Information extraction and data mining are the important aspects in blockchain technology. Big- data mining tools can perform pattern recognition assignments from thousands to billions of blockchain communications to recognize evil users and fraudulent transactions. The current information extraction algorithms have the limitations of large memory occupation, long running time, high dimensionality, low extraction accuracy, poor convergence precision and slow convergence speed. There is a need to devise newer techniques with the potential of fast and accurate information extraction features in blockchain based systems to support high risk international financial transactions. Thus, in this paper, the automatic extraction algorithm of data mining as a case study of blockchain communications based on QACS (quantum adaption cuckoo search) method is proposed. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used to map the original features of blockchain communications into low-dimensional feature space through linear transformation, and then to replace the original features with fewer absolutely needed features. The features of coding information in information management system are reduced, and the optimal feature subset is obtained. K-means is used to extract the key information in the optimal feature subset. An improved and adaptive Cuckoo search is proposed in this paper where quantum operation is introduced into the original K-means algorithm for automatic extraction of coded information in blockchain communications. The results prove that the proposed QACS method has the potential of automatic extraction of the encoded information with lower execution time, higher extraction accuracy, and faster convergence speed, and is significant for blockchain based systems.
Blockchain is a tamper-proof distributed ledger for tracking public or private pair transactions in pair networks that can not be retroactively changed without modifying all corresponding network blocks. The Consensus Protocol upgrades a blockchain, which guarantees a sequential, unambiguous transaction ordering. Blocks ensure that the blockchain is integral and uniform across a network of distributed nodes. Different blockchain implementations use different consensus protocols. This paper offers a brief overview of the most important discrepancies between the Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum distributed ledger technologies (DLT).
Defending the “Catalan separatist cause,” as Antonio Bar calls it,1 through arguments provided by disciplines such as political philosophy, constitutional theory, or history, is not a sin. It may be a sin if we take the almost religious vision of the 1978 Spanish Constitution that Antonio Bar offers in his vigorous critique of my article: a vision that reveals the “hubris” to which I referred in my contribution and that, as I argued, embeds the Spanish constitutional system and its interpreters when the issue of Spanish national unity is at stake. Bar’s narrative, to sum it up, is grounded in the idea that there is no national conflict between Spain and Catalonia. According to his historical description, Bar argues not only that there is no national conflict under the current constitutional regime but also that there has never been any kind of confrontation since the creation of the Spanish Kingdom in the fifteenth century. Modern Spain, in Bar’s perspective, would have been the outcome of a harmonious national construction, of which the 1978 Constitution would represent the coronation. In my opinion such an interpretation of the past and recent history of Spain is unsustainable (not surprisingly, Bar does not provide any single reference from an historian to support his thesis) and can only be explained through the lens of an idealization closer to mythology than to reality. In fact, my historical considerations do not go back until the Middle Ages, as Bar’s do, to analyze the present political and legal configuration of Spain. My concern is centered in pointing out that at least from 2003 in Catalonia there has been an absolute majority in a democratically elected Parliament claiming for a change in Catalonia’s political status, and from 2015 such a sustained majority has directly demanded unilateral secession with the aim of founding an independent Catalan republic. We may discuss, as Bar only secondarily does, and I shall develop in this reply, if such a majority is enough or not to trigger a secessionist process, but what seems to me beyond dispute is that there is a conflict, and that this conflict has a national background. I have tried to explore the origins of the Catalan-Spanish conflict in Spain’s twentieth century and, particularly, through the Spanish Civil War, the dictatorship of General Franco, and the so-called Spanish transition which led to the approval of the 1978 Spanish Constitution. In this latter period, according to Bar’s interpretation, it seems not to be relevant that the Spanish Constitution was passed after a long and ferocious authoritarian regime within a context in which the power structure of the dictatorship (from the army to the judiciary) remained unreformed. To me (and I invoke several and recent studies on the Spanish transition arguing that this process was the most violent of regime changes in Europe in recent decades, second only to the case of the 1989 Romanian revolution2) this factor is crucial, and helps to understand the present attitude of the Spanish central authorities toward the Catalan challenge. But from Bar’s statements denying that there is a conflict between Catalonia and Spain may be inferred another distorted view that has