The transparent and immutable nature of blockchain provides incentives for organizations wishing to create and implement an open, decentralized governance structure. As members exercise their voting rights, a fault-tolerant record accumulates on the blockchain that can be analyzed to diagnose and intercept potential threats to the governing body. To date, there has not been a systematic study of on-chain governance with respect to voting. In this paper, we provide an analysis of blockchain governance through a case study of the first cryptocurrency to adopt on-chain voting, Dash. Our analysis introduces the key characteristics of blockchain governance, steps through a data-driven exploration of Dash's on-chain voting system, and highlights exploitable attack vectors and vulnerabilities for the subversion of Dash's on-chain voting system via a novel network analysis methodology. We then conclude with guidelines for other organizations looking to implement similar blockchain governance solutions while maintaining integrity in their operations.
We propose a token-based blockchain system that streamlines abstractions into a universal token structure. In the proposed system, each token has an identity that enables the implementation of specific rollbacks and governance that make 51% attacks unprofitable. Because the token-based bookkeeping method only verifies and updates the ownership within each transaction, the proposed system supports parallel expansion and cross-chain transactions without limit. The flexible authority management mechanism of the proposed system is regulatory-friendly, as the intensity of supervision and governance can be adapted to accommodate different application scenarios.
In proof-of-work-based (PoW-based) blockchain networks, the miners participate in a crypto-puzzle solving competition to win the reward by publishing a new block. Open mining pools attract a large number of miners for solving difficult problems together. Although the open strategy is likely to be more efficient, it makes pools susceptible to attack at the same time. In this paper, we present a game-theoretic analysis of mining pool strategy selection in order to explore the trade-off between the efficiency of openness and the vulnerability of attacks in a PoW-based blockchain network. We first model the pool mining process as a two-stage game, wherein the pools might decide whether to open or not and to attack or not. Based on the two-stage game model, we analyze the Nash equilibrium and the evolutionary stability of the mining games among pools, which uncovers the pool selection dynamics of PoW-based blockchain networks. In particular, we find that the attack behavior is the norm for a weak pool and triggers lower expected utilities when punishing the attacks more severely. Numerical simulations also support our theoretical findings as well as demonstrate the stability of the pools’ strategy selection.
Rumors and misleading information detection and prevention still represent a big challenge against social network developers and researchers. Since newsworthy information propagation is a traditional behavior of most of the users in social media, then verifying information credibility and reliability is indeed a vital security requirement for social network platforms. Due to its immutability, security, tamper-proof and P2P design, Blockchain as a powerful technology can provide a magical solution to overcome this challenge. This Paper introduces a novel blockchain approach called Proof of Credibility (PoC) for detecting fake news and blocking its propagation in social networks. The functionality of the PoC protocol has been simulated on two datasets of newsworthy tweets collected from different news sources on Twitter. The results clarified a satisfying performance and efficiency of the proposed approach in detecting rumors and blocking its propagation.
Many people talk about blockchain but very few understand its true nature and potential. Blockchain seems very exciting yet simultaneously a bit confusing, and naturally many people, businesses, and governments approach it with high expectations while also exhibiting some hesitancy. This article will deal with the use of blockchain in relation to government applications. A proper assessment of such use requires a discussion on blockchain standards, which are currently developed, or may develop in the future. Without blockchain standards, any potential use of blockchain in government will be of limited and restricted value. This would render our discussion on government applications rather limited too. Standards enable us to appreciate blockchain applications in a useful way for future applications outside the context of government. Focusing our attention to government applications is deliberate. Blockchain, obviously, provides amazing opportunities for the private sector. Over the last years there has been widespread public disbelief in many public and government institutions. Corruption, fraud, lack of transparency, alienation and disconnection of citizen from decision-making centres oblige governments to change and offer proper governance conditions for their citizens. Further, higher consumer expectations in all sectors of the economy naturally affect the expectations of citizens vis--vis their governments. For the above reasons, governments could leverage the positive features of blockchain to restore their
The present paper explores the current development of cryptocurrencies, emphasizing the concept of trust related to the blockchain technology and the digital currency market. The study offers a fundamental review of relevant research papers on Bitcoin, examining the main issues of trust among five categories of stakeholders: Governments, users, miners, exchanges and merchants. The results highlight the trust challenges on Bitcoin, reveling a unique perspective of risks on the cryptocurrency market, contagion effects, decentralisation systems or cryptocurrency regulation. The blockchain features are explained in order to better understand the Bitcoin mechanism, presenting the advantages of using such technology, concluding that Bitcoin is a product of the mistrust in financial institutions and an attempt to use alternative payment systems in a more secure way.
