Blockchain Papers

Annalee Newitz

No abstract is available for this record.

Joost Bambacht, Johan Pouwelse

A movement for a more transparent and decentralized Internet is globally attracting more attention. People are becoming more privacy-aware of their online identities and data. The Internet is constantly evolving. Web2 focused on companies that provide services in exchange for personal user data. Web3 commits to user-centricity using decentralization and zero-server architectures. The current digital society demands a global change to empower citizens and take back control. Citizens are locked into big-tech for personal data storage and their for-profit digital identity. Protection of data has proven to be essential, especially due to increased home Internet traffic during the COVID pandemic. Citizens do not possess their own travel documents. The European Commission aims to transition this governmental property towards self-sovereign identity, introducing many new opportunities. Citizens are locked into banks with non-portable IBAN accounts and unsustainable legacy banking infrastructures. Migration to all-digital low-fraud infrastructures and healthier competitive ecosystems is essential. The overall challenge is to return the power to citizens and users again. The transition to a more decentralized Internet is the first crucial step in the realization of user-centricity. This thesis presents the first exploratory study that integrates governmental-issued travel documents into a (decentralized) societal infrastructure. These self-sovereign identities form the authentic base to a private and secure transfer of money and data, and can effectively provide trust in authenticity that is currently missing in online conversations. A fully operational zero-server infrastructure that incorporates all our requirements has been developed for Android using the P2P network overlay IPv8, and a personalized blockchain called TrustChain...

Mesut Serdar ÇEKİN

Blockchain teknolojisinin yaygınlaşması, özellikle web3 ve metaverse gibi gelişmeler, blockchain ağındaki kayıt niteliğindeki kripto varlıkların hukuki açıdan incelenmesi ihtiyacını da beraberinde getirmektedir. Gerçekten de her gün farklı blockchain ağı üzerinde kripto varlıklar üzerinde birçok işlem gerçekleştirilmekte, işlem hacmi de artmaktadır. Bu çalışmada söz konusu varlıkların hukuki niteliği incelenmeye çalışılmıştır. Hukuki nitelendirmeden yola çıkarak blockchain ağında gerçekleştirilen kripto varlık devir işlemlerinin borçlandırıcı işlem ve tasarruf işlemi boyutları ele alınmaya çalışılmıştır. Kripto varlıkların eşya niteliğini haiz olmaması, gerek borçlandırıcı işlem, gerek ise tasarruf işlemi açısından birçok sorunlara sebebiyet vermektedir. Kripto varlıkların devrine ilişkin sözleşmelerin niteliği ve özellikle ifa engelleri, mevcut düzenlemeler ışığında incelenmiştir. Yine kripto varlığın devri ile eş zamanlı olarak blockchain ağı dışındaki bir eşyanın devrinin de amaçlandığı kripto varlık türlerinde eşya hukuku ilkeleri açısından birçok sorun mevcuttur. İşte söz konusu işlemlerin hukuki bir zemine oturtulması amacıyla bu çalışmada hak kavramından hareketle kripto varlık üzerinde gerçekleştirilen işlemlerin borçlandırıcı işlem ve tasarruf işlemi boyutları ele alınmış, sorunlar tespit edilmeye çalışılmış ve mukayeseli hukuktan örneklerle muhtemel çözüm önerileri sunulmaya çalışılmıştır.

Vandana Cp, S. Kalaivanan, R Karthik, A. Sanjana

Due to the quick increase of IoT devices, they lack the authentication standards and administration needed to keep user data secure. Hackers could cause significant infrastructure harm by infiltrating a wide spectrum of IoT devices. Blockchain use in IoT technology guarantees trust and authentication across all IoT elements, resulting in IoT security. Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, and shared database that enables the creation of decentralized apps. Traceability, openness, immutability, and fault tolerance are some of the qualities of this technology that help maintain data privacy in IoT scenarios and thus create a safe environment. We look at a potential strategy for securely controlling IoT devices,i.e., devices connected to the internet using smart contracts on the blockchain in this study. This paper demonstrates how the proposed system comprising of a blockchain and smart contracts work efficiently in concurrence to avoid tampering by unauthorized parties. We have employed web3 library to control the linked devices by implementing Ethereum nodes (second most popular blockchain) on Raspberry Pi simulations and node.js.

Santosh Kumar Singh, Vikas Rao Vadi, Rajesh Kumar Tiwari, Ajay Kumar Pathak

The implementation of blockchain technology by various businesses has gained impetus at the same time as within the finance area it is achieving new heights progressively. To generate a distributed ledger a blockchain (data structure) is utilized. Basically, a blockchain is a collection of (a page of a ledger or record book) i.e. blocks in a sequential fashion. A record book holds all dealings, timestamps, the hash value of the preceding block, record book compensation, record book number, and others. Each single record book holds a hash value of the preceding record book or block, therefore making a series of record books accompanying one another. In this research work, while discovering these DApps, we will discover them at a stage that is sufficient to comprehend in what way they work and manage various concerns. In this research work, we will deliberate and recognize Blockchain arrangement, how Ethereum works, writing smart contracts, the introduction of web3.js, and wallet services. Finally, we put forward promising clarifications in detail for improving the safety of the distributed ledger for industrialized applications

