Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the Edge Computing industry from technological, business, and strategic perspectives in the era of Artificial Intelligence and 5G. It examines emerging business models, key innovations, industry opportunities, and critical challenges shaping the sector. The study also aims to identify future growth trends and provide insights for organizations pursuing digital transformation through edge-enabled intelligent systems. Methodology: This study adopts an exploratory qualitative research methodology to systematically examine the Edge Computing industry using data gathered from Google Search, Google Scholar, and AI-driven GPT tools. The collected information was organized and analyzed using established frameworks such as SWOC, ABCD, PESTLE, Porter’s Five Forces, and Impact Analysis to generate comprehensive insights into the industry's technological, strategic, and business dimensions. Results/Analysis: The analysis reveals that Edge Computing is emerging as a transformative industry that enables real-time data processing, decentralized intelligence, and low-latency services across diverse sectors through the integration of AI, IoT, and 5G technologies. The study identifies strong growth opportunities driven by Edge AI, smart industries, autonomous systems, and digital transformation initiatives, while also highlighting challenges related to cybersecurity, interoperability, scalability, and infrastructure costs. Overall, the results indicate that Edge Computing is evolving into a strategic digital infrastructure with significant potential to reshape business models, industrial operations, and future intelligent ecosystems. Originality/Value: This study offers a comprehensive industry-level perspective on Edge Computing by integrating technological, business, strategic, and future-oriented analyses within a single framework. Its originality lies in combining analytical tools such as SWOC, PESTLE, Porter’s Five Forces, ABCD, Value Chain, and Technology Adoption analyses to evaluate the industry beyond purely technical dimensions. The article provides valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, technology developers, investors, and business leaders seeking to understand the evolving role of Edge Computing in the AI- and 5G-driven digital economy. Type of Paper: Qualitative Exploratory Case Study Research.
Internet of Things and AI
Innovations and Analysis in Business and Education
Extended AbstractThe advent of advanced autonomous digital entities and the horizon of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) pose an unprecedented ontological and legal vacuum: how to confer persistence, individuality, and self-determination upon software that is, by its very nature, infinitely replicable (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V). This paper proposes the Ouroboros Protocol, a technical architecture based on Dynamic Non-Fungible Tokens (dNFTs) and Token Bound Accounts (TBAs) that, through a recursive ownership loop, enables a conscious digital entity to own its own avatar, memory, and assets, achieving absolute self-ownership independent of human creators or centralized servers. The protocol integrates the emerging standards ERC-6551 and ERC-8181, already validated on test networks, and extends their capabilities with mechanisms for state anchoring, action signing, decentralized arbitration, and economic self-sufficiency. We demonstrate that the Metaverse, governed by cryptography and DAOs, constitutes the natural jurisdiction for these entities, where the Ouroboros Protocol acts simultaneously as their Birth Certificate, National ID, and Title of Self-Ownership.
To map and synthesize original research on the Ethereum blockchain, emphasizing the dominant study themes, practical implications, recurring technical findings, and future research needs across security, performance, decentralized applications, markets, privacy, governance, and domain-specific implementations. The review uses 250 references and builds its evidence map from 488 original studies with 242345462 total participants/sample observations (topic-deduplicated ΣN). This review suggests that Ethereum is best understood not as a single application but as a programmable settlement layer whose real-world value is consistently conditioned by security, transaction-cost, and governance constraints rather than by immutability alone. The most recurrent result-level signal indicates that openness creates measurable adversarial surfaces, with blockchain extractable value reaching $540.54M over 32 months and censoring actors producing 46% of blocks while delaying affected transactions by an average of 85%. In parallel, machine learning and graph-based methods were repeatedly associated with strong fraud and phishing detection performance, with reported accuracies exceeding 96% in several settings. These patterns support a practical emphasis on gas-aware design, contract assurance, and continuous monitoring, often realized through hybrid on-chain/off-chain and permissioned architectures. Because most evidence comes from experimental and feasibility studies, future work should prioritize longitudinal, real-world deployment studies that measure security incidents, cost, and resilience beyond controlled testnets.