relevant legal consequences: the idea according to which there is no conflict because there are not different peoples or, in other words, the Catalan people is not differentiated from the Spanish one (“the original national identity of Catalonia, differentiated and separate from the set of Spanish “demoi” does not exist”). I can understand that from the strong Spanish nationalistic view that Bar holds in his reply, it is vital to strike against the notion of the Catalans as a people (as we shall see, if there is a “people,” there is a collective right recognized in the international order as well: the right to self-determination) but, aside from the fact that the denial of the existence of the Catalan people is a dangerous road taken by all the nationalistic perspectives of states that have denied national pluralism, Bar’s position is not even admissible by Spanish constitutional law. This establishes, as the 1978 Spanish Constitution certainly does, that only the Spanish people understood as a whole is the bearer of sovereignty, but it does not imply blindness to the national character of the Catalans as a differentiated people. Beyond the different attributes associated with a people that have been provided by history, sociology, or culture (that the Catalans with their own language, their own culture, and their common history fully accomplish as any other stateless nation in Europe), the presence of other peoples within the Spanish state is even eschewed by the Spanish constitutional system itself. In the preamble of the Constitution, for instance, is mentioned the aim to “protect all the Spaniards and all the Spanish peoples” and, in fact, the inclusion of the term “nationality” as an agent of political autonomy is likely to outline a frame of democratic decision grounded in another popular entity beyond the Spanish people. The creation of the Autonomous Community after passing a statute voted in a referendum only by the Catalan citizens in 1979 (as was passed an amendment to such statute in 2006) only confirms that the Spanish constitutional system has provided a space of decision reserved to the Catalans understood as political agents differentiated from the Spanish demos. Something similar might be said of the periodical elections celebrated at the Catalan Parliament in which only the Catalan citizens can vote and, as we have seen, in which the pro-independence parties have gained an absolute majority of seats since 2015, the latter circumstance being the core of the problem that we are discussing in these pages. And so to my view on the original Spanish constitutional design that is not as negative as Bar attributes to me: in short, I think that the turbulent context in which the 1978 Spanish Constitution was enacted was not as problematic as the persistence of the most centralist and conservative interpretation adopted in the present by the central Spanish authorities regarding the Catalan question. To some degree, violence, domination, and exclusions are always involved in any process of both state-building and constitution-making. We may take experiences of this sort that go from the independence of the American states and the formation of the United States in the eighteenth century, to the foundation of the German Federal Republic after World War II. What matters, following an insight which might be best represented by the writings of Jürgen Habermas, is if such constitutional design is able to channel the ongoing conflicts emerging within its society under the principles of democracy, inclusiveness, and respect for fundamental rights.3 My idea is that the frame to provide solutions of national identity based on claims in terms of recognition of national plurality was originally envisaged by the Spanish constitutional system. However, in my opinion (and that is what I call the “constitutional sin”), when the Catalan claim for independence arose given the unsatisfactory response by the Spanish central authorities to the amendment of the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, the Spanish constitutional system was unable to face up to the problem in the manner in which a constitutional democracy is expected to do (and in which, in fact, other constitutional democracies such as Canada and the United Kingdom have done). Instead, all the ghosts related to the fears of Spanish territorial disintegration, which forged Spanish nationalism under the Franco era, were resuscitated. The Spanish state apparatus, from the Spanish government to the Spanish Constitutional Court, struggled to repress what was a democratically expressed demand by blocking any negotiation on the organization of a referendum, by criminalizing it, by sending the security forces to beat the Catalan voters who gathered in front of the polling stations on October 1, 2017 (something never seen in a constitutional democracy and only experienced in the 1999 East Timor independence referendum), and, summarizing, by violating fundamental rights. The premises of my analysis are, in short, (i) that there is a conflict and (ii) that in a liberal democracy such conflict may only be solved through democracy, fundamental rights, and negotiation and, as I will develop, with a notion from international law specially relevant in order to arrange claims based on national identity: the people’s right to self-determination (recognized by Spanish constitutional law via ratification in 1977 of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). The key concept of my narrative on the Catalan secessionist process is, of course, the democratic and strictly peaceful character of the demand. Such a point marks a difference between