Mona Schubert

How do feminist activists take over our feeds? And can we really escape the shadows of networked visibility? In a series of five case studies, this text and video-based _Perspective applies the method of visual research to analyze and cross-pollinate visual formulas and platform strategies of Pussy Riot’s and LASTESIS’ networked performances. What started as a social media revolution in 2012 has now spread into the realm of cryptocurrencies and Web3 advances. Formerly situated feminist protests become more and more decentralized and ubiquitory—and so do their audiences. Nonetheless, catering to the demands of networked imagery also entails perpetuating its hegemonic, exploitative, and violent nature, which is ultimately at the hands of the viewer’s and researcher’s interaction.

Ioannis Caragiannis, Nikolaj I. Schwartzbach

We study a scenario where an adjudication task (e.g., the resolution of a binary dispute) is outsourced to a set of agents who are appointed as jurors. This scenario is particularly relevant in a Web3 environment, where no verification of the adjudication outcome is possible, and the appointed agents are, in principle, indifferent to the final verdict. We consider simple adjudication mechanisms that use (1) majority voting to decide the final verdict and (2) a payment function to reward the agents with the majority vote and possibly punish the ones in the minority. Agents interact with such a mechanism strategically: they exert some effort to understand how to properly judge the dispute and cast a yes/no vote that depends on this understanding and on information they have about the rest of the votes. Eventually, they vote so that their utility (i.e., their payment from the mechanism minus the cost due to their effort) is maximized. Under reasonable assumptions about how an agent's effort is related to her understanding of the dispute, we show that appropriate payment functions can be used to recover the correct adjudication outcome with high probability. Our findings follow from a detailed analysis of the induced strategic game and make use of both theoretical arguments and simulation experiments.

Kuldeep Vayadande, Rahebar Shaikh, Suraj Rothe, Sangam Patil · 6 authors

In today’s world, having access to land records is a must and being able to see who owns the land property is important to allow crossverify ownership of the land in order for business purposes or for personal use. In India, maintaining the land record with the current population is a challenging task, and the current system was causing incomplete registries, leading to fraudulent activities. The current system being used by the government is inconsistent and has a lot of intermediaries who have access to the system and make changes to it. The use of Blockchain is increasing day by day, the government is trying to adopt technology, and web3.0 is the future we are heading; adding Land Records in Blockchain is very useful because it provides transparency for everyone. Allowing citizens to view the land record with a visual representation with maps will ensure everyone has access to these land records.

Lincy Golda Careline S, T. Godhavari

Electronic health records (EHR) play an important role in digital health transition. EHRs contain medical information such as demographics, laboratory test results, radiological images, vaccination status, insurance policy, and claims. EHR is essential for doctors and healthcare organizations to analyze a patient's profile and provide appropriate therapy. Despite this, current electronic health record (EHR) systems lag with difficulties such as Interoperability and security. Better and faster care may be provided with an integrated and secure health record for each patient that can be transmitted easily in real-time across countries. People having health insurance policies are often confronted by insurance jargon and the insurer’s cumbersome requirements while filing a claim for treatment. There are times when the claims processing takes longer than expected. The insurer, Third-Party Administrators (TPAs), and network provider hospitals examine, approve, and initiate the sum claimed. The use of blockchain in the process allows for more efficient information sharing at a lower cost and with more security. Only authorized individuals have access to the shared ledger on a blockchain, making it more confidential and secure. All parties engaged in a health insurance policy, including the insurer, the insured, the TPA, and the network provider hospital, may be members of the blockchain network and have access to the same set of policy data. In our proposed work we implemented a Blockchain-based EHR and Health insurance management system using Ethereum and deployed smart contracts using solidity and created a web application with web3js and React Framework.

