely it was online, with "content" that algorithms and menus offered. By January, movie theaters were still open, but I knew few people over the age of forty willing to enter them.Into this moment blasted . . . not a comet, but a movie about one (and yes, "comet" shares its first two letters with that other five-letter word dominating all life on earth). Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) is lucky, as "a new-school streaming entity, blessed with optimal COVID-surge timing. Millions who were interested a month ago to see something in a theater now, once again, find themselves back on the couch."1Based on a story McKay developed with journalist David Sirota, it was conceived before but shot during pandemic times, and released just in time for Christmas by Paramount and Netflix. Ah, if only good intentions were everything. This is a movie ostensibly about politics, science, and climate change that comes closer than most to communicating the full horrors of twenty-first century feudalism, corruption, greed, and ignorance (but not, incidentally, climate change) yet is undermined by its splashy multiplex-focused stylistic choices. Even Forbes took notice of the disparity between scientist appreciation and film-critic deprecation.2Any impulse to praise is canceled out by McKay's decision to script the sleazy corrupt president as a woman (Meryl Streep, no less). This colossal misstep throws the entire enterprise into the "ha ha, just kidding" wastebasket. Was it Bernie backer McKay's final revenge against Hillary or a botched attempt to imagine Ivanka there? Either way, to assign the classic misogynist and corrupt traits of Trumpian alpha males to a female character was an insulting misfire.Leonardo DiCaprio is convincing as a nerdy professor happy to sell out for celebrity and glamour (making me curious about the script changes he supposedly demanded). Jennifer Lawrence is spectacular as the whistleblower undone by her own discovery. Rob Morgan, however, is handed the thankless role of NASA's Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, a Black man so divorced from community and selfhood that he is never seen in the company of Black family or friends or partner, and chooses to see the world end cosseted in whiteness in Lansing, Michigan.3Don't Look Up is a film trapped between political ambitions and genre fidelity. McKay just can't help himself: given the choice, he opts for the easy laugh every time. With one exception. Mark Rylance's character, Peter Isherwell, the gazillionaire head of the tech company BASH, is one part Elon Musk, one part Mark Zuckerberg, one part Peter Thiel, with a dash of Jared Kushner thrown in for good measure. This fascist figure is a thoroughly chilling embodiment of today's technofuturist overlords and deserves to be reincarnated immediately in a future McKay script aimed squarely at technocrats' control of human lives. Watching the film in the midst of the Elizabeth Holmes trial (again, with a woman standing in for the unprosecuted but equally corrupt male royalty of Silicon Valley) lent it extra frisson.A CNN headline interrupted: "The COVID-19 Case Surge Is Altering Daily Life across the US. Things Will Likely Get Worse, Experts Warn." I was still trying to write this editorial. Back home in California, climate change continued to gain momentum. "Many Stinson Beach Homes Could Be Flooded amid Rising Seas within a Decade. Would Building Dunes Save Them?" read another headline.4 Dan Fruchtman, the owner of an A-frame on the beach, was quoted as saying, "The Earth is so fragile. It's a shame what we've done to it." McKay, though, never really addresses climate change; instead, his film is lodged squarely in the "disaster movie" genre of The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972) or the sci-fi hybrid Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981), with its villains updated and the whole world implicated.The theme of an uninhabitable earth, though, summons memories of another film: Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer (2013), about a world rendered uninhabitable by a botched climate experiment, leaving the remains of humanity to circle the globe in a perpetual-motion train divided by class. Based in part on the graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982), by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer was reborn as an ongoing episodic series (TNT, 2020–). I first saw the film in New York City at a private screening organized by Tilda Swinton. She was trying to drum up support for Bong Joon Ho's vision as the film was being held hostage by its distributor, the Weinstein Company, where Harvey was demanding cuts. Ah, history.It's worth remembering that in the movie theaters of yesteryear there was once Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), a chilling parable of infertility and global collapse—set, alarmingly, in 2027, now just five years away. And playing right now on a streaming platform near you is Station Eleven, the phenomenal new series based on Emily St. John Mandel's eponymous book that eerily imagined a world wiped out by a viral epidemic, its feral survivors roaming the earth years later. Yes, it could be a moment for dystopian viewing—for a public with a strong stomach and steady nerves. Soylent Green, anyone?In December 2021, Film Quarterly presented a webinar saluting the Pacific Film Archive on its fiftieth anniversary; it turned at one point to the question of in-person screenings for nontheatrical as well as first-run, after a year of streaming platforms custom-built for this sector. MoMA's Rajendra Roy reported on the museum's reopening of its theaters, acknowledging his surprise that the audience was substantially younger.5 He observed that older patrons were more reluctant to return to the risk of in-person gatherings. I wonder, too, whether younger cineastes have become more motivated to engage in communal activity—in classic establishment locations, no