the Catalan case and what has been usual regarding other counties’ experiences in accessing statehood: the democratic and peaceful nature of the Catalan pro-independence movement is what makes more acute the long observed contradiction between democracy and constitutional supremacy that has deserved the work of a wide range of contemporary constitutional theorists who I mention in my article (from Bruce Ackerman to James Tully). It is at this point that I have to express my strong disagreement with Bar’s view (which is also the view of the Spanish prosecutor and some members of the Spanish judiciary) regarding the supposed crimes committed by the organizers of the referendum of October 1, 2017. Organizing a referendum (even an illegal one) is not a crime sanctioned by the Spanish Penal Code, as I explained in my article, a point that Bar does not examine at all in his reply. It must also be remarked, in contrast to Bar’s vision, that the acts that occurred in October 2017 in Catalonia were not violent but peaceful demonstrations. The only violence experienced was that perpetrated by the Spanish police, storming the polling stations, as was witnessed all over the world through the broadcasts provided by international media. One of the main pieces of evidence that demonstrates the lack of violence in the Catalan authorities’ actions was that provided by the Schleswig-Holstein High Court’s ruling, in Germany, rejecting the extradition on charges of rebellion of Catalan President Carles Puigdemont. In that ruling the Schleswig-Holstein High Court stated that Puigdemont did not exercise any kind of violence in order to reach Catalan independence, and that violence was not involved in the events of October 2017 to the degree of considering that a rebellion took place.4 Bar, and something similar might be said of both the Spanish prosecutor and part of the Spanish judiciary, would have to justify how it can be possible that all the exiled Catalan politicians who organized the referendum of October 1, 2017, including the leader, Carles Puigdemont, are free European citizens in every European Union member state except Spain. Instead, their colleagues in the former Catalan government who remained within Spanish territory have been indicted and imprisoned, accused of committing crimes sanctioned with twenty-five years of prison. My answer is that the Spanish authorities, expressing another constitutional sin, consider to be serious crimes facts that any other European democracy would not punish through criminal law, simply because, as happens with voting in a referendum, they should not be considered crimes. The democratic and peaceful vindication of Catalan sovereignty, which has instigated the interest of several theorists on secessionism,5 should, from my perspective, lead to the vexing question of how to deal with a widespread demand for independence of a stateless nation within a state demographically dominated by a larger nation, when this latter controls the procedure of constitutional amendment. The majority of the Catalan Parliament, backed by a majority of the Catalan citizenry, as I explained, has been recurrently reminded that it has to obey the rule of law and the procedures of constitutional amendment. But how can such a requirement be observed if the political majority of the state as a whole is not interested at all in sharing power or changing the constitutional rules to benefit the national minority?6 To me an interesting possibility to disentangle such a conundrum is translating the question into the language of the right to self-determination of peoples. The right of people’s self-determination, in a nutshell, is the right to decide freely on the people’s political status. Such a definition may be inferred from some advisory opinions rendered by the International Court of Justice7 and has been pinpointed by Antonio Cassese8 and some other prominent figures of international public law doctrine.9 The free determination of its own political status would seem to imply the power of the people to make fundamental constitutional choices, such as becoming an independent state or enacting an initial constitution for the newly created sovereign entity.10 In a liberal democracy the right of self-determination has been usually understood as the right to internal self-determination,11 since it has been considered that the democratic decision-making process would enable the people concerned to decide, both via elections or referendum, their accommodation within the state in whatever form they choose: mere administrative decentralization, political autonomy, federal statehood, or even co-sovereign partnership. Only when the decision-making processes in establishing the political status according to the will of a free people fail can the door for that people be opened to claiming the right of self-determination in its external fashion, namely, to create a new independent state. Such processes may be described from another point of view: if a liberal democracy is unable to ensure the accommodation of a national community within a large state by democratic means, maybe it is because the problem lies in the democratic quality of that larger state. Rather, thus, than being a problem of nationalism, it would be a problem of democracy, which would be one of the main arguments of my article. The right to self-determination (even this statement may be strongly contested by international law interpreters) enshrines the dialectic between the right to internal self-determination and the conditions that may legitimize the claim for external self-determination.12 In that way, the violation of basic human rights