Heyward Ehrlich

Poe came of age in what Frank Luther Mott described as a “Golden Age of Periodicals” in A History of American Magazines ([New York: D. Appleton, 1930], 337). Although “essentially a magazinist” (PL 476), Poe managed to become a major American author by working in the fruitful midground between books and newspapers. “The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward,” he wrote in 1846. “We now demand the light artillery of the intellect: we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand,” he warned, “the lightness of the artillery must not degenerate into the pop-gunnery . . . of the newspaper press” (Graham’s, December 1846, eapoe.org).What Poe called “pop-gunnery” in newspapers, anticipating the stream of social network items on the Internet today, had their place for him when he needed their special ambiance. Significantly, he announced his return to New York in 1844 by publishing his famous “Balloon-Hoax” as an extra of a penny paper, The Sun. It was issued on a single sheet surrounded by a mixture of announcements, events, and fiction reprints. Poe saw that the effects of the penny papers on “the whole newspaper business of the country . . . are probably beyond all calculation” (Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson [New York: Library of America, 1984], 1214; hereafter ER). The impact of The Sun was memorable: “Its success firmly established ‘the penny system’ throughout the country” . . . [becoming] one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress” (ER 1221). On the other hand, the penny press also contributed “an increasingly spicy diet of horror, gore, and perversity” (David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 171), suggesting at times a content approaching that of Poe’s most extreme tales.When “The Balloon-Hoax” was published, Richard Adams Locke edited The Sun, where his quite famous “Moon Hoax” had appeared eleven years before. Reviewing Locke afterward, Poe listed the main ingredients of a good hoax: “the novelty of the idea,” its “reason-repressing character,” the tact of the deception, and the “exquisite vraisemblance of the narration” (Godey’s, October 1846, eapoe.org). Suggesting a possible similarity between the hoax and the detective tale, Poe reminded us that the former challenged the reader with constant intellectual “correctness, and the consequent difficulty of detecting a flaw” (“Doings of Gotham,” 4, eapoe.org).Readers of a detective tale might enjoy the possibility, however difficult, of solving the crime, but readers of a hoax had to deal with the utter impossibility of the situation. In total, Poe wrote six hoaxes, each exhibiting a different kind of wit than that found in his detective tales. They further burnished his image as a very clever writer in what was, lest we forget, the age of P. T. Barnum. To a degree his hoaxes were the humorous literary equivalent of diddling, sharing its qualities of “minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin” (M 3:869–70; repr. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, ed. Mabbott [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 2: 869–70; hereafter M [2000] 2).Poe’s first hoax, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall” (Southern Literary Messenger, June 1835), as he later admitted, failed to achieve a consistency of approach, because he “fell back upon a style half plausible, half bantering” (Godey’s, October 1846, eapoe.org). The banter included the use of the date April 1, the description of the balloon as “entirely made of dirty newspapers,” and his use of Dutch-Irvingesque ambiance. In this and subsequent hoaxes, Poe always built on something that readers already knew. Recent press reports of balloon flights provided the starting point for “Hans Pfaall.” Early exploration attempts in the Antarctic provided information on which to base The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837). The famous Lewis and Clark expedition paved the way for its imaginary predecessor, “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (1840). Poe used the apparently inexhaustible subject of aerial travel again in “The Balloon-Hoax” (1844), where he incorporated as many supporting factual details as possible. The contemporary interest in hypnotism and mesmerism—forerunners of the modern concept of the unconscious—providedgrounds for his next hoax, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845). Finally, the contemporary gold craze and the myth of the transmutation of lead provided contexts for his last hoax, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1849).Poe claimed that the public widely believed his hoaxes. One reader, the historian Robert Greenhow, went so far as to mention “Julius Rodman” in his Memoir, Historical and Political, on the Northwest Coast of North America, and the Adjacent Territories (PL 289). Poe insisted that most readers believed his “Balloon-Hoax”: “Not one person in ten discredited it . . . chiefly the ignorant, because the thing was so novel, so entirely ‘out of the usual way’” (PL 161). For “Van Kempelen,” Poe made the similar claim that “nine persons out of ten (even among the best informed) will believe the quiz,” adding that as a “check to the gold fever, it will create a stir to some purpose” (PL 796). In private, however, Poe told a different story, responding to a query from Arch Ramsay, a Scottish druggist: “Hoax is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar’s case. . . . Some few persons believe it—but I do not—and don’t you” (PL 677).The press generally greeted Poe’s hoaxes with skepticism. However, reviewers at first were charmed by the novelty of “Hans Pfaall”: the Baltimore Republican saw it as “a capital burlesque upon balloonings” (PL 160), and the Charleston Messenger appreciated it as “one of the most exquisite specimens of blended humor and science” (PL 160–61). But reviewers who recalled that Arthur Gordon Pym had been party serialized “under the garb of fiction” could not accept it as a work of fact supposedly created by an actual Pym, then conveniently deceased. Although the New-Yorker praised Pym as a work of “extraordinary, freezing interest” (PL 250), the New York Mirror called Poe a “liar of the first magnitude” (PL 252) and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine declared it to be “a mass of ignorance and effrontery” (PL 254). The Naval and Military Gazette remarked that Poe’s Pym contained “not only the improbable but the impossible” (PL 257). Disdaining “The Balloon-Hoax” as “ridiculous,” James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald used the occasion to refer to the current Sun publisher, Moses Y. Beach, as “that manufacturer of hoaxes of all kinds” (PL 460).Taking advantage of the loose editorial standards of the day, Poe sometimes pursued the opportunity to exaggerate the extent of his accomplishments and even to fabricate details in his biography. For example, he reported that as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger he had increased the number of subscribers eightfold, from 700 to 5,500, in only fifteen months (Poe to Anthon, October 1844, eapoe.org), and later had boosted circulation at Graham’s tenfold (from 5,000 to 52,000) in only two years (ER 742). Poe’s estimates were repeated in some form in biographies and general reference works until Terrence Whalen, examining the surviving circulation records of the Southern Literary Messenger, found that subscriptions increased only modestly during Poe’s editorship, undermining his claims: “The oft-repeated Messenger story must therefore be seen as a deliberate act of deception” (Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999], 75).Perhaps in imitation of Byron, Poe added some details to his biography that made him seem more adventurous and more brilliant, and he also shaved two years off his official age. Poe gathered these claims for a biographical sketch intended for the Philadelphia Saturday Museum in 1843, hoping they would serve to promote his proposed magazine, The Stylus. The claims consisted entirely of “myths concerning the elopement of Poe’s parents, their death ‘on a visit to Richmond,’ Poe’s journey to Greece and St. Peterburg, [and] his return from Europe on the night after Mrs. Allan’s burial” (A. H. Quinn Edgar Allan Poe [1941; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998], 