Objective: creating the corporate governance structure and legal regulation mechanism of blockchain protocols.Methods: dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena, allowing to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the totality of objective and subjective factors, which predetermined the following research methods: formal-logical, comparative-legal, and sociological.Results: Blockchain technology was born out of a Cypherpunk vision for regulation without sacrificing privacy. This vision feeds a call by some in the blockchain technology ecosystem to view computer code as the only law applicable to blockchain protocols, transactions conducted on the protocols, and DAOs. The code of certain protocols, such as the Bitcoin blockchain and Ethereum, currently embody their Cypherpunk cultural origins, placing a premium on privacy and governance mechanisms that preserve privacy. But that code can change. In fact, laws enacted and enforced by governments may act as the stimuli for such change. Indeed, such stimuli, for better or worse, are already in play, with coders ceasing work for fear of legal repercussions. Adopting a contract-based governance system in which the rules and expectations are clearly defined empowers blockchain protocol communities to preserve as much of their cultures and visions as possible. Adopting these contracts also requires blockchain communities to engage in open, active, and thoughtful conversation about their collective culture and vision. Further, basing blockchain governance structures in contracts that loosely resemble corporate governance structures allows such communities to tap into centuries of scholarship and experimentation in a functionally equivalent governance arena. Scientific novelty: the work proves that the biggest cultural impact of (un)corporate crypto-governance may be on the culture of traditional corporations. Indeed, one significant lesson of a corporate governance model for off-chain governance may be a sharpened recognition that “code as law” is a subsystem of regulatory norms within the greater legal system. Viewed through systems analysis, the result is a two-way recognition of the interconnected roles of code and law in limiting behavior within the blockchain ecosystem. In other words, the code informs the law and its application to a blockchain ecosystem. Meanwhile, law informs behavior and activities undertaken through the code. The result is that the intersection of code and law can impact our understanding of how to apply the law in more traditional scenarios as well.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical and law enforcement activities when considering issues related to (un)corporate crypto-governance.
블록체인 환경에서 트릴레마 문제로 불리는 분산성•보안성•확장성을 동시에 만족시키는 것은 어려운 문제이다. 블록체인들은 트릴레마 문제를 위해 많은 합의 알고리즘를 제안한다. 보안성이 높은 작업증명(Proof-of-Work)은 ASIC 채굴기의 등장으로 분산성이 훼손되었다. 몇몇 블록체인은 ASIC 저항 알고리즘을 개발하였다. 우리는 ASIC 채굴기의 등장을 억제하기 위하여 LDPC 디코더와 해시 함수를 결합한 오류-정정 부호 기반의 작업증명(Error-Correction Codes Proof-of-Work, ECCPoW)를 제안하였다. 그리고 ECCPoW를 구현하는 방법을 제안하였다. 이 논문은 ECCPoW의 코어 1.0 버전에 대하여 설명하고 이더리움 환경에 적용하는 방법을 제안한다. 그리고 우리는 ECCPoW가 적용된 이더리움과 기존의 이더리움(Ethash)의 확장성을 평가한다.
Cho Nwe Zin Latt, Sandi Rahmadika, Kyung-Hyune Rhee
The Myanmar rice cycle’s existing system is still relying on a third party to manage every rice data information from several organizations. It is inconvenient to supervise simultaneously due to the unreliability of information provided by organizations. Thus, the rice cycle’s original data is challenging to be utterly trusted since irresponsible parties can manipulate the current state of information. Moreover, the applied system does not preserve a proper incentive for the involved parties. In this paper, we leverage the Ethereum blockchain to be adopted to tackle the aforementioned issues. The main objective is to build trust between parties in the Myanmar rice cycle system. Our proposed scheme allows customers to check and trace information about the rice cycle information without worrying about the integrity of the data. Furthermore, the authorized parties are also rewarded by the government through Ethereum smart contract features. Eventually, our scheme achieves traceability in the rice chain system and leads to the complete digitization and automation of the rice cycle information.