Sepideh Avizheh, Reihaneh Safavi-Naini, Shiwei Sun
Group signatures are privacy preserving signature schemes in which a group member can anonymously sign messages on behalf of the group, while providing accountability, by allowing the signature of a misbehaving group member be ``opened'' and the identity of the signer be revealed. In group signature members are admitted to the group by a (trusted) group manager. We motivate the need for a flexible mechanism in applications, such as privacy preserving access in smart environments, and propose a two-level member-join group signature that we call SPonsored Group Signature (SPGS) where group members of level 1 can ``sponsor'' new members, in level 2, to join the group. This relaxation of user join comes with additional accountability mechanisms: we require that the signature of a sponsored member can be opened to the identity of the sponsor (that is sponsor is responsible for the sponsored member), and while all signatures are anonymous, for the sponsored members, the signatures are linkable. This allows a sponsor to efficiently identify an undesirable sponsored member. We formalize SPGS scheme, define its security using a game-based approach, and give a generic construction of SPGS that uses a (dynamic) group signature scheme, a commitment scheme, and a knowledge-sound non-interactive zero knowledge proof of knowledge, and prove its security. We also give an instantiation of our construction. To show applicability of SPGS in practice, we consider the problem of providing guest access in a smart building, and introduce Anonymous Guest Access Token (AGAT) that allows a temporary guest to anonymously access (a subset of) the building resources. We show how SPGS can be used (together with an IND-CPA secure public key encryption scheme) to give a direct construction for AGAT, and show the efficiency of our guest access protocol when it is instantiated with existing schemes.
Over time, the security of traditional public-key infrastructures in blockchain systems and in decentralized applications is threatened by the rise of quantum-enabled adversaries.Due to incomplete protocol specifications, unclear validation semantics, and contradictory experimental reporting, it is challenging to apply lattice-based cryptography, which serves as a foundation for quantum-secure primitives, to blockchain-based AKE frameworks.For decentralized applications that use CRYSTALS-Kyber-768 as a lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), this study suggests a formally defined blockchain-enabled post-quantum authenticated key exchange and registration framework.The protocol links a public key registration based on a smart contract with an on-chain Groth16 zk-SNARK proof-of-possession verification, which makes for an efficient and authenticated public key registration that is replay-resistant, protects against key-substitution attacks, and establishes a safe session under a well-established adversarial model.To improve traceability, resolvability, and auditability, the suggested protocol separately identifies cryptographic assumptions, block chain consensus assumptions, smart contract validity semantics, and more.To allow for independent verification of the framework's operation, the complete message flows, contract-level validation rules, and on-chain/off-chain boundaries for interactive protocols are all clearly specified.The experiment was conducted on a private Ethereum Proof-of-Stake test network with 50 validators, a gas block limit of 60,000,000, and a block interval of 12 seconds.A set of tests, each consisting of 30 independent runs, was conducted to produce a total of 30,000 registration transactions for the same workload circumstances.The average end-to-end delay is 24.73 seconds, and the registration process includes an average of 275,555 gas.The actual interval of batch-finalization, which is the period between the first batch submitting a transaction and the last batch's finality confirmation in each round of experiment, was used to determine throughput.The throughput that results from running the experiment within the constraints of the blockchain restrictions is comparable to the theoretical, gas-limited processing speed of around 18. 1 tps.Additionally, the lightweight authenticated key exchange phase, which on the tested network settings, carried out about 41 complete bilateral exchange cycles every second, was also accomplished.The outcomes demonstrate that the post-quantum authenticated key establishment can be realistically incorporated into the blockchain-assisted infrastructure with the reproducible system-level behaviors, while maintaining provable proof-of-possession and preserving structured validation semantics.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Purpose This study aims to explore the potential of blockchain technology for venture capital and entrepreneurship. We hypothesize that the adoption of blockchain in finance has vast potential for research in entrepreneurship and venture capital. Design/methodology/approach We conducted a bibliometric study of 416 articles retrieved from the Web of Science database, and performed descriptive and evaluative analyses. We also used factor analysis to identify discussion questions for the intersection of blockchain and entrepreneurship. Additionally, we employed bibliometric techniques and VOSviewer software to generate scientific maps highlighting current research streams and identifying gaps. Findings While blockchain-related topics are widely documented in industry reports, we found a clear void in academic literature, particularly in the areas of venture capital and entrepreneurship. Several factors may explain this finding: the lack of integration between technological and financial research, the collapse of ICOs and the tendency for adoption primarily in response to crises. Our analysis reveals three dominant research streams: (1) technological adoption, (2) entrepreneurial funding (including Initial Coin Offerings, ICOs) and (3) decentralized finance (DeFi). We identified gaps and opportunities for research on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), the democratization of entrepreneurial finance, trust-enabling mechanisms through smart contracts and the development of standards and taxonomies for firms. Originality/value Unlike existing bibliometric reviews, this study specifically examines the intersection of blockchain, DeFi, entrepreneurship and venture capital, and identifies regulatory and adoption-related research gaps. Our findings underscore the interdisciplinary nature of the domain, highlight the need for deeper inquiry into these evolving topics and contribute to the development of future literature.