less—than they had been in prepandemic times. And if that summer/fall exuberance would survive omicron winter.Traditional distributors—that is, those without wholly owned production/streaming monopolies—greeted the new year with a seemingly contrarian decision.6 They decided to turn the clock back and restore the theatrical window (forty-five days, most often) and permit hopefully lucrative ticket sales to run their course in advance of online availability.7 Wonder how that will go. The studios' calculation was perhaps a reactive move following Scarlett Johansson's widely reported courtroom success (reportedly a $40 million settlement) after she sued Disney for releasing Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021) online on Disney+ on the same date it opened in theaters. And notice that it was the star who sued, not the director; presumably, it was her lucrative contract tied to theatrical revenues that was shredded by the day-and-date move. The studio calculations will undoubtedly shape-shift again over the course of 2022.As platforms evolve, it's always important to remember that the classic ones are still in existence and bear scrutiny. Public television, for instance. Way back in March 2021, the very month that lockdown started, fifteen filmmaker members of the Beyond Inclusion collective together with more than one hundred thirty cosignatories, including Stanley Nelson, Laura Poitras, Yance Ford, and other prominent figures from across the documentary field, sent an open letter to PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) demanding diversity.8 The letter in particular called out the system's cozy funding relationship with Ken Burns, to whom PBS has funneled substantial sums of money (for more than two hundred hours of PBS programming over forty years) far beyond anything that has been awarded to projects by filmmakers of color, long consigned to far more modest levels of support.9 PBS defended Ken Burns, and Ken Burns defended PBS, and they all agreed they could do better.Not so simple, PBS! Data, please! Filmmaker Grace Lee, one of the Beyond Inclusion signatories, teamed up with reporter-filmmaker Akintunde Ahmad to launch a podcast with a purpose: Viewers Like Us, its title a riff on public television's own motto.10 In seven episodes that ran from September to the end of December 2021, with Lee as executive producer along with co–executive producers Ken Ikeda of the Association of Independents in Radio and Joaquin Alvarado of Studiotobe, the podcast offered up testimonies from a range of social actors with a stake in public television's future and a commitment to the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion.11 Their podcast question hung in the air, unanswered: "Why is PBS so white and how exactly did it designate Ken Burns as America's Storyteller?"12Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Paris, where this text was written, cinemas were still open. They flourished all through fall and early winter 2021, their marquees and posters providing a welcome sense of normalcy; with omicron rates rising by the day, though, it was becoming harder to see how that could continue. Posh screening invitations continued to pile up, restaurant reservations were still being made, but a dampening of spirits was undeniable, even out in the streets, as I tested the crowds like an anxious flâneuse who is out of practice.As cinema events began to feel risky, and with more in-person cancellations being announced, I found myself drawn instead to the presence of films in other spaces: exhibited in museums, installed in galleries, with lots of air and space, high ceilings, and (hopefully) less dense crowds. Major shows beckoned with their alternative modes of viewing and public display.13First up was the promising Enfin le cinéma! Arts, images et spectacles en France (1833–1907) (Cinema at last! Arts, pictures, and shows in France [1833–1907]) at the Musée d'Orsay, organized in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), France's National Center for Cinema and Moving Images (CNC), Gaumont, and Pathé, and curated by Dominique Païni, former Pompidou director and former head of the Cinémathèque française (who reportedly oversaw its move to the dismal Frank Gehry building in Bercy on his watch). With gallery after gallery in the immense Orsay filled with paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the didactic exhibition sought to retrace the origins of cinema and the mutuality of influence between painting, photography, and cinema. Infuriatingly, however, the fascination was entirely with the precinematic materials; the many screens hung throughout the galleries, stamped in the corner with the telltale "L" for Lumière, were left not only uncontextualized but entirely unidentified and bereft of texts.The public, absent any curatorial assistance, was presumably expected to make its own leap of imagination to link the images on the walls to those on the screens, or else to buy the giant catalogue when exiting through the gift shop to figure out the details ex post facto. True, anyone patient enough to stand in front of any one screen long enough for the digital loop to come full circle (not that long, of course, with those early Lumières) would be rewarded when finally the title appeared and a date flashed by, but that was it: no context, no history, no linkages to the images surrounding the screens. I was dismayed that an exhibition ostensibly dedicated to uncovering cinema's beginnings would turn the medium itself into mere decoration.Off, then, to the newly reopened Musée Carnavalet, dedicated to the history of the city of Paris, where a new exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Marcel Proust was under way. It was a natural location: the Carnavalet had long been a pilgrimage site for Proustians because of its gallery containing the furnishings of his actual bedroom, complete with the (posthumously revealed as gay) author's actual