Borcun kaynaklarından biri olan sözleşmelerin temelinde tarafların sözleşme yapmak konusunda iradelerini açıklamaları ve bu iradelerin birbiri ile uyuşması yatar. Sözleşmesel yükümlülüklerin sözleşmelerde düzenlenen şekilde yerine getirilmesi önemlidir. Bu nokta, taraflarının iradelerine tabi olup ve birbirlerine yönelik karşılıklı güvenlerine dayanır. Sözleşmelerin gereği gibi ifası, dayanağı ve kaynağı bakımından hassas, zayıf ve kırılgandır. Zira, taraflar her zaman birbirlerinin iradelerini tam ve doğru şekilde anlayamayabilir. Yine böylesine akitlerde taraflar, aradan geçen zamanın veya değişen şartların etkisiyle yahut ortada bunun için zorlayıcı bir sebep yokken bile sözleşmeye yansıyan iradesine konu taahhüdünü tam veya zamanında yerine getirmekten kaçınabilir. Güven esasına dayanan sözleşmelerin ifası itimat asimetrisi riskine ve taraf iradesinin zaaflarına tabidir. Teknoloji, güven ve sözleşmelerin ifa edilmesine dair bu risklerin giderilmesine çözüm getirebilir mi? İşte bu soru, Bitcoin ile ortaya çıkan Blokzincir teknolojisini pek çok yönden daha ileri taşıyan Ethereum ile birlikte daha fazla tartışılır, merak edilir hale gelmiştir. Ethereum ile beraber tekrar hatırlanan ve Blokzincir teknolojisi ile yeniden yorumlanan akıllı sözleşme kavramı mezkur sözleşmenin, taraflarının karşılıklı, subjektif güvenine mahkum edilmeden, kendi kendini ifa edebilmesinin yeniden tartışılmasına ve heyecanla karşılanmasına yol açmıştır. Bu makalede, Ethereum üzerinde geliştirilebilen ve uygulanabilen akıllı sözleşmelerin ne anlama geldiği, kendi kendini nasıl ifa edebildiği, gelecekteki teknoloji ve hukuk işbirliğine dair hangi etkileşimleri yarattığı ve bunların hukuki sonuçlarına incelenmektedir.
Rahul Pitale, Kapil Tajane, S. S. Khandagale, Vidhya Gadewar · 6 authors
The increase in fake goods is severely affecting the industrial sector and consumers. According to the survey, incidences involving fake products have increased in recent years, which have had a negative impact on sales, profits, and brand recognition. Far from reducing the ability of a company to make money, this counterfeiting also affects the consumer's ability to trust their goods in open market. Without proper tracking and security measures, consumers gradually stop trusting brands to keep their consumers safe from theft. This is happening because the manufacturing and distribution processes are hidden to consumers and this information is easily manipulated or falsified by others. So, users must have a method to determine if a product is genuine or not. This study proposes a blockchain based anti-counterfeiting system for product traceability throughout the supply chain. By using public or permissionless blockchain all the information throughout the supply chain will be recorded in the blockchain network in the form of blocks that are immutable, transparent, secure, tamper-proof, and trusted. This proposed method uses QR code for making the system further secure.
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely adopted incentive model in current blockchain systems, which unfortunately is energy inefficient. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is then proposed to tackle the energy issue. The rich-get-richer concern of PoS has been heavily debated in the blockchain community. The debate is centered around the argument that whether rich miners possessing more stakes will obtain higher staking rewards and further increase their potential income in the future. In this paper, we define two types of fairness, i.e., expectational fairness and robust fairness, that are useful for answering this question. In particular, expectational fairness illustrates that the expected income of a miner is proportional to her initial investment, indicating that the expected return on investment is a constant. To better capture the uncertainty of mining outcomes, robust fairness is proposed to characterize whether the return on investment concentrates to a constant with high probability as time evolves. Our analysis shows that the classical PoW mechanism can always preserve both types of fairness as long as the mining game runs for a sufficiently long time. Furthermore, we observe that current PoS blockchains implement various incentive models and discuss three representatives, namely ML-PoS, SL-PoS and C-PoS. We find that (i) ML-PoS (e.g., Qtum and Blackcoin) preserves expectational fairness but may not achieve robust fairness, (ii) SL-PoS (e.g., NXT) does not protect any type of fairness, and (iii) C-PoS (e.g., Ethereum 2.0) outperforms ML-PoS in terms of robust fairness while still maintaining expectational fairness. Finally, massive experiments on real blockchain systems and extensive numerical simulations are performed to validate our analysis.