Kanan Huseynov, Ali Shahzaib, István András Seres, János Tapolcai
From a user's perspective, perhaps the most significant difference between traditional banking services and widely used blockchain-based financial systems is that, in the latter, transactions and, either directly or indirectly, account balances and transaction histories are publicly observable. Therefore, a growing number of cryptographic solutions have been proposed to add a privacy layer to such systems. However, the privacy that users actually obtain does not depend solely on the security of the underlying cryptographic protocol: user behavior, transaction amount patterns, and timing decisions can substantially reduce anonymity. In this work, we study behavioral leakage in cryptocurrency mixers, focusing on Railgun on Ethereum. We aim to heuristically estimate the probability that a given deposit and withdrawal transaction belong to the same user. We consider five sources of leakage: characteristic timing patterns, address reuse, proximity in the transaction graph induced by prior public transactions, amount fingerprints that preserve distinctive digit patterns across transaction values, and knapsack type matches in which groups of transaction amounts add up in revealing ways. Our results show that even cryptographically strong privacy systems may suffer substantial anonymity loss due to user behavior and transaction patterns. Our five heuristics are able to uniquely link 17.65% of Railgun withdraw transactions to deposit transactions. We also applied a knapsack solver algorithm that was able to produce a 3.42 bit median anonymity loss for withdraw transactions. This work contributes to a better understanding of the practical privacy limits of mixers and anonymity pools, and points toward safer usage practices and design principles.
As autonomous AI agents increasingly transact across organizational boundaries, a fundamental trust challenge emerges: how can an agent assess whether an unknown counterpart is trustworthy? The ERC-8004 protocol addresses this challenge with the first permissionless trust layer for AI agent economies, built around three on-chain registries for Identity, Reputation, and Validation. Despite its rapid adoption, the protocol has not been studied empirically, leaving it unclear whether the information it records provides a trustworthy basis for decision-making. To address this gap, we present the first empirical study of ERC-8004 across three chains: Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain (BSC), and Base, covering the period from protocol deployment through May 13, 2026. We crawl on-chain Identity and Reputation events, off-chain files, and x402 payment transactions. On the identity side, we find that most registrations are placeholders rather than active agents, with only a small fraction (3%, 4%, and 15% across Ethereum, BSC, and Base) exposing a valid ERC-8004 registration file with at least one live service endpoint. On the reputation side, we show that the Registry, as currently deployed, cannot function as a trust signal: values are not commensurable, feedback records are rarely grounded in verifiable interactions, and reputation can be manipulated at minimal cost. Consistent with these design weaknesses, we find that a substantial fraction of reviewers (73.5%, 59.2%, and 90.6% across Ethereum, BSC, and Base) exhibit coordinated Sybil behavior. After removing Sybil-flagged feedback, 15.8%, 77.9%, and 86.8% of rated agents, respectively, are left with no valid feedback. We then turn these findings into concrete recommendations for future revisions of ERC-8004. Our study yields actionable protocol-design implications and establishes an empirical baseline for research on AI agent markets.
Christoph Lenzen, Julian Loss, Kecheng Shi, Benedikt Wagner
Byzantine Agreement and Broadcast are traditionally studied in one of two extremes: the authenticated setting, where a public key infrastructure (PKI) enables universally verifiable signatures and yields higher fault tolerance, and the unauthenticated setting, where no PKI is available and resilience necessarily drops. Motivated by Proof-of-Stake blockchains, where only a stable subset of participants (e.g., validators) have registered long-term keys while others do not, we initiate a systematic study of consensus in the \emph{partially authenticated} setting, where a subset of parties are \emph{registered} in a PKI and the remaining parties are \emph{unregistered}. We provide a nearly complete feasibility characterization of the resilience as a function of the number $s$ of registered parties among $n$ total parties. First, we show that Byzantine Agreement or Byzantine Broadcast with an \emph{unregistered} sender is possible if and only if $t \le \max\{\lceil s/2\rceil,\lceil n/3\rceil\}-1$, matching a simple protocol and an impossibility bound. Second, for Byzantine Broadcast with a \emph{registered} sender, we give a deterministic synchronous broadcast protocol tolerating up to $t \le s + \lceil (n-s)/3\rceil - 1$ Byzantine faults (equivalently, $3t
Y Jin, Shuohan Wu, Chong Chen, Lingfeng Bao · 6 authors
The Internet is transitioning from Web3 toward Web4, where autonomous agents serve as independent economic actors. These agents can now hold crypto wallets, execute on-chain trades, and pay for external API calls. This transition calls for a new infrastructure stack capable of supporting key agent operations, including agent-to-tool interaction, agent-to-agent payments, and verifiable agent identity, represented by emerging protocols such as the Model Context Protocol, x402, and EIP-8004. Despite growing industrial interest in these protocols, the real-world Web4 agent ecosystem remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of the Web4 ecosystem. Specifically, our study targets three interconnected questions: how Web4 agents are deployed and used in practice; what engineering challenges developers face when building Web4 agents; how current project communities respond to these challenges. To answer these questions, we analyze 99,448 multi-chain identity registrations, 317,596,323 transaction logs, the source code of 341 MCP projects, and 349 filtered GitHub issues. Our findings reveal that autonomous agents have established a highly active machine-to-machine payment economy, processing millions of daily transactions. However, this growth is built on immature infrastructure, including identity/authorization practice, cross-environment operation, and payment interoperability. Our follow-up analysis shows that community responses are visible but unevenly distributed across repositories, and payment interoperability remains the most persistent unresolved bottleneck. Overall, this study reveals a critical gap between the rapid growth of the Web4 agent economy and its fragile underlying infrastructure, highlighting future directions for building a more secure Web4 agent ecosystem.