373). Although Poe expected his friend Frederick William Thomas to complete the article, Thomas, insisting he “knew more of his history,” demurred, and the sketch was completed by Henry W. Hirst, who claimed he had been helped by Thomas, which Poe dismissed as “a slight extension of the truth for which I pray you to forgive him” (Quinn 371). Thus, when Thomas confronted Poe regarding the inaccuracies and fictions in the sketch, he took the matter very lightly: “He was amused, and laughed the matter off by confessing that the story was intended to help the magazine project” (qtd. in Whalen 64).On another occasion, Poe insisted that the use of exaggeration was an essential element in the composition of “Berenice.” He famously enumerated the sources of the tale’s effectiveness: “In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical” (PL 150). Poe continued by applying the process to editing: “The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature—to Berenice.”Today, many species of exaggeration flourish in Silicon Valley, where careers are believed to thrive by following the maxim: “Fake it till you make it.” A recent severe example of the maxim was Elizabeth Holmes’s unicorn, her highly promising automated blood testing company Theranos. With her charming presence and appealing backstory, Holmes presented herself as a youthful, female version of the brilliantly successful Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. At its height Theranos raised an estimated $1 billion in investments, enjoyed a marketing agreement with Walgreen’s, and had an estimated stock value reaching as high as $10 billion. But Theranos proved to be something other than a legitimate invention seeking to turn a profit. On October 15, 2015, the Wall Street Journal began running a series of exposés revealing that the company’s signature device was a sham that had never worked; in order to perpetuate the lie, its supporting tests had been staged. In 2018 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Holmes with a “years-long fraud” of deceiving both investors and patients. In January 2022 a jury found her guilty of four counts of fraud. Although Facebook has literally billions of users, very few of them stop to think about how the service works. Indeed, even outside Facebook very few understand its inner operations. There was great interest therefore when Frances Haugen, a former data engineer at Facebook, turned whistleblower in September 2021, sharing with the Securities Exchange Commission, the Wall Street Journal, the British Parliament, EU authorities, and even 60 Minutes thousands of internal company documents. Her evidence suggested that Facebook prioritized its profits over the public interest in its handling of a long list of sensitive subjects, including “political misinformation, hate speech, teenage mental health, human trafficking, the promotion of ethnic violence, preferential treatment for certain users, and its communications with investors” (Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2021). Although Facebook employees spent 3.2 million hours tackling global issues of misinformation in 2020, Haugen’s documents disclosed that a disappointingly low 13 percent worked on content from outside the United States.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied to Haugen, “Many of the claims don’t make any sense. I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted” (Facebook, October 6, 2021). Facebook spokesperson Mitch Henderson said it had spent $13 billion and hired forty thousand people to work on safety-related issues, further claiming its artificial intelligence software was catching 90 percent of hate speech. In rebuttal, Haugen said the figure was less than 5 percent (New York Times, October 25, 2021).After the Haugen papers appeared, Facebook changed its identity, preferring to be known as Meta. Zuckerberg expressed the hope on October 26, 2021, that over the coming five years people would move from seeing Facebook as “a social media company to being a metaverse company.” Since “metaverse” had become a widely adopted buzzword with a variety of meanings and associations, for many observers this immediately clarified little. But Facebook did have a concrete plan to invest at least $10 billion in its VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and AI (artificial intelligence) activities. Zuckerman remarked, “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet” (Facebook, October 28, 2021). Nevertheless, whether known as Facebook or Meta, the stock of the company collapsed, falling from its high in September 2011 by 45 percent in February 2022 (Bloomberg, February 18, 2022).After the era of Web1, the text-based early web, and Web2, the era of the interactive commercial web, Web3 promised to bring AR, VR, and AI into the home. However, some observers remain skeptical about the promises of machine or artificial intelligence: “For instance, many companies who claim to have developed algorithms that can recognize complicated images or derive meaning from text with machine learning don’t always mention that humans are often doing much of that work behind the scenes” (Washington Post, January 4, 2022; hereafter WP).Outside Silicon Valley in the United States today, in an era of ultra-partisan politics, unbridled exaggeration in the form of misinformation, disinformation, fake news, doctored media, conspiracy theories, and outright lies has become dangerously prevalent. Recently the word “hoax” is more likely to be applied to discussions of partisan politics than to literary antics in magazines and newspapers. In the United States nearly everyone seems to believe in some national political hoax. To Trump supporters, the hoax is the theft of the 2020 election by Biden and his supporters. To Trump critics, the hoax is Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen, despite the denials of Trump’s vice president and attorney general. In addition, there are also a parallel pair of irreconcilable views of what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. While president, Trump was ceaselessly active on the social networks, especially Twitter. According to critical statistics gathered by the Washington Post Fact Checker newsletter, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first three years as president, with the number increasing each year: “Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third claims a day in his January hoaxes have been to contemporary fake news, even they never to political G. “Fake Poe’s and the that in their of penny press as The Sun readers to their 2020, At the the penny press to some extent the of a that has been as the of and (qtd. in people a among media for that their the be among in Poe A in point is Poe’s story of the outside the Sun for the his of the balloon in the has because his to believe this great Poe had described a of for a so that the the Sun was literally for most of the The and Thomas a different starting from his that Poe’s after a or two of him “not but Poe his to a newspaper for he the but by a of on the the and told the that the extra was a hoax, as he for he had it The the and the . . . saw his author what he to be the of American repr., New York: a and who had Poe times in In “The Poe described her as “a a a a and a of of more I not to (ER one of her to Poe he had ever praised a in for Poe replied that to an act would be an he that he had so when to a way of “not his to In Poe he was guilty of a the of (qtd. in Quinn with Poe that he and even with of Edgar Allan Poe repr., New York: hereafter However, in a subsequent he to the that he all “I on would to the very the I would have in from and from and on this are and in “The of apparently for Poe, the of newspapers, us in in it is the of to create a make a to further the of (qtd. in this how to create a among readers by content with the of some “The mass of the people as only him who of the general (M in a of far beyond the of success in the maxim “Fake it till you make it.” For Poe, was never a of a successful but a to a variety of and pursued this by two which have been described as and in an Poe never in partisan fake people his of exaggeration and him to his work to literary as he in his that a (ER For Poe, even after or public much he continued his for and in “I . . . from a mental and of in are at

