Blockchain-Research and Applications最新文献

In March 2021, we witnessed a surge in Bitcoin price. The cause seemed to be a tweet by Elon Musk. Are other blockchains as sensitive to social media as Bitcoin? And more precisely, could Ethereum's popularity be explained using social media data?

This work aims to explore the determinants of Ethereum's popularity. We use both data from Etherscan to retrieve the relevant historic Ethereum factors and Twitter data. Our sample consists of data ranging from 2015 to 2022. We use Ordinary Least Squares to assess the relationship between these factors (Ethereum characteristics and Twitter data) and Ethereum's popularity.

Our findings show that Ethereum's popularity—translated here by the number of daily new addresses—is related to the following elements: the Ether (ETH) price, the transaction fees, and the polarity of tweets related to Ethereum.

The results could have multiple practical implications for both researchers and practitioners. First of all, we believe that it will enable readers to better understand the technology of Ethereum and its stake. Secondly, it will help the community identify pointers for anticipating or explaining the popularity of existing or future platforms. And finally, the results could help in understanding the factors facilitating the design of future platforms.

The energy use of Bitcoin is fiercely debated among academics, practitioners, and the general public. This debate is often biased and characterized by a lack of understanding. Therefore, I start this paper with a discussion of the fundamentals of Bitcoin, which includes the clarification of widely held misconceptions. Next, I illustrate how Bitcoin is related to energy and describe the underlying incentive mechanism. In the main body of the paper, I discuss various components of Bitcoin’s energy use, including the amount, composition, and geographical distribution of the energy, as well as emerging positive and negative effects. These components are then combined into a comprehensive framework that provides a solid foundation for future academic research and presents practitioners with the big picture of how and why Bitcoin requires energy and whether this can be justified from an environmental point of view.

During the COVID-19 crisis, the need to stay at home has increased dramatically. In addition, the number of sick people, especially elderly persons, has increased exponentially. In such a scenario, home monitoring of patients can ensure remote healthcare at home using advanced technologies such as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The IoMT can monitor and transmit sensitive health data; however, it may be vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, an efficient healthcare security system is proposed for IoMT applications. In the proposed system, the medical sensors can transmit sensed encrypted health data via a mobile application to the doctor for privacy. Then, three consortium blockchains are constructed for load balancing of transactions and reducing transaction latency. They store the credentials of system entities, doctors' prescriptions and recommendations according to the data transmitted via mobile applications, and the medical treatment process. Besides, cancelable biometrics are used for providing authentication and increasing the security of the proposed medical system. The investigational results show that the proposed system outperforms existing work where the proposed model consumed less processing time by values of 18%, 22%, and 40%, and less energy for processing a 200 ​KB file by values of 9%, 13%, and 17%. Finally, the proposed model consumed less memory usage by values of 7%, 7%, and 18.75%. From these results, it is clear that the proposed system gives a very reliable and secure performance for efficiently securing medical applications.

The bunker industry has faced negative perception to their trust and credibility in recent times. This is further compounded by the need for the industry to answer new challenges to meet the requirement of the International Maritime Organization 2020. The aim of this work is to illustrate how blockchain technology may be adopted for aiding in bunker dispute resolution.

To demonstrate how blockchain may aid in disputes within the bunker industry, this paper first examines the existing bunker supply process, which involves the formation of contracts under English law, the Bunker Delivery Notes, the different types of disputes that may arise during a bunker transaction and the methods of dispute resolution utilised by the industry. Furthermore, the current literature in relation to blockchain technology and blockchain smart contracts is examined. Finally, interviews and surveys within the industry have been conducted to identify the benefits and challenges in adopting blockchain technology.

The research found that blockchains may benefit the bunker supply chain offering the effective resolution of bunker quality disputes. Furthermore, blockchains may also serve as a verification tool for electronic bunker delivery notes, which may aid quality and quantity bunker disputes as well as compliance with the new International Maritime Organisation 2020 requirements. As a result, despite the research having shown blockchain to be situationally dependent and having an element of legal uncertainty, blockchain does offer a solution to aid in bunker disputes and for improving the trust and credibility within the bunker industry.

Context

Decentralized autonomous organizations are a new form of smart contract-based governance. Decentralized autonomous organization platforms, which support the creation of such organizations, are becoming increasingly popular, such as Aragon and Colony. Selecting the best fitting platform is challenging for organizations, as a significant number of decision criteria, such as popularity, developer availability, governance issues, and consistent documentation of such platforms, should be considered. Additionally, decision-makers at the organizations are not experts in every domain, so they must continuously acquire volatile knowledge regarding such platforms.

Objective

Supporting decision-makers in selecting the right decentralized autonomous organization platforms by designing an effective decision model is the main objective of this study. We aim to provide more insight into their selection process and reduce time and effort significantly by designing a decision model.

Method

This study presents a decision model for the decentralized autonomous organization platform selection problem. The decision model captures knowledge regarding such platforms and concepts systematically. This model is based on an existing theoretical framework that assists software engineers with a set of multi-criteria decision-making problems in software production.