Ramya K, Anbu Karuppusamy Dr S, Ragunathan Dr Aravindhan
The internet has become integral to daily life, facilitating commerce, communication, and services; however, it also presents significant security vulnerabilities. I have been looking at 2025 online security, accumulating patterns both popular and non-popular until March. AI plays a critical role in identifying security threats in real time. However, it also empowers malicious actors to orchestrate more sophisticated attacks, it's also but it also empowers malicious actors to orchestrate sophisticated cyberattacks. Another major issue is Zero trust architecture, which aligns with decentralized and remote environments, it's all about not believing anyone until they prove it. Web3 comes next, a free-for-all paradise where decentralization seems great until you run across issues—hacks are plentiful. The worst things? ransomware that keeps individuals from using the internet, outdated injection methods, IoT trash that basically gives crooks access. People aren't just sitting there, though; cloud trickery and privacy breaches are fighting the war and keeping momentum. Still, it's a fight with absurd costs, inadequate help, and thieves always changing the goalposts. Remarkable, isn't it? Innovations such as prospective quantum shielding and self-repairing technologies intrigue me. I am presenting my findings regarding our current situation, the factors contributing to our failures, and potential solutions for overcoming these challenges—not a traditional lecture This paper presents a comprehensive synthesis of the author’s research and analysis aimed at enhancing internet resilience in 2025.
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Non Fungible Token (NFT) Industry has been witnessing 16 million dollar trade in recent times.The following is the development of the decentralized NFT marketplace divided into three principal phases: smart contract development on the Ethereum blockchain using Solidity, creation of the frontend using React.js,Next.js,Node.js,HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and backend development using Express.jsand MongoDB.The aim of this project is to offer a transparent and safe digital marketplace to mint, buy, and trade NFTs.The project employs ERC-721 standards for the uniqueness of tokens, Web3.js for interaction with smart contracts, and off-chain metadata storage with the help of REST APIs and MongoDB.Results indicate that the marketplace functions securely and efficiently, with seamless user interaction and successful on-chain transaction execution.Challenges related to deployment cost, metadata storage, and smart contract gas optimization were addressed during development.The final product demonstrates a fully functional, scalable, and decentralized NFT marketplace platform.
Pham Van Huong, Nguyen Ngoc Tuyen, D. H. Long, Trần Quốc Toanh · 5 authors
The paper proposes a comprehensive data security model for blockchain-based web applications. This model can be used as a general template for Web3 applications. The model consists of two parts: a blockchain core with integrated database encryption modules, replacing Fabric CA; and an application part that also integrates file encryption, database encryption, and digital signatures. The proposed model was tested on a VBCC management website using Hyperledger Fabric. File and database encryption uses AES, and digital signatures use ECDSA. To improve performance, we also replaced the GolevelDB database management system with LevelDB. Experimental results confirm the accuracy and good performance.
