Implementing TontineCoin

One of the alternatives to proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocols is proof-of- stake (PoS) protocols, which address its energy and cost related issues. But they suffer from the nothing-at-stake problem; validators (PoS miners) are bound to lose nothing if they support multiple blockchain forks. Tendermint, a PoS protocol, handles this problem by forcing validators to bond their stake and then seizing a cheater’s stake when caught signing multiple competing blocks. The seized stake is then evenly distributed amongst the rest of validators. However, as the number of validators increases, the benefit in finding a cheater compared to the cost of monitoring validators reduces, weakening the system’s defense against the problem. Previous work on TontineCoin addresses this problem by utilizing the concept of tontines. A tontine is an investment scheme in which each participant receives a portion of benefits based on their share. As the number of participants in a tontine decreases, individual benefit increases, which acts as a motivation for participants to eliminate each other. Utilizing this feature in TontineCoin ensures that validators (participants of a tontine) are highly motivated to monitor each other, thus strengthening the system against the nothing-at-stake problem. This project implements a prototype of Tendermint using the Spartan Gold codebase and develops TontineCoin based on it. This implementation is the first implementation of the protocol, and simulates and contrasts five different normal operations in both the Tendermint and TontineCoin models. It also simulates and discusses how a nothing-at-stake attack is handled in TontineCoin compared to Tendermint

Preserve birds in their natural NZ habitat and save their “Wild Musick”.

The Wild Musick framework has been created to support the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (Tourism) NZ, Department of Conservation, Ministry of Conservation, and Ministry of Youth Development. It works to encourage the youth, and families in saving birds and conserving the biodiversity of New Zealand avian population. The solution offers the following direct use cases : 1. Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (Tourism) a. Creation of new walking trails along areas of high bird density. b. Promoting bird watching and bird sounding trips. c. Aligning the tourism season with bird migration and seasonal population variation of birds. d. Promoting bird watching as a sport. e. Family trips encouraged to record bird sounds and feeding them to the Wild Musick web service. 2. Ministry of Conservation (Bio Conservation) a. Pest population has an inverse relationship to the bird population in a geographic area. The Wild Musick framework can assist in decreasing the pest population in an area supporting other programs working in conjunction with saving birds. b. Saving the avian population leads to the maintenance of the ecological balance in the Aotearoa region. c. Identification of unusual birds migration in specific areas. d. Identification of bird songs from bird calls and identifying the breeding season and perhaps preventing human intervention during the season. e. Identifying bird’s behaviour based on their songs/calls. f. Identify the population density of the endangered birds species. 3. Ministry of Youth Development a. Identify the bird sounds in the wild on youth trips. b. Respond to a bird call for help, if we can isolate the bird sound c. Gamify the application and ask the youth (children as well as youth) when they go wit

Shaking during Ion-Atom Collisions

Shaking (shakeup + shakeoff) probabilities accompanying ion-atom collisions are studied using hydrogenic wavefunctions for K-, L-, M- shell electrons in the sudden approximation limit. The role of recoil velocity in the shaking processes is discussed. Further, it is found that the suddenness of collision between projectile and target nuclei plays a major factor in shaking of respective atomic system than the recoil of nuclei.Comment: 10 page