This paper presents the use case of digitizing health certificates of prostitutes. It is shown that a centralized approach lacks trust in privacy by the prostitutes as well as not sufficient actions to ensure the integrity of digital health certificates. To counter these short comings, it is evaluated if a blockchain/distributed ledger technology approach should be considered. Based on this discussion, an evaluation of Ethereum Hyperledger Fabric and IOTA is presented, stating that IOTA matches the use case requirements the best. Therefore, an IOTA based architecture for digital health certificates of prostitutes is presented and discussed.
Blockchain mining is increasingly dominated by a few centralized mining pools [1]. Large pools can censor transactions on the blockchain and can coordinate their efforts to potentially carry out a 51% attack [2]. There have been 2 previous decentralized mining pools P2Pool and SmartPool, but both had unique limitations and are no longer actively mining. PoolParty is a novel decentralized blockchain-agnostic mining pool. By using smart-contracts to validate shares and punish miner misbehavior, as well as employing fines to disincentivize cheating, PoolParty is both secure and has low overhead operating costs. PoolParty can provide 0.05% overhead costs on Ethereum, and 0.003% overhead costs on Ethereum Classic for users with 20% pool hash-power. Finally, PoolParty can be implemented on less expensive smart contract hostable blockchains to improve scalability and overhead.
Mwrwan Abubakar, Zakwan Jaroucheh, Ahmed Al‐Dubai, Xiaodong Liu
The publish and subscribe messaging model has proven itself as a dominant messaging paradigm for IoT systems. An example of such is the commonly used Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. However, the security concerns with this protocol have presented vital security challenges in most IoT applications. For example, the MQTT protocol does not have secure authentication mechanisms implemented and leaves that task to the developer as all the included native security services are fragile. This paper will present a well-thought approach involving a lightweight authentication and authorization scheme together with a decentralized identity system to manage the users' identities. This mechanism helps in facilitating the authentication for both subscribers and publishers by utilizing a smart contract in Ethereum blockchain to guarantee trust, accountability and preserve user privacy. We provided a proof-of-concept implementation to prove our work, which involves a decentralized MQTT platform and dashboard using our approach. The usability of this approach was further analyzed, particularly concerning CPU and memory utilization. Our analysis proved that our approach satisfies IoT applications' requirements since it reduces the consumption of resources and that smart contracts help in the automation of data management processes.
In order to ensure the confidentiality of digital contents, improve the fairness of digital copyright transactions, and reduce the time and management overhead of digital copyright owners, we proposed a blockchain-based digital rights management scheme. First, we designed a new multiauthority ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (MA-CPABE) scheme and showed that the new MA-CPABE has the indistinguishability of plaintext under adaptively chosen plaintext attack (IND-CPA) security and good performance. By combining the MA-CPABE and proxy re-encryption, the rights owner can flexibly sell the copyright to different users with once encryption by an agent who cannot access any information related to digital content when changing the ciphertext access policy as required. By using the smart contract of Ethereum, a fair trade of the decryption keys between the rights owner and rights requester is implemented. In order to further improve fairness, another blockchain is used as a ledge to store information related to digital rights, which greatly reduces the storage overhead in public blockchain. Security analysis shows that our scheme can provide IND-CPA security, resist collusion attacks, and protect the user’s privacy. Performance analysis shows that our scheme can provide a wealth of features to meet the various needs of users. The simulation results show that our scheme is very efficient compared to other schemes.