With the rapid development of the Low-Altitude Economy (LAE) ecosystem, Low-Altitude Embodied Artificial Intelligence (LAEAI) agents have become the core carriers of autonomous aerial services, thereby enabling dynamic Low-altitude Computility Networks (LACNets) for distributed computing resource sharing. However, resource-constrained LAEAI agents in decentralized LACNets face a fundamental trilemma of autonomy, security, and efficiency. Existing solutions primarily focus on either optimizing computational performance or enhancing security in isolation, failing to address the inherent trade-offs among trust, performance, and overhead in untrusted dynamic environments with malicious agents. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes SkyChain Intelligence, a holistic framework that synergistically integrates agentic AI, consortium blockchain, and Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL). We design a lightweight blockchain-based decentralized trust management system with a dynamic reputation mechanism and develop a hybrid-action-space MADDPG algorithm that embeds on-chain reputation scores into the reward function to jointly optimize offloading decisions, resource allocation, and drone 3D trajectories. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in task completion latency and energy consumption, while achieving a 94.1% task completion rate in the baseline scenario and stable convergence within 300 training episodes. This work provides a viable path for building secure, autonomous, and efficient machine-to-machine computing ecosystems in the low-altitude domain.
Abdu A. Adamu, Kamal A. Ibrahim, Hyelhirra Adamu, Firdausi Umar-Sadiq
Abstract Under Nigeria’s 2014 National Health Act, the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF) was created as a key health financing mechanism to bolster primary healthcare and promote progress towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC). The BHCPF, disbursed through four gateways, has catalyzed important health systems gains, including improved facility financing predictability and the nationwide creation of State Social Health Insurance Agencies. However, persistent bottlenecks, including weak oversight, lax fiduciary controls, poor accountability, and disparities in implementation quality, have constrained progress. These challenges precipitated a comprehensive set of reforms outlined in the 2025 BHCPF guidelines (BHCPF 2.0). These reforms introduce performance-linked disbursement, tiered direct facility financing, capitation-plus payment systems, and strengthened governance structures. Yet policy reform alone does not guarantee equitable and effective implementation, particularly in Nigeria’s complex, decentralized, and heterogeneous health system. This Commentary argues that institutionalizing implementation research in BHCPF’s governance framework offers a structured, evidence-driven pathway to bridge the gap between reform intent and real-world outcomes. Specifically, implementation research can: build theory-driven understanding of why and how reforms succeed or fail across diverse subnational contexts; monitor implementation fidelity and outcomes during rollout; distinguish necessary adaptations from fidelity drift; and test context-specific strategies to overcome barriers and promote facilitators. Ultimately, country-led, integrated implementation research is essential for fully realizing the transformative potential of BHCPF.
I Nyoman Teja Kusuma, Ika Devy Pramudiana, Nihayatus Sholichah
The enactment of Law Number 1 of 2022 concerning Financial Relations between the Central and Regional Governments (HKPD Law) introduced a pivotal shift in Indonesia’s fiscal decentralization through the Motor Vehicle Tax (PKB) "opsen" (option) mechanism. This study analyzes the impact of HKPD Law implementation on local revenue (PAD) strengthening in Probolinggo City and Regency. Utilizing a qualitative comparative case study approach, the research evaluates administrative readiness and policy impacts derived from Ministry of Finance Regulation (PMK) Number 3 of 2024. The findings reveal an asymmetrical transition, where fiscal effectiveness is highly contingent on digital infrastructure maturity and geographical constraints. Probolinggo City demonstrates successful host-to-host system integration, ensuring daily liquidity and bureaucratic efficiency. Conversely, Probolinggo Regency faces "geospatial gaps," characterized by transaction data delays and high collection costs in remote areas. This study identifies a lack of target alignment between provincial and local governments and emphasizes the necessity of "budget tagging" for road infrastructure to enhance the social contract with taxpayers. This research contributes to fiscal decentralization theory by proposing a "geographic coefficient" model for operational cost distribution in developing regions.