bed. Now, like Orsay's, its exhibition sought to re-create yesteryear—here, the times of Proust (1871–1922) by definition also a fabled era of Paris.Where the Orsay texts were promulgating a philosophy of visual influences, Carnavalet was content to offer up artifacts and facts, photographs and maps, filling in the one extraordinary life. For cinephiles, Proust is a sort of origin text, his writing having inspired Volker Schlöndorff's Un amour de Swann (Swann in Love, 1984), Raúl Ruiz's Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained, 1999), and Chantal Akerman's La captive (The Captive, 2000).14 Madeleines, indeed. And, freed of any purity impulses, the exhibition included archival footage, again on hanging screens, along with monitors that intrigued with period interviews, such as one of Jean Cocteau talking about Proust, clips from films, and a wealth of information and reflection. I was happier, and just as edified.Ten blocks away, the Marian Goodman Gallery was completely given over to installations by Chantal Akerman. The multiple-screen From the Other Side—an epic installation adapted from her film De l'autre côté (From the Other Side, 2002), her look at the Mexican border and the harsh life of migrants, filmed two decades before their lives and crossings got significantly worse—filled two rooms with monitors, then extended into another room with a single and singular projection: A Voice in the Desert, an excerpt which Akerman had refilmed during the shoot in a desert projection. Upstairs, more modestly in terms of scope, Je, tu, il, elle, l'installation (2007) presented a three-screen redeployment of her film made more than thirty years earlier, when she was in her early twenties, Je tu il elle (1974). With its three sequential chapters now lined up simultaneously, the impossible innocence and youth of the young Chantal filled the screen.Free of the didacticism and explanations of the two museums, the visitor here could wander, immersed in the multiplicity of images and shifts of scale, like a flâneuse in the gallery space itself. Later in January, there was a conference on Akerman: "The Affective Interiors of Chantal Akerman: Aesthetic Passages - Films and Installations," organized by the Cinema and Audiovisual Studies Research Institute (IRCAV, at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3). Just over six years since Akerman's death, her work is more alive than ever.At press time, a wonderful volume arrived in the post. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's delirious fever dream of a film, Memoria (2021), starring Tilda Swinton, has been commemorated with a gorgeous art book of the same name, edited by Giovanni Machini Camia and Annabel Brady-Brown, published by Berlin's Fireflies Press. A compendium of photographs and documents related to the film's production, from early sketchbooks and notes to the shooting script and an interview with Swinton, its editors describe it as "a work of curation." I would call it an archive. A remarkable record of Weerasethakul's working methods over the two years of the film's development and through its production, it reveals (among hundreds of other details) that Swinton's character Jessica, a woman adrift in Bogotá and the was conceived as a character out of Jacques I With A to the year the of the to an Film Quarterly sought to at a December The of the month of year and first of this one the and words have this time, a of to and the one of all for Jean knew in New York City in the when she was out and on the and and she up all the of the that never one to in the corner and And she to engage with film, a at the and the films of the moment in a New York where cinema and where the new young cinema was to life. was else like there never will the of filmmaker a and of the of through the of cultural his of to an of vision and conceived in conjunction with its own shows how on a collective that and with the establishment of the even at in the work and at her own to that are by into the a he the of film history to their and earlier in of a to the of even a the of today's he instead a for the through of It's and The a of and of for a of the of influence and the into to bear on the over the years to the of his films with the political history of itself. The era of La that is always as the of but it out that has never been all that far away. the into the and that has open to a space for the of the the of the two with filmmakers at very of their one in the and one in as they on their early the anniversary of the film Is (1982), a with the from to he to not only the of for an but also a of the of itself. It was there that the young filmmaker at the as his students for the he was is drawn into memories long a time for an early cinema and a city still full of from Paris, as a on the of the film director in the for (2006), her of the Lawrence but with films to her before and up the for a sort of an online platform that she to With she her her at the film La and the it her early with the and her into the episodic world with Le to of as to films and filmmakers in at a time of in film and at the of against and the of to that run to With he that move beyond to the of the out and to call for the of a more for in 2021) a from to it a moment in documentary that more of its audience than and . . . more of than just their that such as de and for beyond as a documentary up from a film and new to the of the and the history of in a range of from to to she the of genre and the of And that may well have made a in the first the with about his new around the In the that of global and the of and that its around the not on screens but in physical the movie as to communicating not incidentally, book with a by on and for up a of edited that a new era in cinema The Cinema and the of Cinema and and A to Cinema The that are for their of David and David the and in Film up The of and with and also a book of with this look at in this same though, that she be far away.