Unlike conventional cryptocurrencies, Islamic ones are new technologies backed by tangible assets and are characterised by their fundamental values. After the COVID-19 outbreak, cryptocurrency responses have shown different behaviour to stock market reactions. However, there is a lack of studies on the efficiency of Islamic and green cryptocurrencies during the pandemic. This paper attempts to analyse the behaviour of three typical families of cryptocurrencies (conventional, Islamic, and green) extracted according to their availability in daily frequencies during COVID-19. For this purpose, their efficiency levels are studied before and after the outbreak by employing multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA) to make the best predictions and strategies. The inefficiency of the cryptocurrencies is assessed through a magnitude of long-memory (MLM) efficiency index, and the impact of COVID-19 on their efficiency is evaluated. The primary results show that HelloGold was the most efficient market before the COVID-19 outbreak and that subsequently Ethereum has been the most efficient. In addition, the findings reveal that the cryptocurrency reactions are not similar and show more resilience in the Ethereum and Litecoin markets than in other cryptocurrency markets. The main contribution of this study is the evaluation of the impact of COVID-19 on the various classes of crypto money. This work has practical implications, as it provides new insights into trading opportunities and market reactions. Moreover, he work has theoretical implications based on its evaluation of three distinct models from different doctrine viewpoints.
Proof of Stake (PoS) has been talked about extensively as an alternative way of reaching consensus in blockchain systems. However, there are few publications on how PoS can be used to create new blocks in detail. The undisputed lead proponent for PoS is Ethereum. However, virtually all discussions regarding PoS for Ethereum are centered on selecting a block using PoS after one or more candidate blocks have already been somehow created. PeerCoin was the first blockchain system that incorporated PoS in block creation. Unfortunately, there is no known documentation on how PoS works in PeerCoin. In this paper, we fill this gap by presenting a detailed explanation of the PeerCoin PoS algorithm based on PeerCoin source code. We also dispel the misconception that PeerCoin PoS is based on Proof of Work (PoW) and hence would consume a lot of energy just like proof of work (PoW). In fact, it resembles PoW only on surface and differs from PoW substantially in terms of how to meet the difficulty target.
As an innovative type of decentralized model, blockchain is a growing list of blocks linked by cryptography. Blockchain incorporates anonymity protocol, distributed data storage, consensus algorithm, and smart contract. The anonymity protocols in blockchain are significant in that they could protect users from leaking their personal information. In this paper, we will conduct a detailed review and comparison of anonymity protocols used in three famous cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin, Zcash, and Ethereum.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Daniel J. Moroz, David C. Parkes, Mitchell Stern
In recent years, prominent blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have experienced explosive growth in transaction volume, leading to frequent surges in demand for limited block space and causing transaction fees to fluctuate by orders of magnitude. Existing systems sell space using first-price auctions; however, users find it difficult to estimate how much they need to bid in order to get their transactions accepted onto the chain. If they bid too low, their transactions can have long confirmation times. If they bid too high, they pay larger fees than necessary. In light of these issues, new transaction fee mechanisms have been proposed, most notably EIP-1559, aiming to provide better usability. EIP-1559 is a history-dependent mechanism that relies on block utilization to adjust a base fee. We propose an alternative design -- a {\em dynamic posted-price mechanism} -- which uses not only block utilization but also observable bids from past blocks to compute a posted price for subsequent blocks. We show its potential to reduce price volatility by providing examples for which the prices of EIP-1559 are unstable while the prices of the proposed mechanism are stable. More generally, whenever the demand for the blockchain stabilizes, we ask if our mechanism is able to converge to a stable state. Our main result provides sufficient conditions in a probabilistic setting for which the proposed mechanism is approximately welfare optimal and the prices are stable. Our main technical contribution towards establishing stability is an iterative algorithm that, given oracle access to a Lipschitz continuous and strictly concave function $f$, converges to a fixed point of $f$.