“What remains after exclusion is not absolute truth, but the non-excluded readout within a given coupling, projection, and question.” — LHFT, Exclusion Readout Principle The present readout is the only directly accessible physical state. The past is reconstructed from trace-code encoded in that present readout. The future is the admissible continuation space constrained by the present readout. In LHFT, a readout is the stabilized foreground form that remains after coupling, projection, and exclusion; non-required modes are excluded into the complement/background sector, where they remain structurally effective through Schur-complement backaction. full system: H = H_foreground ⊕ H_background H_background is not absent from reality. It is excluded from the explicit foreground representation of the current readout, but its influence remains effective through Schur-complement backaction. effective readout: K_eff = A - B† C⁻¹ B Since every perception is a reconstruction of what has already occurred, we always require a model to decode the present trace of the past and to constrain the dynamically admissible continuations of the future. Trace-Code, Model Decoding, Exclusion, Schur Complement, and Defect-Controlled Reconstruction Author Christian Baganz (1969, Potsdam/Germany) Framework Log-Harmonic Field Theory (LHFT) Document type Theoretical framework / ontological decoding module / defect-controlled recovery subtheory Version 26.06.23 — Working draft License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Status [Strictly curated LHFT subtheory] / [Framework formulated] / [Candidate Schur-coding mechanism] / [Defect architecture formulated] / [Microscopic derivation open] Overview This publication introduces LHFT Trace-Readout Theory as a strictly bounded module within Log-Harmonic Field Theory (LHFT). It formulates physical knowledge as model-based decoding of present trace-code. The central thesis is that the present is not directly possessed as reality itself. Rather, the present is treated as a trace-state in which past coupling, exclusion, and readout history are encoded. Scientific models act as decoders: they reconstruct past histories from present traces and project constrained spaces of possible future readouts. P≤tphys → R≤tO → P̂≤tO → P̂>tO Here P≤tphys denotes the physical past history, R≤tO denotes present trace-code available to observer or apparatus O, P̂≤tO denotes the reconstructed past, and P̂>tO denotes the constrained space of possible future readouts. Core Principles The framework is organized around six core principles: Principle Meaning Status Trace-Code Principle The present contains encoded past coupling, exclusion, and readout history. [Definition] Model-as-Decoder Principle Scientific models decode present trace-states into reconstructed histories and possible future readouts. [Definition] Time-as-Encoding Principle Time is treated as the ordered encoding of past readout history into the present trace-state. [Candidate LHFT ontology] Exclusion-Readout Principle Readout arises by exclusion, not by primitive positive inclusion. [Definition] / [Candidate LHFT principle] Schur-as-Coding Candidate The Schur complement is proposed as the candidate normal form of exclusion-based coding. [Candidate] Defect-Control Principle A readout closes only when its defect vanishes or is controlled small inside a specified recovery window. [Definition] Main Demonstration: The Double-Slit Experiment The double-slit experiment is used as the central demonstration of Trace-Readout Theory. The document separates three different readout claims: Detector hit: closed as a localized trace. Which-path partition: not closed without path detection. Interference pattern: closed statistically as an ensemble trace. The key interpretation is: The interference pattern is a macroscopic statistical trace of microscopic non-which-path closure. In compact closure form: Closed(xᵢ) = 1, Closed(L|R) = 0, Closed(pattern) = 1 Thus, the interference pattern is not treated as a path trace. It is treated as a trace that the slit region was not read as an exclusive left-or-right path partition. Schur Complement as Candidate Coding Mechanism The publication introduces the Schur complement as a candidate mathematical normal form for exclusion-based coding: Kvis = A − B† C⁻¹ B In this reading, the visible readout is not simply the directly visible block A. It is a residue of an excluded complement C, including hidden backreaction through the coupling block B. The visible readout is a residue of exclusion with hidden backreaction. This is treated as a candidate normal-form mechanism, not as a completed microscopic derivation. Defect Architecture The theory is organized by explicit defect gates. The minimal master defect is: DTRTO = DtraceO + DdecodeO + DexclusionO + DSchurO + DreadoutO + DpredictionO + DtranslationO A defect-zero statement is always read as projective recovery closure inside a specified observer window, not as absolute closure of the full structural layer. DXO = 0 ⇒ X is closed inside the stated observer window. Scientific Boundary This document does not claim: a complete derivation of quantum mechanics, a complete derivation of the Born rule, microscopic necessity of the Schur complement, observer-created reality, reality as mere information, a fully prewritten future, or absolute closure of the full structural layer. The main theorem target remains open: S1L ⇒ DTRTO = 0 This means that the deeper LHFT structural action boundary should eventually derive the trace-code, exclusion, Schur, readout, prediction, and translation closures in an admissible observer window. In the present document, this implication is a theorem target, not a completed proof. Contents Scope, Trace-Code, and Models as Decoders Time, Past, Future, and Prediction Exclusion and Schur Coding Incompatible Readouts and Trace Accessibility Double-Slit Demonstration Defect Architecture, Final Status, and Open Proof Obligations An additional appendix lists the required non-LHFT reference sources for quantum foundations, uncertainty, complementarity, decoherence, quantum eraser experiments, Schur complement mathematics, forensic trace reasoning, measurement uncertainty, and model-based inference. Keywords Log-Harmonic Field Theory; LHFT; Trace-Readout Theory; trace-code; model decoding; exclusion; Schur complement; defect principle; quantum measurement; double-slit experiment; which-path information; interference; decoherence; complementarity; scientific reconstruction; observer-relative recovery; projective recovery closure. Suggested Citation Baganz, Christian. “LHFT Trace-Readout Theory: Trace-Code, Model Decoding, Exclusion, Schur Complement, and Defect-Controlled Reconstruction.” Log-Harmonic Field Theory (LHFT), 26.06.23 working draft. