Most Artificial Intelligence (AI) implementations so far are based on the exploration of how the human brain is designed. Nevertheless, while significant progress is shown on specialized tasks, creating an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) remains elusive. This manuscript proposes that...

Cryptocurrencies provide a unique opportunity to identify how derivatives impact spot markets. They are fully fungible, trade across multiple spot exchanges at different prices, and futures contracts were selectively introduced on bitcoin (BTC) exchange rates against the USD in December 2017....

Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks. However, this procedure can still lead to potential attacks...

The scientific community has become concerned about the impact of blockchain technology as a motivational tool in the COVID-19 era. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of scientific articles published in this field has been increasing, making it highly desirable to carry out a...

Fragmentation of production across national boundaries results in global supply chains. To govern effectively in this type of economy requires a combination of public data with private initiatives (from business, banks and NGOs). But basically, there are three major challenges to that: a) data...

Since its launch in 2009 much has been written about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchains. While the discussions initially took place mostly on blogs and other popular media, we now are witnessing the emergence of a growing body of rigorous academic research on these topics. By the nature...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the analysis of reward sharing schemes in mining pools, such as those associated with Bitcoin. The framework is centered around the reported shares in a pool instead of agents and introduces two new fairness criteria: absolute and relative...