Rishi Raj Singh, Manish Thakral, Sunil Kaushik, Ayur Jain · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Authors unavailable

Gartner's Technology Hype Cycle has Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) at the peak of the hype cycle in 2021 while not even having appeared on the hype cycle in 2020. This exploratory study looks at the spread of the hype from a social media context by examining all tweets related to #NFT. We find evidence that the communities are highly dynamic in nature which is indicative of a decentralized social movement with no strong leaders. Sentiment regarding NFTs was strongly positive across all communities with no indication of any growing negative sentiment. The community expanded at exponential rates throughout the period of study with the communities becoming more interlinked and sharing more content over time. This analysis provides a foundation on which future NFT studies, or alternative emergent technology studies could build upon.

Akanksha Upadhyay, Gaurav Baranwal

No abstract is available for this record.

Abdul Razaque, Bandar Alotaibi, Munif Alotaibi, Fathi Amsaad · 8 authors

When people use social networks, they often fall prey to a clickbait scam. The scammer attempts to create a striking headline that attracts the majority of users and attaches a link. The user follows the link and can be redirected to a fraudulent resource where the user easily loses personal data. To solve this problem, a Blockchain-enabled deep recurrent neural network (BDRNN) is proposed to detect the nature safe and malicious clickbait from the contents. The proposed BDRNN consists of three phases: analysis of clickbait and source rating, clickbait search process and multi-layered clickbait detection. The analysis of clickbait and source rating phase helps to analyze different sources to detect the clickbait and also rating the content-sources. To achieve the clickbait analysis and source rating, the detection of blocklisted/allowlisted source and source rating check algorithms are introduced. The clickbait search process is accomplished by incorporating the binary search features for a faster and more efficient search process for malicious content-detection. The multi-layered clickbait detection is main phase of the proposed BDRNN that consists of three models: content-to-vector model (layer-1), deep neural network model(layer-2), and Blockchain-enabled malicious content detection model (layer-3). These models collectively detect the malicious and safe clickbait from the contents. The extensive experiments are conducted to determine the effectiveness of the proposed BDRNN model and compared with the existing state-of-the-art neural network models designed for clickbait detection, and the result demonstrates that the proposed BDRNN model outperforms the counterparts from the, accuracy, link detection, memory usage, analogous perspectives, and attacker’s successful content capturing rate.