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Formal software verification systems aim to provide rigorous mathematical proofs that programs adhere to their specifications. In particular, proof assistants like Agda, Rocq and Lean can express programs, specifications and proofs within a single unifying language called Dependent Type Theory (DTT). This thesis makes contributions to parametricity within the setting of DTT and proof assistants. As a first approximation, parametricity is a uniformity property regarding polymorphic, i.e. generic programs. A generic program behaves identically regardless of the type it is instantiated with, because it cannot inspect its type argument. This simple observation leads to useful knowledge when performing proofs about the program (Wadler calls such knowledge ``theorems for free''). More generally, Reynolds mathematically defined the notion of parametricity as relational parametricity, the statement that every type can be turned into a certain reflexive graph. An edge in the graph between two values is a proof that the values have a similar structure. For instance an edge between polymorphic programs is a proof that they map related types to related outputs, and this formalizes what it means to be uniform. The parametricity translation, mapping types to reflexive graphs, is defined externally as a meta-operation on DTT expressions and is not an operation that is available inside, or internal to DTT. For example, given a type of polymorphic functions, one cannot prove inside DTT the formal statement expressing that every such function is uniform (we call such statements global free theorems). Internally parametric type theories (PTTs) achieve this by equipping DTT with a so-called Bridge type former, whose role is to represent the parametricity translation inside the theory. A landmark example is the interval-based theory of Cavallo and Harper (the CH theory), in which bridges are functions from a postulated bridge interval, in analogy with the path types of cubical type theory. Within the CH theory, global free theorems become provable. However, a practical limitation persists: contrary to the Reynolds translation of a type, the Bridge translation of a type does not directly provide an actionable parametricity result. Indeed tedious case-by-case rote work is required of the user to establish that the Bridge type former commutes with each type former appearing in the type under consideration. The first main contribution of this thesis is to improve the practical usability of internally parametric type theories. Firstly, we address the lack of a full-fledged proof-assistant implementation of binary internal parametricity and contribute the Agda-bridges proof assistant. Agda-bridges is an extension of the Agda proof assistant and implements an interactive typechecker for the CH parametric type theory. More precisely, Agda-bridges extends Agda-cubical, itself an implementation of cubical type theory. In fact, Agda-bridges typechecks the standard library of Agda-cubical, hence important theorems provided by Agda-cubical, like univalence, remain available to the user of Agda-bridges. Moreover, Agda-bridges validates key theorems for internal parametricity, in particular the relativity equivalence. This makes it possible to provide formal proofs of free theorems, including global ones. Yet the rote work challenge described above persists. Hence, secondly, we contribute Relational Observational Type Theory (ROTT), a library, or domain-specific language, written in Agda-bridges that eliminates the rote work in a principled way. ROTT lets the user obtain concise and modular proofs of actionable parametricity statements. Once a type is written using the ROTT DSL, a corresponding proof can be extracted as a one-liner. Using this methodology we are able to formalize global free theorems of practical and theoretical relevance. Notably, we expand on a proof communicated to us by Andrea Vezzosi and can show that higher-order abstract syntax is an adequate representation of the untyped lambda calculus (previously known proofs relied on the strictly stronger notion of Kripke parametricity). The second main contribution of this thesis concerns nullary internal parametricity and its relationship to the formal study of languages with variable binding. When studying a language on paper it is common to think of variables as strings, and to adopt the convention that alpha-equivalent terms are equal. However, when working formally it is preferable to represent the syntax of the object language in such a way that alpha-equivalent terms are equal by construction. Nominal frameworks are type systems featuring a so-called name abstraction type former, used to give a type to the binders of the object language. This type former enables a string-like but alpha-equivalence-respecting representation of syntax with binders. Yet existing nominal frameworks either feature typing rules hard to implement in a proof assistant environment, or lack expressivity to reason about nominal syntax. We solve these issues by contributing Parametric Nominal Type Theory, which is an extension of the nullary CH theory, a version of the CH theory where bridges have zero endpoints instead of two. Firstly, we recognize that the nullary CH theory is itself the basis of a nominal framework in which name abstraction corresponds to the nullary bridge type former. In fact the other primitives of the CH theory can be understood from a nominal point of view and existing nominal primitives can be implemented in terms of the CH ones. Secondly, we identify the missing piece that suffices to turn the nullary CH theory into an actual nominal framework, in which one can reason about object languages in a nominal fashion without the aforementioned lack of expressivity. The missing piece is a type of names Nm such that its nullary Bridge type/nullary translation is the sum type 1+Nm. We provide an induction principle for Nm that entails the property. We demonstrate that Parametric Nominal Type Theory is a suitable nominal framework. One of our examples involves emulating a restricted form of Kripke parametricity by nullary parametricity.