Applications of blockchain technologies got a lot of attention in recent years. They exceed beyond exchanging value and being a substitute for fiat money and traditional banking system. Nevertheless, being able to exchange value on a blockchain is at the core of the entire system and has to be reliable. Blockchains have built-in mechanisms that guarantee whole system's consistency and reliability. However, malicious actors can still try to steal money by applying well known techniques like malware software or fake emails. In this paper we apply supervised learning techniques to detect fraudulent accounts on Ethereum blockchain. We compare capabilities of Random Forests, Support Vector Machines and XGBoost classifiers to identify such accounts basing on a dataset of more than 300 thousands accounts. Results show that we are able to achieve recall and precision values allowing for the designed system to be applicable as an anti-fraud rule for digital wallets or currency exchanges. We also present sensitivity analysis to show how presented models depend on particular feature and how lack of some of them will affect the overall system performance.
Gyuwon Song, Suhyun Kim, Hae‐Jin Hwang, Kwanhoon Lee
This paper presents a blockchain-based notarization service for social media. With the advent of smartphones, social media platforms have become an undeniably popular way to communicate with people across the world. However, fake news and maliciously fabricated screenshots are continuously produced and distributed on social media. Since blockchain technology can store data in a secure and tamper-proof way, it is a suitable platform for notarizing online activity. The problem is how we can verify the data to notarize. We propose an architecture that can authentically archive the contents on social media using blockchain technology. Based on the proposed method, an instant messaging scenario is presented as a proof-of-concept.
Roy Bar-Haim, Dalia Krieger, Orith Toledo‐Ronen, Lilach Edelstein · 10 authors
Roy Bar-Haim, Dalia Krieger, Orith Toledo-Ronen, Lilach Edelstein, Yonatan Bilu, Alon Halfon, Yoav Katz, Amir Menczel, Ranit Aharonov, Noam Slonim. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2019.
Bitcoin is a decentralized cryptocurrency. It is secure as long as majority of the computational resources are with honest miners who follow the Bitcoin protocol. There has been several attacks on Bitcoin mining process in recent years. Selfish mining has been proposed by which miners can get more reward than their fair share. If 33% of the miners are follow the selfish mining strategy, then the Bitcoin system will no longer remain decentralized. We propose a new mining strategy called the Rational Mining, following which only 28% of miners are enough to make Bitcoin decentralized.We analyze the different strategies and show how a miner can choose a strategy to maximize its gain under different parameter selection.
Shantanu Kumar Rahut, Razwan Ahmed Tanvir, Sharfi Rahman, Shamim Akhter
In general, peer reviewing is known as an inspection of a work that is completed by one or more qualified people from the same profession and from the relevant field to make the work more error-free, readable, presentable, and adjustable according to the pre-published requirements and also considered as the primary metric for publishing a research paper, accepting research grants, or selecting award nominees. However, many recent publications are pointing to the biasness and mistreatment in the peer-review process. Thus, the scientific community is involved to generate ideas to advance the reviewing process including standardizing procedures and protocols, blind and electronic reviewing, rigorous methods in reviewer selection, rewarding reviewers, providing detailed feedback or checklist to reviewers, etc. In this chapter, the authors propose a decentralized and anonymous scientific peer-reviewing system using blockchain technology. This system will integrate all the above concern issues and eliminate the bias or trust issues interconnected with the peer-reviewing process.