Imran Ush Shahid, Md.Tanbir Anjum, Md.Shafayet Hossain Miah Shohan, Rahanuma Tasnim · 5 authors

Now a days, people spend most of their times in social media. Due to availability of news and also for the free scope of sharing, most of the time rumors are being extensive in a short period of time. Detecting and preventing rumors and false information remains a significant challenge for social network. The introduction of blockchain technology has paved the way for the development of decentralized apps in order to address this issue. In this technology any information is recorded permanently. We will explore a strategy to eliminate bogus news on social media by utilizing the benefits of peer-to-peer network ideas. By issuing non-fungible token content rating we can detect and ensure appropriate news. The findings revealed that the suggested technique has a satisfactory performance and efficiency in recognizing rumors and preventing their spread.

Tan Hui Yang Zen, Chin Bing Hong, P. Mohan, Vivek Balachandran

The propagation of misinformation has become prevalent in recent years and is one of the predominant factors for social media myths and conspiracy theories. This paper proposes and develops a solution to detect fake news and hence control misinformation broadcasting in social media. Existing solutions for detecting fake news involve either using Machine learning/AI or employing a crowdsourcing-based fact-checker to evaluate the reliability of the information. In our proposed solution - ABC-verify - we designed and developed an integrated framework combining both AI and a Proof-of-stake (PoS) smart contract algorithm for crowdsourcing to achieve better accuracy than AI-only or pure crowdsourcing. The advantage of the proposed solution is two-fold. Firstly, the AI model can continuously learn from the output of the smart contract algorithm. Secondly, the validated news that is added to the blockchain is immutable. The validators from the public Ethereum blockchain stake ERC721 tokens in exchange for a reward if the information reliability were accurate. The prediction from the AI classification model is based on a pre-trained BERT model on a dataset of 10,000 labelled Twitter datasets. The AI classification model proxies as one of the validators in the PoS algorithm. The final verdict from the smart contract is then fed back into the training dataset to improve the AI classification model and achieve better overall accuracy of 93%. Unlike traditional crowdsourcing platforms, news stored within the blockchain is immutable. Furthermore, the Ethereum blockchain is transparent, and every transaction is recorded within the blockchain, hence enabling authenticity and trust between peer-to-peer transactions.

Pronaya Bhattacharya, Shivani Bharatbhai Patel, Rajesh Gupta, Sudeep Tanwar · 5 authors

This article proposes a SaTya scheme that leverages a blockchain (BC)-based deep learning (DL)-assisted classifier model that forms a trusted chronology in fake news classification. The news collected from newspapers, social handles, and e-mails are web-scrapped, prepossessed, and sent to a proposed Q-global vector for word representations (Q-GloVe) model that captures the fine-grained linguistic semantics in the data. Based on the Q-GloVe output, the data are trained through a proposed bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) model, and the news is classified as real-or-fake news. This reduces the vanishing gradient problem, which optimizes the weights of the model and reduces bias. Once the news is classified, it is stored as a transaction, and the news stakeholders can execute smart contracts (SCs) and trace the news origin. However, only verified trusted news sources are added to the BC network, ensuring credibility in the system. For security evaluation, we propose the associated cost of the Bi-LSTM classifier and propose vulnerability analysis through the smart check tool for potential vulnerabilities. The scheme is compared against discourse-structure analysis, linguistic natural language framework, and entity-based recognition for different performance metrics. The scheme achieves an accuracy of 99.55% compared to 93.62% against discourse structure analysis. Also, it shows an average improvement of 18.76% against other approaches, which indicates its viability against fake-classifier-based models.

Haibin Zheng, Minying Ma, Haonan Ma, Jinyin Chen · 6 authors

Recently, phishing scams have posed a significant threat to blockchains. Phishing detectors direct their efforts in hunting phishing addresses. Most of the detectors extract target addresses’ transaction behavior features by random walking or constructing static subgraphs. The random walking methods, unfortunately, usually miss structural information due to limited sampling sequence length, while the static subgraph methods tend to ignore temporal features lying in the evolving transaction behaviors. More importantly, their performance undergoes severe degradation when the malicious users intentionally hide phishing behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose TEGDetector, a dynamic graph classifier that learns the evolving behavior features from transaction evolution graphs (TEGs). First, we cast the transaction series into multiple time slices, capturing the target address’s transaction behaviors in different periods. Then, we provide a fast nonparametric phishing detector (FD) to narrow down the search space of suspicious addresses. Finally, TEGDetector considers both the spatial and temporal evolutions toward a complete characterization of the evolving transaction behaviors. Moreover, TEGDetector utilizes adaptively learned time coefficient to pay distinct attention to different periods, which provides several novel insights. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Ethereum transaction dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection performance. The code of TEGDetector is open sourced at https://github.com/Seaocn/TEGDetector.