Duckworth, Peter

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) facilitates a new chapter for the internet, one known as Web3. It is a back-end upgrade (Voshmgir, 2020, p. 28) that drives particularly rapid innovation in the finance industry. Its trajectory will be in part determined by the role of developer communities, innovators, and technology companies. It will be shaped by government supervisors and decisions by policymakers on how to foster innovation, control risk, or compete internationally. It is no secret that the ideals of DLT developers regarding decentralization and democratization are partly social in nature; indeed, their efforts have been recognized as the ultimate form of protest (Russo, 2020). Despite this, discussion of DLT developers as belonging to social movements or civil society is a research gap in the academic literature. In seeking a better political context for the social efforts of DLT developers, the first contribution of this thesis is a definitional distinction between DLT Automation and DLT Activism. The null hypothesis that DLT activism must exist as a theme in DLT narratives, presented by the mainstream written media, is then developed. This is done by tying together interdisciplinary literature on DLT, banking, environmental and social governance, as well as civil society, and social movements. The importance of decision framing in the media is discussed in the research methods section, along with natural language processing techniques used to test the hypothesis. The research methodology begins with a multi-label classification prediction model built using machine-learning packages available in Python. Predicted descriptive labels for a large sample of articles from The Economist magazine suggest the null hypothesis should be rejected. This outcome is subsequently validated more comprehensively using ProQuest command-line queries and a larger sample, which suggests that at a 5% confidence level there is evidence to accept the expanded hypothesis; that DLT activism exists as a minor theme in mainstream DLT narratives. The thesis concludes with discussion about the risk of divided partisan views about DLT. Technology is used to create decentralized organizations and facilitate widespread contractual cooperation. One could say that political polarization regarding DLT could result in extreme collective organization within, rather than across, group lines thereby exacerbating social cleavages. As democracy faces the growing challenge of political polarization, the inclusive and open ecosystems that DLT communities have nurtured so far should be studied more deeply with a view to strengthening cross-cutting ties. DLT communities should not be left to develop in an isolated and insular manner.

S. Hammer, Brett Hemenway

No abstract is available for this record.

Evanei Gomes dos Santos

No abstract is available for this record.

VILMA MATTILA, PRATIK GAURI, PRATEEK DWIVEDI, DHANRAJ DADHICH · 5 authors

With the growing interest in blockchain in both academic research and industry, the security and privacy of blockchains have attracted huge interest, even though only a small part of the blockchain platforms can achieve the set of abovementioned security goals in practice. Leveraging from the state-of-the-art security paradigms, we propose 5irechain protective covering which has the ability to continuously identify, map, scan, assess, and grade the risk portfolio of all the assets, vendors, and acquisitions of a company giving a hackers perspective to the company. The dashboard gives visibility of not just only the web2 infrastructure in place, but also covers the web3 space and allows 5ire to monitor all of its nodes and their activities including historical data, tracking large wallets, monitoring bot activity, detecting transaction stats and volume along with the ability to block possible large scale attacks.