Tzung‐Her Chen, Ting-Le Zhu, Fuh-Gwo Jeng, Chien-Lung Wang
Although encryption and signatures have been two fundamental technologies for cryptosystems, they still receive considerable attention in academia due to the focus on reducing computational costs and communication overhead. In the past decade, applying certificateless signcryption schemes to solve the higher cost of maintaining the certificate chain issued by a certificate authority (CA) has been studied. With the recent increase in the interest in blockchains, signcryption is being revisited as a new possibility. The concepts of a blockchain as a CA and a transaction as a certificate proposed in this paper aim to use a blockchain without CAs or a trusted third party (TTP). The proposed provably secure signcryption scheme implements a designated recipient beforehand such that a sender can cryptographically facilitate the interoperation on the blockchain information with the designated recipient. Thus, the proposed scheme benefits from the following advantages: (1) it removes the high maintenance cost from involving CAs or a TTP, (2) it seamlessly integrates with blockchains, and (3) it provides confidential transactions. This paper also presents the theoretical security analysis and assesses the performance via the simulation results. Upon evaluating the operational cost in real currency based on Ethereum, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme only requires a small cost as a fee.
Purpose This paper aims to empirically examine the effect of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on cryptocurrency market returns with particular attention to top five cryptocurrencies and COVID-19 confirmed and death cases. Design/methodology/approach The study applies the linear Toda and Yamamoto and nonlinear Diks and Panchenko Granger causality test to know the causal relationship of cryptocurrencies with COVID-19 pandemic. The study also uses the Narayan and Popp endogenous two structural break tests to capture the break period of the sample. Findings The findings of the study confirm the existence of unidirectional causal relation from COVID-19 confirmed and death cases to cryptocurrency price returns. While examining the break periods, the post-break period result indicates the presence of unidirectional linear causality from COVID-19 confirmed cases to Bitcoin and Ethereum price returns. This shows that prior knowledge of COVID-19 pandemic growth helps to predict the return of cryptocurrencies. Originality/value The study suggests the investors or crypto lovers to observe the growth of COVID-19 situations during their investment in cryptocurrency markets.
Abstrak
Virus COVID-19 menjadi wabah yang melanda dunia. Penyebaran virus yang sangat cepat membuat
seluruh sektor perdagangan terkena dampak. Seluruh lini perekonomian merasakan dampak dengan adanya
pandemi COVID-19. Pelaku pasar perlu menanggapi bagaimana investasi saat terjadi pandemi yang melanda
dunia. Seiring perkembangan zaman muncul berbagai alternatif investasi lainnya seperti Cryptocurrency. Negara
Indonesia sendiri telah menetapkan jual beli aset kripto ini disamakan dengan komoditas yang diperdagangkan di
Bursa Berjangka pada tanggal 8 April 2019. Maka, peneliti ingin melihat perbedaan tingkat abnormal return pada
pasar berjangka dan pasar modal karena adanya masa pandemi COVID-19 di Indonesia.
Tujuan Penelitian ini yaitu mengetahui bagaimana bagaimana abnormal return pada portofolio di pasar
berjangka (Bitcoin, Ether,Emas) dan portofolio di pasar saham (Indeks LQ45) selama masa pandemi COVID-19
di Indonesia serta mengetahui apakah terdapat perbedaan antara abnormal return LQ45 dan portofolio di bursa
berjangka (Bitcoin, Ether,Emas) selama periode pandemic COVID-19.Dengan menggunakan data Time series
berupa data harian selama tujuh puluh sembilan hari dimulai dari bulan Maret 2020 hingga Juni 2020. Kemudian,
untuk menjawab pertanyaan penelitian menggunakan uji asumsi klasik dan uji beda t. Hasil penelitian
menunjukkan bahwa tidak terdapat perbedaan abnormal return pada portofolio komoditas berjangka dan portofolio
saham Indeks LQ45 selama periode pandemi COVID-19 2 Maret 2020 sampai dengan 30 Juni 2020. Dengan
portofolio komoditas berjangka menunjukkan nilai rata- rata abnormal return positif dan portofolio Indeks LQ45
menunjukkan nilai rata- rata abnormal return negatif terhadap aktivitas perdagangan berdasarkan abnormal return
selama masa pandemi COVID-19.