Subhasis Thakur, John G. Breslin

Social bots can cause social, political, and economical disruptions by spreading rumours. The state-of-the-art methods to prevent social bots from spreading rumours are centralised and such solutions may not be accepted by users who may not trust a centralised solution being biased. In this paper, we developed a decentralised method to prevent social bots. In this solution, the users of a social network create a secure and privacy-preserving decentralised social network and may accept social media content if it is sent by its neighbour in the decentralised social network. As users only choose their trustworthy neighbours from the social network to be part of its neighbourhood in the decentralised social network, it prevents the social bots to influence a user to accept and share a rumour. We prove that the proposed solution can significantly reduce the number of users who are share rumour.

Bhaskara S. Egala, Ashok Kumar Pradhan, Venkataramana Badarla, Saraju P. Mohanty

The recent COVID-19 outbreak highlighted the requirement for a more sophisticated healthcare system and real-time data analytics in the pandemic mitigation process. Moreover, real-time data plays a crucial role in the detection and alerting process. Combining smart healthcare systems with accurate real-time information about medical service availability, vaccination, and how the pandemic is spreading can directly affect the quality of life and economy. The existing architecture models are become inadequate in handling the pandemic mitigation process using real-time data. The present models are server-centric and controlled by a single party, where the management of confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of data is doubtful. Therefore, a decentralised user-centric model is necessary, where the CIA of user data is assured. In this paper, we have suggested a decentralized blockchain-based pandemic detection and assistance system (iBlock). The iBlock uses robust technologies like hybrid computing and IPFS to support system functionality. A pseudo-anonymous personal identity is introduced using H-PCS and cryptography for anonymous data sharing. The distributed data management module guarantees data CIA, security, and privacy using cryptography mechanisms. Furthermore, it delivers useful intelligent information in the form of suggestions and alerts to assist the users. Finally, the iBlock reduces stress on healthcare infrastructure and workers by providing accurate predictions and early warnings using AI/ML.

Jonas Hedman, Tanya Beaulieu, Michael Karlström

Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency, has not only given rise to a wave of digital innovations but also stirred up considerable controversy. Some have hailed it as the most significant innovation since the Internet, while others have dismissed it as a Ponzi scheme that should be abandoned and forbidden. Regardless of these varying views, this is an innovation in need of scrutiny. In this paper we present a metastory of Bitcoin, based on an interpretative study of 737 news articles between 2011–2019. Through our analysis, we identified five narratives, including The Dark Side, The Bright Side, The Tulip Mania, The Idea, and The Normality. Our analysis demonstrates the interpretive flexibility of technology as influenced by ideologies, and we construct a theoretical model demonstrating media’s role as constructor and conduit. The metastory provides an institutional look at the broader interpretations of digital innovations as well as the multifaceted nature of digital innovations and how their interpretation evolve over time.

Riri Fitri Sari, Asri Samsiar Ilmananda, Daniela M. Romano

In the current digital era, information exchanges can be done easily through the Internet and social media. However, the actual truth of the news on social media platforms is hard to prove, and social media platforms are susceptible to the spreading of hoaxes. As a remedy, Blockchain technology can be used to ensure the reliability of shared information and can create a trusted communications environment. In this study, we propose a social media news spreading model by adapting an epidemic methodology and a scale-free network. A Blockchain-based news verification system is implemented to identify the credibility of the news and its sources. The effectiveness of the model is investigated by utilizing agent-based modelling using NetLogo software. In the simulations, fake news with a truth level of 20% are assigned a low News Credibility Indicator (NCI ± -0.637) value for all of the different network dimensions. Moreover, the Producer Reputation Credit is also decreased (PRC ± 0.213) so that the trust factor value is reduced. Our epidemic approach for news verification has also been implemented using Ethereum Smart Contract and several tools such as React with Solidity, IPFS, Web3.js, and Metamask. By showing the measurements of the credibility indicator and reputation credit to the user during the news dissemination process, this proposed smart contract can effectively limit user behaviour in spreading fake news and improve the content quality on social media.

