Overview. A blockchain is best understood in the model of state-machine replication [8], where a service maintains some state and clients invoke operations that transform the state and generate outputs. A blockchain emulates a “trusted” computing service through a distributed protocol, run by nodes connected over the Internet. The service represents or creates an asset, in which all nodes have ...

The potential for blockchains to fundamentally transform how organizations produce and capture value is huge and very real. Practical applications dealing with nearly any type of digital asset demonstrate this capacity. Blockchain-based application architectures benefit from a set of unique properties including immutability and transparency of cryptographically-secured and peer-recorded transac...

The most fundamental purpose of blockchain technology is to enable persistent, consistent, distributed storage of information. Increasingly common are authentication systems that leverage this property to allow users to carry their personal data on a device while a hash of this data is signed by a trusted authority and then put on a blockchain to be compared against. For instance, in 2015, MIT ...

We present a radical solution to the two foremost challenges facing “blockchain”-based cryptocurrencies: (1) “mining pool” oligopolies and (2) incompressibility of delays affecting validation. Both problems stem from the Blockchain mechanism itself, which drives participants into a winner-takes-all global contest that amounts to a low-odds high-variance rewards lottery. Our proposal strips out ...

Smart contracts (SC) are software codes which reside and run over a blockchain. The code can be written in different languages with the common purpose of implementing various kinds of transactions onto the hosting blockchain, They are ruled by the blockchain infrastructure and work in order to satisfy conditions typical of traditional contracts. The software code must satisfy constrains strongl...

Product-centric information management is a key concept in understanding the interoperability between increasingly intelligent and autonomous goods in distributed computing architectures. In the same way as consumers are an important source of data in contemporary platforms, products — especially durable and capital goods — can be considered equally valuable for industries that have not yet bee...

A long-standing focus on compliance has traditionally constrained development of fundamental design changes for Electronic Health Records (EHRs). We now face a critical need for such innovation, as personalization and data science prompt patients to engage in the details of their healthcare and restore agency over their medical data. In this paper, we propose MedRec: a novel, decentralized reco...

The Italian version of this paper can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2731132 The core technology of Bitcoin, the blockchain, has recently emerged as a disruptive innovation with a wide range of applications, potentially able to redesign our interactions in business, politics and society at large. Although scholarly interest in this subject is growing, a comprehensive analysis of blockchai...

Swarms of robots will revolutionize many industrial applications, from targeted material delivery to precision farming. However, several of the heterogeneous characteristics that make them ideal for certain future applications — robot autonomy, decentralized control, collective emergent behavior, etc. — hinder the evolution of the technology from academic institutions to real-world problems. Bl...

This is the second of a series of papers describing the results of a project whose goal was to identify five remote identity proofing solutions that can be used as alternatives to knowledge-based verification. This paper describes the second solution, which makes use of a rich credential adapted for use on a blockchain and backed by a blockchain PKI. A rich credential, also used in Solution 1, ...