Hanna Gawel

Pod koniec 2021 roku szacowano, że 300 milionów osób na całym świecie posiadało jakąś formę kryptowaluty. Dwie największe dźwignie popularności kryptowalut to DeFi i NFT. Gdy na początku 2021 roku NFT, czyli niewymienialne tokeny, wzbudziły lawinę transakcji detalicznych, duże marki zaczęły zwracać na to uwagę. NFT dają możliwość zachowania cyfrowego IP i aktywowania społeczności internetowych w sposób, który nigdy wcześniej nie był osiągalny. Jednakże, jak dotąd, nie obserwuje się "web3-natywnego" podejścia do NFT ze strony dużych marek. Oznacza to, że żadna marka nie zmieniła swojej architektury Web 2.0 i nie zastąpiła jej całkowicie strukturą Web 3.0. Zamiast tego, globalne firmy przyjęły bardziej ostrożne podejście, udostępniając kolekcje NFT jako odrębne człony swojej oferty, a zarazem stymulując rozwój skupionych wokół nich społeczności. Tę fazę, którą można określić mianem Web 2.5, cechuje stopniowe wdrażanie nowych technologii, takich jak NFT, z korzyścią zarówno do samej lansującej je marki, jak i dla konsumentów. Producenci połączyli to, co najlepsze w Web 3.0, ze sprawdzonymi modelami rozwoju i promocji Web 2.0. Zasadniczo tym właśnie jest Web 2.5: stapianiem innowacyjnych technologii web3, m.in. NFT, z infrastrukturą Web 2.0 i tworzeniem środowiska, które zapewnia odbiorcom silne immersyjne doświadczenia kształtujące więź z marką. Procesy te przedstawiam w artykule na przykładzie marek z sektora mody i sztuki.

Ben Vinod

No abstract is available for this record.

Marjory S. Blumenthal

ABSTRACT The period from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s saw the transformation of information and communication infrastructure. In the same period, TPRC evolved from a narrower focus on conventional telecommunications and information policy to “The Research Conference on Communications, Information, and Internet Policy.” Through the lens of my own interdisciplinary work on Internet policy and intersecting TPRC activity, this retrospective describes an arc of change that began at the 1994 TPRC and continued for about a decade. It combines description, commentary, and reflections on what this history might bode for TPRC as metaverses and Web3 progress from today’s hype to tomorrow’s Internet.

Seth Oranburg

No abstract is available for this record.