Michael Cary

Recent research in cryptocurrencies has considered the effects of the behavior of individuals on the price of cryptocurrencies through actions such as social media usage. However, some celebrities have gone as far as affixing their celebrity to a specific cryptocurrency, becoming a crypto-tastemaker. One such example occurred in April 2021 when Elon Musk claimed via Twitter that “SpaceX is going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon”. He later called himself the “Dogefather” as he announced that he would be hosting Saturday Night Live (SNL) on 8 May 2021. By performing sentiment analysis on relevant tweets during the time he was hosting SNL, evidence is found that negative perceptions of Musk’s performance led to a decline in the price of Dogecoin, which dropped 23.4% during the time Musk was on air. This shows that cryptocurrencies are affected in real time by the behaviors of crypto-tastemakers.

Akash Dnyandeo Waghmare, Girish Kumar Patnaik

Social media news are most important in today's worlds, it puts positive or negative influence on social views. There is a wide propagation of fake news on social media so it will be difficult to believe on the news. Fake news has negative impacts on individuals as well as on society. Information spreads rapidly over the social media and so there is a need of mechanism which detects and stops the spreading of fake news. Therefore, detection of fake news is the need of time and also a challenging problem. The goal of this proposed research work is to detect fake news and minimize spreading of the fake news. In the proposed research a machine learning approach is used for detection of fake news with blockchain framework. In first section a supervised machine learning techniques is design to identify the trustiness of specific news while blockchain framework revoke the malicious activity of spreading fake news. A blockchain environment is created with mining, smart contract as well as Proof of Work (PoW) of consensus. The current systematic review broadly focuses on the various methods to detect fake news in social media. After partial implementation of system, performance evaluation has done with traditional blockchain framework. It is found that 10% less time for transaction verification by consensus in P2P environment over the existing systems.

Mary C. Lacity

This teaching case explores the advantages and disadvantages of battling fake news with advanced information technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchains. Students will explore the purposes of, proliferation of, susceptibility to, and consequences of fake news and assess the efficacy of new interventions that rely on emerging technologies. Key questions students will explore: How can we properly balance freedom of speech and the prevention of fake news? What ethical guidelines should be applied to the use of AI and blockchains to ensure they do more good than harm? Will technology be enough to stop fake news?

Rickard Grassman, Vanessa Bracamonte, Matthew J. Davis, Maki Sato

In this paper, we explore how cryptocurrencies have been received in Sweden and Japan, and what specific attitudes and discourses may reveal about the ethical implications surrounding this new technology. By way of topic modelling prevalent discourses on social media among users of cryptocurrencies, and teasing out the more culturally situated significance in such interactions through discourse analysis, our aim is to unpack the way certain tropes and traces around the notion of autonomy may provide a fruitful lens through which we may discern how this technology has been received in each respective country. The ultimate aim of the paper is to shed light on the attitudes that inform the way this technology is perceived and the cultural and ideological nuances that this brings to the fore, as well as how this culturally nuanced view may help us better discern the potential advantages and ethical challenges associated with this new technology.

Yuetong Chen, Fengming Liu

In the face of increasingly complex social public opinion situations, the traditional network public opinion governance models have increasingly prominent issues such as information transmission efficiency and information security. In order to establish a new model of fair, credible, and community co-management of network public opinion governance, this article uses blockchain as a key technology for collaborative governance of network public opinion. In order to meet the requirements of network governance, the Delegated Proof-of-Stake(DPoS) algorithm is improved to solve problems. After proposing a reputation model that considers time dynamic factors, this paper constructs a reputation-based voting mechanism and rewards and punishments incentive mechanism, and also designs a new method of counting votes. From the experiment results, it was found that the node participation has increased significantly, the proportion of error nodes was obviously reduced, and the operating efficiency was improved. It shows that the improved consensus algorithm can not only improve the security of the system, reduce the possibility of false public opinion spreading, but also improve the efficiency of information processing, so it can be well applied to information sharing and public opinion governance scenarios.

Tee Wee Jing, Raja Kumar Murugesan

No abstract is available for this record.