Trends in crypto-currencies and blockchain technologies: A monetary theory and regulation perspective

The internet era has generated a requirement for low cost, anonymous and rapidly verifiable transactions to be used for online barter, and fast settling money have emerged as a consequence. For the most part, e-money has fulfilled this role, but the last few years have seen two new types of money emerge. Centralised virtual currencies, usually for the purpose of transacting in social and gaming economies, and crypto-currencies, which aim to eliminate the need for financial intermediaries by offering direct peer-to-peer online payments. We describe the historical context which led to the development of these currencies and some modern and recent trends in their uptake, in terms of both usage in the real economy and as investment products. As these currencies are purely digital constructs, with no government or local authority backing, we then discuss them in the context of monetary theory, in order to determine how they may be have value under each. Finally, we provide an overview of the state of regulatory readiness in terms of dealing with transactions in these currencies in various regions of the world

Blockchain: Developing Regulatory Approaches for the use of Technology in Legal Services

This paper charts the evolution of blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies as tools for radically simplifying common legal tasks such as identity verification and contract fulfilment

Cyber Security

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Annual Conference on Cyber Security, CNCERT 2020, held in Beijing, China, in August 2020. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topical sections: access control; cryptography; denial-of-service attacks; hardware security implementation; intrusion/anomaly detection and malware mitigation; social network security and privacy; systems security

Cyber Security

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Annual Conference on Cyber Security, CNCERT 2020, held in Beijing, China, in August 2020. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topical sections: access control; cryptography; denial-of-service attacks; hardware security implementation; intrusion/anomaly detection and malware mitigation; social network security and privacy; systems security

Digital Transformation

The amount of literature on Digital Transformation is staggering—and it keeps growing. Why, then, come out with yet another such document? Moreover, any text aiming at explaining the Digital Transformation by presenting a snapshot is going to become obsolete in a blink of an eye, most likely to be already obsolete at the time it is first published. The FDC Initiative on Digital Reality felt there is a need to look at the Digital Transformation from the point of view of a profound change that is pervading the entire society—a change made possible by technology and that keeps changing due to technology evolution opening new possibilities but is also a change happening because it has strong economic reasons. The direction of this change is not easy to predict because it is steered by a cultural evolution of society, an evolution that is happening in niches and that may expand rapidly to larger constituencies and as rapidly may fade away. This creation, selection by experimentation, adoption, and sudden disappearance, is what makes the whole scenario so unpredictable and continuously changing.The amount of literature on Digital Transformation is staggering—and it keeps growing. Why, then, come out with yet another such document? Moreover, any text aiming at explaining the Digital Transformation by presenting a snapshot is going to become obsolete in a blink of an eye, most likely to be already obsolete at the time it is first published. The FDC Initiative on Digital Reality felt there is a need to look at the Digital Transformation from the point of view of a profound change that is pervading the entire society—a change made possible by technology and that keeps changing due to technology evolution opening new possibilities but is also a change happening because it has strong economic reasons. The direction of this change is not easy to predict because it is steered by a cultural evolution of society, an evolution that is happening in niches and that may expand rapidly to larger constituencies and as rapidly may fade away. This creation, selection by experimentation, adoption, and sudden disappearance, is what makes the whole scenario so unpredictable and continuously changing

Data Spaces

This open access book aims to educate data space designers to understand what is required to create a successful data space. It explores cutting-edge theory, technologies, methodologies, and best practices for data spaces for both industrial and personal data and provides the reader with a basis for understanding the design, deployment, and future directions of data spaces. The book captures the early lessons and experience in creating data spaces. It arranges these contributions into three parts covering design, deployment, and future directions respectively. The first part explores the design space of data spaces. The single chapters detail the organisational design for data spaces, data platforms, data governance federated learning, personal data sharing, data marketplaces, and hybrid artificial intelligence for data spaces. The second part describes the use of data spaces within real-world deployments. Its chapters are co-authored with industry experts and include case studies of data spaces in sectors including industry 4.0, food safety, FinTech, health care, and energy. The third and final part details future directions for data spaces, including challenges and opportunities for common European data spaces and privacy-preserving techniques for trustworthy data sharing. The book is of interest to two primary audiences: first, researchers interested in data management and data sharing, and second, practitioners and industry experts engaged in data-driven systems where the sharing and exchange of data within an ecosystem are critical

Race & Mobility in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Migration Control

Global movement and information technologies are changing practices of bordering, globally. Such matters are now also substantially urban. As cities of refuge rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they are also inviting the border closer to cities and migrant bodies. This marks a convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism. In New York City, infrastructural technologies such as sophisticated public Wi-Fi, smart ID cards, and digitalised city services, in an environment prone to deportation raids, has led to deep information “panics”. In Berlin, a combination of civil society and private sector technology initiatives have produced a deluge of largely unused or distrusted information services, job-matching, house-sharing, social credit, and identity management tools in the name of refugees. In lieu of mitigating conditions of displacement, these practices compound analogue borders by engaging in a practice of digitally fusing borders to racialised characteristics, resulting in symbolic, material, and epistemic forms of technological marginalization. Through following and documenting how migrant communities navigate and experience these digital urban interventions, and the logics of those who develop them, this dissertation 1) highlights how migrant bodies and urban spaces become contested spaces in the battle for racial capital – a frontier in which technology actors are chiefly concerned with reconstituting conceptions of race for power and profit, and; 2). unveils how digital urban infrastructures interact with subtle practices of racialised bordering. Drawing on an analytical lens rooted predominantly in the Black radical tradition, critical development and migration studies, and science and technology studies, it challenges the paradigms of techno-solutionism and techno-chauvinism, as well as critical digital studies that has tended to treat race and racialism as a symptom of, rather than as integral to, the technology industry. By extension, the field of migration has also tended to impart greater weight to the positive affordances of technology in contexts of displacement, in absence of the critical voice of would-be recipients and “users”. By attending to the frontiers of racial capitalism and increasing technology deployments, I advance the idea of the ‘digital periphery’ to make sense of how urban migrant environments and subjectivities are commodified and ‘datafied’. As a concept, the digital periphery allows for the rapid advance of technology upon displaced populations to be disaggregated. It reveals an inseparable and mutually constitutive entanglement of race, borders, and migration, advancing racial capitalism beyond its conventional physical and spatial limitations.This dissertation was completed with the financial support of the Jo Cox PhD Studentship at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and the Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust