Blockchain is an emerging technology for decentralized and transactional data sharing across a large network of untrusted participants. It enables new forms of distributed software architectures. Although the technology was mainly adopted in digital currency in initial days, but it is a promising technology for other areas too. This paper provides an introduction to blockchain technology in a s...

Reproducibility, data sharing, personal data privacy concerns and patient enrolment in clinical trials are huge medical challenges for contemporary clinical research. A new technology, Blockchain, may be a key to addressing these challenges and should draw the attention of the whole clinical research community.Blockchain brings the Internet to its definitive decentralisation goal. The core prin...

Blockchain protocols such as Bitcoin provide decentralized consensus mechanisms based on proof-of-work (PoW). In this work we introduce and instantiate a new primitive for blockchain protocols called Non-Interactive-Proofs-of-Proof-of-Work (NIPoPoWs) which can be adapted into existing PoW-based cryptocurrencies. Unlike a traditional blockchain client which must verify the entire linearly-growin...

In the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario, the blockchain and, in general, Peer-to-Peer approaches could play an important role in the development of decentralized and dataintensive applications running on billion of devices, preserving the privacy of the users. Our research goal is to understand whether the blockchain and Peer-to-Peer approaches can be employed to foster a decentralized and pri...

Bitcoin and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies employ a consensus protocol called Nakamoto consensus which reward miners for maintaining a public blockchain. In this paper, we study the security of this protocol with respect to rational miners and show how a minority of the computation power can incentivize the rest of the network to accept a blockchain of the minority’s choice. By deviating fr...

Blockchain technology enables the execution of collaborative business processes involving untrusted parties without requiring a central authority. Speci cally, a process model comprising tasks performed by multiple parties can be coordinated via smart contracts operating on the blockchain. The consensus mechanism governing the blockchain thereby guarantees that the process model is followed by ...

The purpose of this work is to demonstrate a fast, efficient, highly scalable blockchain. Current blockchain implementations have performance limitations that make them unsuitable for high speed record keeping. For example, the Bitcoin blockchain has a global maximum sustained transaction rate of 7tps [1][2]. Other blockchain implementations have maximum transaction rates in the hundreds or pos...

Bitcoin (BTC) is often cited as Libertarian. However, the technology underpinning Bitcoin, blockchain, has properties that make it ideally suited to Socialist paradigms. Current literature supports the Libertarian viewpoint by focusing on the ability of Bitcoin to bypass central authority and provide anonymity; rarely is there an examination of blockchain technology’s capacity for decentralised...

Equity crowdfunding via the Internet is a new channel of raising money for startups. It features low barriers to entry, low cost, and high speed, and thus encourages innovation. In recent years, equity crowdfunding in China has experienced some developments. However, some problems remain unsolved in practice. Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed ledger technology to ensure data securit...

The Philosophy of Blockchain Technology is concerned, among other things, with its ontology, how might it be characterised, how is it being created, implemented, and adopted, how does it operate in the world, and how does it evolve over time. Here, we concentrate on whether Bitcoin/blockchain can be considered a complex system and, if so, whether a chaotic one. Beyond mere academic curiosity, a...