and the corrosion of the democratic decision-making processes threatening the channels in which a people expresses its decisions on its political status strengthen the justification of that people in its claim to secede. I think that the Supreme Court of Canada nicely captured some of the terms of the discussion here presented, when it dealt with the question of the secession of Quebec in its famous advisory opinion rendered on the August 20, 1998, in which, in summary, the court refused that the people of Quebec had the right of self-determination as provided in international public law.13 Quebec’s citizenry, stated the Court, was not denied participation in the governmental decision making-processes through democratic means.14 “The recognized sources of international law establish that the right to self-determination of a people is normally fulfilled through internal self-determination, a people’s pursuit of its political, economic, social, and cultural development within the framework of an existing state. A right to external self-determination (which in this case potentially takes the form of the assertion of a right to unilateral secession) arises in only the most extreme of cases and, even then, under carefully defined circumstances.”15 The right of the people of Quebec to internal self-determination would consequently have been ensured by Canadian constitutional law, for instance, to the extent that they had been even allowed to celebrate two referenda on Quebec’s sovereignty. Such an opportunity, as I have developed in my previous article, was denied in the case of Catalonia by the Spanish constitutional system. The basic claim of my approach is that the refusal and the criminalization of a secessionist referendum, by the Spanish constitutional system, reveal that the Catalans are deprived of deciding freely on their political status. The events in October 2017 would, in this fashion, be the corollary of a process that began at least a decade ago, from which might be inferred the frustration of the Catalan people’s right to “internal” self-determination. It began with the Spanish Constitutional Court 2010 ruling, declaring unconstitutional and void the basic architecture of the amendment to the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia (which had been passed by the Catalan people via referendum), and it continued with the Spanish central authorities, refusal of any fiscal agreement (2012) and any public consultation or referendum on the political status of Catalonia (2012–2017) and culminated with the seizing of the Catalan autonomy (October 2017–May 2018) and the incapability of the Spanish central government to give any political response to the Catalan pro-independence majority which has been confirmed in every election held in Catalonia from 2017. The Spanish constitutional debate on Catalonia is, in conclusion, stuck. It is stuck in terms of any Catalan demand on sovereignty, but it is stuck on any major constitutional development within Spain as a whole to face up to the Catalan crisis as well. For this reason, even assuming that that there is no clear majority among the Catalan population supporting Catalan unilateral secession from Spain (which is arguable given the pro-independence parliamentarian majority), there is a clear majority supporting a change of the Catalan political status that is systematically denied by the Spanish central authorities. There is a reiterated refusal to recognize and permit the right of the Catalan people to internal self-determination, on the part of Spanish constitutional structures as interpreted by the Spanish central authorities. Antonio Bar argues that the 47.5 percent of the vote in terms of individual suffrages in the 2017 Catalan Parliamentarian elections would be insufficient to admit the existence of a pro-independence majority in Catalonia. But, first, the majority existing around the Catalan claim for independence can only be precisely calibrated in a referendum with a clear question posed on Catalonia’s full sovereignty (not in Parliamentary elections) which is exactly what is forbidden according to the Spanish constitutional system. And, second, even a broader majority within Catalonia wouldn’t be enough to trigger any constitutional amendment procedure on Catalonia’s sovereignty since they decisively depend on the consent of the majority of the Spanish nation as a whole, which will never consent to transfer any sovereign power to the Catalans. It may be argued, as Richard Caplan and Zachary Vermeer do,16 that the Catalan case is not extreme enough in terms of repression and human rights violations to consider that the Catalan people has seen its internal right to self-determination frustrated. But my point, from a normative theoretical perspective, would be that within a liberal democracy it should not have to be necessary to ask for further violence, to depart from the principle of territorial integrity or, more precisely, from the constitutional clauses on national unity underpinned by the majoritarian nation of that state. Recognition in the form of a referendum should come before the outburst of a highly escalated conflict. After all, modernity and liberalism have granted a right to adopt decisions concerning every facet of our lives (with whom we marry or from whom we divorce, in what we work, in what we believe), but it is likely that when we challenge the still basic units of political organization and identity, the existing nation states, the response in a supposed democratic context (being Spain, the European Union, or the broader community of liberal democracies) is closer to ancient times than to modernity.