Results

We conducted three industry case studies in the context of three decentralized autonomous organizations to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the decision model in assisting decision-makers. The case study participants declared that the decision model provides significantly more insight into their selection process and reduces time and effort.

Conclusion

We observe in the empirical evidence from the case studies that decision-makers can make more rational, efficient, and effective decisions with the decision model. Furthermore, the reusable form of the captured knowledge regarding decentralized autonomous organization platforms can be employed by other researchers in their future investigations.

The language barrier is the biggest obstacle for users watching foreign-language videos. Because of this, videos cannot be famous across borders, and their viewership is limited to a single language and culture. The easiest way to solve this problem is to add subtitles in the language of the viewer. However, the current subtitling system lacks incentives, the ability to build a secure transaction environment, and a trusting relationship between video creators and subtitling makers. In response to the above situation, a tokenized subtitling crowdsourcing system (TSCS) based on blockchain and smart contract technologies is proposed. The source files for the subtitles are stored on the inter-planetary file system (IPFS) in the proposed system. Based on the ERC-721 standard, the returned corresponding address and subtitling-related information are made into a non-fungible token (NFT). At the same time, depending on the expected revenue from video view counts, the video token (VT), based on the ERC-777 standard and endorsed by the video platform, will be used as the payment token. The TSCS has two payment strategies: one-time and dividend. Through such a settlement mechanism, the subtitling maker’s revenue is also guaranteed by the code invariance and rule certainty of smart contract deployment. On the other hand, introducing an incentive mechanism for viewers to audit subtitles enables community autonomy, thus increasing the applicability of subtitles and the activity of users.

Smart contracts show a high potential to make supply chain management strategies epochally leap towards higher levels of productivity, not only in the functioning of production processes but also in terms of product innovation and overall economic returns. This article illustrates the principle of Income Sharing as a highly performing economic strategy for supply chains with a natural implementation in blockchain smart contracts. It proposes a blockchain-based architecture that uses smart contracts to implement various algorithmic versions of the Income Sharing principle among companies participating in a supply chain. The formation of the total income and its consequent redistribution are calculated taking into account the role of the technological platform automating these procedures, which therefore becomes a party to the inter-company business project of a supply chain in the alternative roles, as feasible in business practice, of Blockchain-as-a-Service and Blockchain-as-a-Partner. The approach is implemented on Hyperledger Fabric, the most widespread platform for private and consortium blockchains. We compare and justify this design choice with the alternative given by public blockchains, with specific attention to Ethereum.

The Ethereum blockchain’s smart contract is a programmable transaction that performs general-purpose computations and can be executed automatically on the blockchain. Leveraging this component, blockchain technology (BT) has grown beyond the scope of cryptocurrencies and can now be applicable in various industries other than finance. In this paper, we investigated the current trends in Ethereum-based decentralized applications (DApps) to be able to categorize and analyze the DApps to measure the complexity of smart contracts behind them, their level of security and their correlation to the maintainability of the DApps. We leveraged the source code analysis, security analysis, and the developmental metadata of the DApps to infer this correlation. Based on our findings, we concluded that the maintainability of Ethereum DApps is proportional to the code size, number of functions, and, most importantly, the number of outgoing invocations and statements in the smart contracts.

Smart contracts are self-executing programs running in the blockchain allowing for decentralised storage and execution without a middleman. On-chain execution is expensive, with miners charging fees for distributed execution according to a cost model defined in the protocol. In particular, transactions have a high fixed cost.

We present MultiCall, a transaction-batching interpreter for Ethereum that reduces the cost of smart contract executions by gathering multiple users’ transactions into a batch. Our current implementation of MultiCall includes the following features: the ability to emulate Ethereum calls and create transactions, both from MultiCall itself and using an identity unique to the user; the ability to cheaply pay Ether to other MultiCall users; and the ability to authorise emulated transactions on behalf of multiple users in a single transaction using hash-based authorisation rather than more expensive signatures. This improves upon a previous version of MultiCall. Our experiments show that MultiCall provides a saving between 57% and 99% of the fixed transaction cost compared with the standard approach of sending Ethereum transactions directly.

Besides, we also show how to prevent an economic attack exploiting the metatransaction feature, describe a generic protocol for hash-based authorisation of metatransactions, and analyse how to minimise its off-chain computational and storage cost.

Presently, there are over 500 cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide and more than 19,700 different cryptocurrencies. Despite the fact that cryptocurrency trading is possible via private peer-to-peer transactions, more than 90% of trading occurs on organised exchanges, which provide convenience and liquidity. However, centralised cryptocurrency exchanges are regarded as high-value targets by criminals and are often victims of cyberattacks. In this paper, we investigate the risk of cryptocurrency exchange closures and develop predictive models to forecast which markets will close down and which ones will remain active using publicly available data. Our models perform well and reach a high level of classification accuracy. Exchange trading volume, the availability of public information on exchange staff, exchange lifetime, and several cybersecurity features are identified as key attributes in predicting exchange closures. Nevertheless, our models do not account for all sources of risk, e.g., potential fraud and mismanagement of client funds committed by the exchanges themselves, and market participants are encouraged to carefully consider where and how they store their digital assets.