Heyward Ehrlich

The West Point classmate who appreciated Poe as a “fellow of talent” assumed that he would be “too mad a poet to like Mathematics” (PL 114). Mad or not, Poe began his lifelong interest in mathematics by standing a respectable seventeenth in his math class of eighty-seven cadets. Throughout his career he maintained a continual thread of logical and mathematical awareness in his detective tales, science fiction, Eureka, and criticism, in counterpoint to their Gothic elements. To follow up on the unprecedented success of “The Raven,” Poe surprised his readers with the mathematical claim in “The Philosophy of Composition” that he had written “The Raven” by following a few logical precepts: “No one point in its composition is referrable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (L2 61–62).Poe experienced in antebellum American literary culture an unprecedented combination of historical factors: geographic expansion on a continental scale, major moral reform, and sweeping technological innovations. These complexities give his career special relevance for us today as we face the dangerous mix of political uncertainties, COVID, Ukraine, and the dual economic worries of inflation and depression. Our response today is to turn toward the digital or virtual equivalents of in-person work and socialization. Thus traditional culture is being replaced to some extent by mechanized procedures and oceans of data. The new mathematical entities have been enlivened to some extent by assuming two-letter abbreviations: AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), and VR (virtual reality). Facebook, once a familiar and stable cultural standard, is now refashioning itself as Meta, transforming ordinary reality into AR (augmented reality).These fundamental transitions deeply affect the Internet, as might well be imagined. When websites first appeared in the 1990s, they were composed chiefly of static pages of information. In response to the innovations of interactive social networks, blogs, wikis, and shared media, Tim O’Reilly in 2004 introduced the term “Web 2.0.” In the early web, which became known retrospectively as Web 1.0, a typical attraction was the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, its static pages written by experts. In Web 2.0 the comparable page was Wikipedia, an ongoing compendium produced by multiple anonymous contributors. After smartphones encouraged the broad expansion of the Internet, Web 2.0, being largely unregulated, contained material that had legal protection, but which unprotected printed outlets could not risk publishing. One serious charge was that Web 2.0 had spread conspiracy theories, hate, and racist sentiments, and even lies and disinformation. At the same time, the Internet was accused of ignoring privacy, being flagrantly partisan in political elections, and offering unstable advice on the COVID pandemic. In addition, many web pages practiced what Shoshana Zuboff studied in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) as the relentless collection and sale of demographic data, location information, and personal habits online. The final effect is that the Internet, once trustworthy, is no longer so.In the worst case, a would-be shooter could take advantage of the low level of supervision in order to obtain on the Internet uncensured instructions on how to make bombs and ghost guns. Some shooters realized that their attacks could be live streamed, thereby encouraging other shooters. Thus in 2019 the New Zealand shooter who killed fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch live streamed the event, providing an example for the Buffalo shooter who used the Internet in multiple ways in his racist attack on a Tops supermarket in spring 2022. He drew information from BitChute, a video sharing site, Reddit, 4chan chat rooms, racist articles on HuffPost and Medium, and practical videos on YouTube. During his fatal shootings, he streamed video live on Twitch, afterward writing a diary, producing a 180-page manifesto, and posting details on Discord. The common thread in these mass shootings is the belief in replacement theory, the notion that Blacks, immigrants, and others were eliminating the dominant white culture in order to replace it with a radical alternative culture. The nonprofit site Media Matters for America reportedly found fifty ads on Facebook promoting replacement theory, some from candidates for political office, in addition to restored posts previously removed from mainstream platforms such as Twitter and Reddit (New York Times, June 1, 2022).Today, as the Internet turns from Web 2.0 to what is called Web3, many observers hope that its new technologies will provide protection that the legal system has failed to offer thus far. Thus Web3 holds up some hope, although most users may still not know what it is. The term could not be explained by 70 percent of the readers of the Harvard Business Review in a survey conducted online on LinkedIn in March 2022. The promise of Web3, to use its own terminology, would be to store data on the blockchain of individual users and rely on its own cryptocurrency to replace transactions of untrustworthy governments and large organizations. The general promise of blockchain is that it would take power now concentrated in the hands of Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft and redistribute it across the Internet to empower ordinary users.Many claims are now being made for this new technology. Web3 is decentralized because ownership is distributed among its builders and users. Web3 is permissionless because everyone has equal access. Web3 uses native payments of cryptocurrency instead of banks and payment processors. Web3 is trustless: it operates using incentives and economic mechanisms. Two more features: Web3 uses DeFi, decentralized finance, and DAO, decentralized autonomous organizations.Supporters argue that Web3 will provide increased data security, scalability, and privacy for users, combating the influence of large technology companies. However, critics are concerned that a decentralized web with low regulation can disseminate harmful content and end up concentrating new wealth in a small group of early investors, turning crypto into a Ponzi scheme.Thomas Stackpole’s balanced response in response to the question “What Is Web3?” appeared in the Harvard Business Review of May 10, 2022. Much interest in Web3 stems from envy or FOMO (fear of missing out) because some early investors had reported making a fortune by investing in crypto. Memorably, famous media stars, not just techno-libertarians and bank haters, were appearing as advocates on TV and in commercials. What started as a curiosity and speculative niche became big business.Crypto is supported by blockchain, which is a “distributed ledger” whose database is backed by a network of independent computers. The idea of the “digital deed” is to support the ownership records of unique digital objects, which are called nonfungible tokens or NFTs. In 2022, their market was said to be worth $41 billion, a value that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Needless to say, blockchain faces major technical, environmental, ethical, and regulatory hurdles as well as the hazards of intentional abuse. Nevertheless, some experiments in Web3 are now underway in the communities of the NBA, Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and Time magazine. However, the assets of Web3 are highly concentrated: “The top 0.01% of bitcoin holders own 27% of the supply” (bitcoinist.com).To some critics, Web3 seems to be largely speculation in cryptocurrencies, a mirroring of the shadow banking practices that resulted in the 2008 financial crisis. At one time the value of crypto is said to have risen as high as $3 trillion, but in the summer of 2022 it reportedly fell to $1 trillion (decrypt.co). The skeptic Jim Chanos, an American investment manager, called crypto a “predatory junkyard”; columnist Paul Krugman labeled crypto a “postmodern pyramid scheme” (New York Times, July 12, 2022). In China and eight other countries, cryptocurrencies have already been banned, and its treatment under European regulations remains unclear. Despite catastrophic losses, the enthusiasm of some advocates of crypto remains undampened (New York Times, August 2, 2022).Many of the hopes and fears concerning Web3 depend on its use of big data and mathematical procedures, which add convenience but also weaken human control. The huge swings of opinion on the subject may reflect the public’s low level of mathematical literacy. In Poe’s case, some contemporaries were distressed by what they saw as his excessively mathematical side. Charles Frederick Briggs, founder of the Broadway Journal, who hired Poe as an editor, complained about Poe to James Russell Lowell on June 27,1845: “I think a machine, something like Babbage’s[,] might be constructed to write poetry and criticisms like his” (www.eapoe.org). Poe had been early aware of Babbage’s computer, mentioning it in “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836) and again in “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade” (Godey’s Lady’s Book, February 1845), which Briggs excerpted in the Broadway Journal on January 25, 1845 (PL 497), just a few days before the publication of “The Raven.”In the poem Poe used the raven, a highly intelligent animal with deep associations in myth, prophecy, and tradition, for its special voice reputedly resembling that of human speech. Poe’s tale of a bereaved lover is cast as a ballad in which he asks a series of questions to which the raven speaks the refrain “Nevermore” in reply. The lover’s midnight reading is interrupted by an outbreak of involuntary memory (to use Proust’s term) of his sorrowful thoughts of the loss of his “sainted Lenore,” now in heaven, hoping for a joyous future reunion with her in the afterlife. However, the raven’s refrain “Nevermore” startles him, denying this meeting will ever take place, then resisting the lover’s attempt to dismiss him. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe quotes the final text that presents the image of the shadow of the raven on the floor, and the startling disclosure that the shadow now contains the young man’s soul:Then, perhaps for the benefit of genteel readers of Graham’s, where the essay appeared, Poe describes the final effect of the poem as “Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (L2 70), a deep sentiment that Kenneth Silverman uses as the subtitle of his biography of Poe. However, some readers have had a different understanding, seeing allegorical significance in the young man’s soul leaving his body and becoming entrapped in the raven’s shadow on the floor, never to leave. Here “Nevermore” is not the raven’s refrain but the young man’s own description, concluding the ballad with the allegorical suggestion that the young man’s trapped soul signified his realization of his imminent fate of madness, death, and damnation. In this reading, the closing text of the poem does not support Poe’s account of the young man’s final sentimental and melancholy separation from Lenore; instead, the ballad concludes abruptly with the shock, amplified by its severe understatement, of the young man’s first realization of the full extent of his final moral state and its associated terror and horror.Although Poe may not have been, as his West Point classmate claimed, “too mad a poet to like Mathematics,” he evidently realized at some point that a reputation for mathematical proficiency would do wonders for his reputation. Thus he also adds a second mathematical claim in “The Philosophy of Composition,” namely that “the extent of a poem” exists in a “mathematical relation to its merit . . . [adding that] the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect” (L2 62). Indeed, a short poem such as a sonnet may be more intense than a long epic, but Poe’s claim of a precise “direct ratio” in the number of lines overstates the case. Nevertheless, Poe understood that exaggeration in matters of appearance could make an impression more memorable. In private, Poe admitted that what he called his tales of ratiocination could owe more to their novelty than to their logical discipline. “These tales of ratiocination,” Poe wrote to Phillip P. Cooke, “owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious—but people think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method” (PL 661).“Poe in Cyberspace” columns are available online at eapoe.info.