Kata kunci: Abnormal return, Bitcoin, Ethereum, indeks LQ45.
Abstract
The COVID-19 virus has become an epidemic that hit the world. The rapid spread of the virus has affected
the entire trade sector. All the lines of economy are feeling the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Market
participants need respond how to invest when a pandemic hits the world. Along with the times, various other
investment alternatives such as Cryptocurrency have emerged. The Indonesian state itself has determined that the
sale and purchase of crypto assets is equated with commodities traded on the Futures Exchange on April 8, 2019.
So, researchers want to see the difference in abnormal returns on the futures market and the capital market due
to the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia.
This research was done to find out how abnormal returns are on portfolios in the futures market (Bitcoin,
Ether, Gold) and portfolios on the stock market (LQ45 index) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia and
also find out if there is a difference between abnormal return of LQ45 and portfolios on futures exchanges (Bitcoin,
Ether, Gold) during the COVID-19 pandemic period. By using Time series data in the form of the daily data for
eighty days starting from March 2020 to June 2020. Then, to answer research questions using the classical
assumption test and t-difference test. The results showed that there was no difference abnormal returns on
commodity futures portfolios and LQ45 Index stock portfolios during the COVID-19 pandemic period March 2,
2020 to June 30, 2020. With commodity futures portfolios showing the average positive abnormal return value
and the LQ45 Index portfolio shows the average negative abnormal return value to trading activities based on the
abnormal return during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keywords: Abnormal return, Bitcoin, Ethereum, indeks LQ45.
This study aims that Bitcoin prices are considered as dependent variables, and the total number of Coronavirus cases in the world, Ethereum Prices, Gold Prices, Coronavirus Google Trend Index, and Crypto Money Google Trend Index are considered as independent variables. Using the ARDL model, it was analyzed with a daily data set between 21.01.2020 - 04.04.2020. It is concluded that the relationship between the variables included in the analysis and Bitcoin prices exists co-integrated in the long term. Within the framework of the findings, investors' fears were interpreted by associating them with Bitcoin and Covid-19.
O. Lutz, Huili Chen, Hossein Fereidooni, Christoph Sendner · 7 authors
Ethereum smart contracts are automated decentralized applications on the blockchain that describe the terms of the agreement between buyers and sellers, reducing the need for trusted intermediaries and arbitration. However, the deployment of smart contracts introduces new attack vectors into the cryptocurrency systems. In particular, programming flaws in smart contracts can be and have already been exploited to gain enormous financial profits. It is thus an emerging yet crucial issue to detect vulnerabilities of different classes in contracts in an efficient manner. Existing machine learning-based vulnerability detection methods are limited and only inspect whether the smart contract is vulnerable, or train individual classifiers for each specific vulnerability, or demonstrate multi-class vulnerability detection without extensibility consideration. To overcome the scalability and generalization limitations of existing works, we propose ESCORT, the first Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based vulnerability detection framework for Ethereum smart contracts that support lightweight transfer learning on unseen security vulnerabilities, thus is extensible and generalizable. ESCORT leverages a multi-output NN architecture that consists of two parts: (i) A common feature extractor that learns the semantics of the input contract; (ii) Multiple branch structures where each branch learns a specific vulnerability type based on features obtained from the feature extractor. Experimental results show that ESCORT achieves an average F1-score of 95% on six vulnerability types and the detection time is 0.02 seconds per contract. When extended to new vulnerability types, ESCORT yields an average F1-score of 93%. To the best of our knowledge, ESCORT is the first framework that enables transfer learning on new vulnerability types with minimal modification of the DNN model architecture and re-training overhead.