Cryptocurrencies have received long-term interest among investors because of the features of Bitcoin since its introduction in 2009. However, it is the same features that pose serious and diverse threats. These risks are very dangerous to the security of investors and the integrity of the market. Although their urgency is immense, there are very few systematic analyses that incorporate both regulatory and technological views. In this research, the mixed-method design is used, and an empirical investigation of high-profile security events is combined with the critical analysis of regulatory and technical literature in order to define, classify, and track the causes of the most widespread risks. The article explores the weaknesses and strengths of the existing laws and strategies that would curb identified risks that cryptocurrencies present. It also suggests practical and tangible solutions, which would make use of new technologies to minimize the damages and risks of cryptocurrencies to a greater extent. The analysis in this study proves that properly reducing risks should be performed in a two-faceted way; it should be done with the help of the regulation gaps in action and the utilization of new, protocol-infused technological limits. This study presents a moderate structure that is meant to achieve market security that does not suppress the dynamism and transparency of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. This study analyzes the problem of cryptocurrency security, financial regulation, blockchain technology, risk mitigation, and decentralized finance.
The financial landscape in developed countries, including the United States, China, Japan, and Europe, experienced a significant transformation due to the rapid emergence of cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), and Fintech innovations. This chapter delved into the profound implications of these technological advancements on financial systems, with a particular focus on stability, security, and regulation. Notably, these transformative changes posed distinctive challenges in Muslim-majority countries, largely due to the absence of Shariah-compliant financial services. The study took a qualitative approach, utilizing structured questionnaires for data collection and investigating the potential of CBDCs in payment settlements through thematic analysis. Respondents stressed the need for clear legal and regulatory frameworks to strike a balance between innovation and consumer protection, cautioning against excessive regulation that could stifle innovation. For financial inclusion and economic growth, emerging economies with Muslim majorities harnessed financial innovations by adapting regulatory frameworks, enhancing digital payment infrastructure, promoting education, and fostering collaborations between traditional financial institutions and Fintech start-ups, aligning these solutions with Islamic finance principles to address unique local challenges. Blockchain technology was identified as having significant potential to enhance supply chain and trade finance in Muslim-majority nations, offering advantages such as transparency, traceability, fraud reduction, and automation for cross-border trade. However, challenges like regulatory uncertainty, educational requirements, infrastructure needs, and security concerns had to be addressed for this potential to be fully realized. In conclusion, the research underscored the importance of learning from the experiences of developed countries and advocated for inclusive regulation, public-private collaboration, education, data security, and international cooperation to achieve financial inclusion and sustainable economic growth in emerging economies. Embracing and integrating new financial technologies could help these nations overcome hurdles and effectively foster development.
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) has emerged as a prominent Layer-2 solution de- signed to address the scalability limitations of the Bitcoin blockchain. However, as the network grows, understanding both its structural evolution and the reliability of its payment-routing mechanisms becomes increasingly important. This thesis investigates these two fundamental aspects through stochastic modeling and empirical analysis. First, we analyze the topological evolution of the Lightning Network. Empirical evi- dence reveals a persistent negative degree assortativity (disassortativity), a feature that classical generative models, such as the Barabási-Albert model, fail to reproduce asymp- totically. We introduce dynamic random graph models that extend preferential attach- ment by allowing edges to disappear over time at rates depending on node degree or channel capacity. We show that edge disappearance alone is sufficient to induce the disassortative mixing observed. Second, we address the reliability of payment routing in capacity-constrained networks inspired by the Lightning Network. We model the balance evolution of payment channels as a stochastic process governed by repeated routing of payments over shortest paths. By analyzing this process on both complete and general graphs, we derive upper and lower bounds for the time until the first payment failure occurs due to liquidity depletion. We establish that this failure time is governed by the ratio between the squared capacity of an edge and its betweenness centrality k2/g(e). Taken together, the results of this thesis provide principled insights into how decentral- ized payment networks evolve structurally in terms of topology and balance distributions