Chuan Chen, Lei Zhang, Yihao Li, Tianchi Liao · 8 authors

With the continuous development of web technology, Web 3.0 has attracted a considerable amount of attention due to its unique decentralized characteristics. The digital economy is an important driver of high-quality economic development and is currently in a rapid development stage. In the digital economy scenario, the centralized nature of the Internet and other characteristics usually bring about security issues such as infringement and privacy leakage. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how to use Web 3.0 technologies to solve the pain points encountered in the development of the digital economy by fully exploring the critical technologies of digital economy and Web 3.0. In this paper, we discuss the aspects of Web 3.0 that should be integrated with the digital economy to better find the entry point to solve the problems by examining the latest advances of Web 3.0 in machine learning, finance, and data management. We hope this research will inspire those who are involved in both academia and industry, and finally help to build a favourable ecology for the digital economy.

Brett Hemenway, Sarah Hammer

No abstract is available for this record.

Clark D. Asay

The software industry's history is also its future. Its history has been defined by both abundance and scarcity, and its future will be, too. In the 1970s and 80s, perceived software scarcity led U.S. legislators to formally grant intellectual property protections to software creators. Later, a different kind of scarcity-a lack of access to source code-led the founders of the free and open source software movement to flip intellectual property protections on their head in an effort to better promote abundance. That movement proved wildly successful, with today's software industry based on vast amounts of freely available open source software resources that both organizations and individuals collaboratively build. Abundance and scarcity will also define software's future, but in different ways. The abundance that the open source software movement spawned is in the midst of a significant commercial phase. That sometimes means that commercial competitors bring to the table a scarcity mindset that conflicts with the norms that made that movement so successful. Intellectual property concerns at times derail what may otherwise be even greater software abundance. And because so much software is moving into the Cloud, trade secrecy may become the software industry's most important form of intellectual property to the extent the industry abandons open models of innovation. The software industry's growing dependence on artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to contribute to these trends. The software industry is increasingly becoming synonymous with the AI industry, as more and more software companies either rely on AI in running their services or provide AI products to the public. As with all software, these AI technologies are increasingly provided from the Cloud, where trade secrecy is not only possible, but often preferable. But trade secrecy may be even more likely in the AI context because much of the magic in implementing AI systems lies in the know-how to piece them together from available open source software resources, decades-old AI techniques, and data. Hence, to the extent that software and AI technologists spurn open innovation in favor of a scarcity mindset, trade secrecy is likely to become its dominant form of legal protection. The advent of web3 technologies may eventually change some of these trends. But for now, increasing secrecy seems the most likely outcome. I conclude by arguing that this shift to secrecy is likely preferable to other forms of intellectual property.

Mikołaj Barczentewicz

No abstract is available for this record.

Abhinav Yadav, Amrit Kanoi, Ramani Selvanambi

Blockchain is one of the technologies that is gaining significant attention within the healthcare industry. In order for blockchain to reach its full potential, it's essential that governments and public institutions map the blockchain ecosystem and establish a blockchain framework for coordinating early adopters. The authors have proposed a web-based application using blockchain with security algorithms to store patients' and other users' details who sign up on the website. Blockchain is highly secure as any tampering with data in any block is not possible. Blockchain attributes ensure smooth interaction between different applications and systems along the availability chain. They also reward the patient with their own implemented bitcoin on their transaction. Ethereum library Web3 is used to make a complete decentralized peer-to-peer chat service without any involvement of a third party. The application will be able to send encrypted messages both securely and anonymously. Blockchain technology has been seeing widespread interest as a means to ensure the CIA triad in fewer environments.