Updated the Robots website: https://schmitt-trading.com/robots

Please read about the Stock Market Robot System we invented.

It will provide you with a relaxed system to make some profit by trading the markets automatically.

Updated the site “Jurisdiction”: https://schmitt-trading.com/en/domiciles

Jurisdiction (from Latin juris ‘law’ + dictio ‘declaration’) is the legal term for the authority granted to a legal entity to enact justice. Colloquially it is used to refer to the geographical area (situs: location of the issue. In federations like the United States, areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, and federal levels.

Jurisdiction draws its substance from international law, conflict of laws, constitutional law, and the powers of the executive and legislative branches of government to allocate resources to best serve the needs of society.
Source: Jurisdiction, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jurisdiction&oldid=1042413123 (last visited Oct. 25, 2021).

Ari Juels, Cornell University; Ittay Eyal, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Oded Naor, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Looking to modernize voting practices, speed waiting times at the polls, increase voter turnout and generally make voting more convenient, many government officials – and some companies hawking voting systems – are looking to an emerging technology called a “blockchain.” That’s what’s behind a West Virginia program in which some voters serving abroad in the military will be able to cast their votes from their mobile devices. Similar voting schemes have been tried elsewhere in various places around the world.

As researchers in the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts, we believe in the transformative potential of blockchain systems in a number of industries. Best known as the technology behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchains can do much more than allow anonymous strangers to send each other money without fear of fraud or tampering. They have created new ways for people to invest in technology ventures that have attracted billions of dollars, and may someday store records that make educational credentials, land ownership and food origins more transparent and harder to forge.

Blockchains might sound like an ideal remedy for the trust problems caused by internet voting. Data can only be added to a blockchain – not deleted or changed – because multiple copies are stored on computers owned by different people or organizations and perhaps spread across different countries. Strict controls can be placed on a blockchain’s contents, preventing unauthorized data from being added. And blockchains are designed to be transparent – with their contents often readable by anyone’s computing device anywhere in the world.

Yet as scholars who have studied traditional and blockchain-based voting, we believe that while blockchains may help with some specific issues, they can’t fix the basic problems with internet voting. In fact, they could make things worse.

Computers can break, or be broken

For years, experts on election security have warned that the internet is too dangerous for such socially crucial and time-sensitive functions as voting. Renowned cryptographer Ronald Rivest, for instance, has remarked that “Best practices for internet voting are like best practices for drunk driving” – there’s no safe way to do either one.

The stakes are enormous. Democracy requires widespread public trust – not just that a declared winner actually received the largest number of votes, but in the integrity of the system as a whole. People need to trust that the votes they cast are the ones that are counted, that their neighbors’ votes are totaled accurately and not the result of bribery or coercion and that local tallies are communicated safely to state election officials.

Even advanced computing devices today cannot provide such assurances. Most hardware and software are rife with hidden security flaws, and are not regularly updated. Devices are vulnerable, and so are networks. Internet outages – even caused by trivialities like gamers trying to get a leg up on their competitors – could prevent people from voting. Intentional, targeted attacks against internet traffic could cause major disruptions to democratic institutions on a national scale.

The stability and integrity of democratic society itself are too important to be relegated to flawed computer systems.

Adversaries are looking for opportunities

Hackers – backed by foreign governments or not – are always looking for new targets and fresh ways to sow social discord. They’ll find – and fully exploit – any technical weaknesses available to them. Without a paper trail, the very possibility that someone could have secretly changed votes will further erode public trust in democratic elections.

Blockchains depend on computing devices

A key method by which blockchain voting could worsen election integrity is by claiming to increase trustworthiness without actually doing so.

It’s easy to imagine a voting system in which only authorized voters could cast ballots, with those ballots indelibly recorded on a blockchain. The blockchain would act as a single authoritative election record that could not be erased or tampered with. For all intents and purposes, the record would be hack-proof.

However, tallying votes on a blockchain doesn’t magically make a voter’s phone or computer secure. A vote may be securely recorded, but that means nothing if the vote was cast incorrectly to begin with. If your phone is infected with malware that switches your vote from Candidate R to Candidate D, it doesn’t matter how secure the rest of the voting system is – the election has still been hacked. In some cases, blockchains may be able to help voters detect that sort of tampering – but only if the hack-detection software itself hasn’t been hacked.

In addition, some companies’ business practices undermine the potential to trust their blockchain systems. The manufacturer of the system West Virginia will use in November – like many companies manufacturing physical voting machines – is refusing to embrace the transparency that is central to the security industry, the blockchain community, and democracy itself. They are not providing public access to the cryptographic protocols at the heart of their systems, leaving the public instead to rely on the manufacturer’s promises of security. There’s no way for an independent auditor to be truly certain that the systems are free of subtle bugs or security flaws – or even massive holes that would be obvious to experts.

Vote buying becomes newly possible

Another way blockchain voting could worsen existing voting problems is by increasing the likelihood of vote buying. Sometimes a glass of beer is all that’s needed to bribe a voter. Vote buying is happily rare in large-scale U.S. elections, in part because the secret ballot makes verifying a bought vote very difficult and because there are serious criminal penalties.

Internet voting could completely negate both of these protections. Putting votes on blockchains eliminates the secrecy of the voting booth. Encryption doesn’t help: Software can prove mathematically to a vote buyer that a voter’s device encrypted the name of a particular candidate. In addition, foreigners who might try to influence people’s votes are very hard to prosecute.

Some voting companies contend that their systems publicly identify voters only by random numerical identifiers, so they aren’t subject to vote-buying or intimidation. But in many of these systems, voting identities can be linked to accounts in cryptocurrency systems – where a voter could receive a bribe, potentially without revealing who was paid, how much or by whom.

Officials and companies who promote online voting are creating a false sense of security – and putting the integrity of the election process at risk. In seeking to use blockchains as a protective element, they may in fact be introducing new threats into the crucial mechanics of democracy.

Ari Juels, Professor of Computer Science, Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Cornell Tech, and Co-Director, Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3), Cornell University; Ittay Eyal, Associate Director, Initiative For Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3); Assistant Prof. of Electrical Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and Oded Naor, Member of the Initiative For Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3); Visiting researcher at Cornell-Tech; Graduate student in Electrical Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When I tried to embed my trading statistics into my WordPress.com site, I could see the statistics page in the Edit-Mode of the page, but as soon as I published the changes, the statistics I embedded disappeared.

Here is an important note from WordPress.com:

We have code restrictions at WordPress.COM. No javascript or iframe embeds from unsupported sources or third party advertising codes can be used on any WordPress.COM hosted sites.

Another important note on the tutorial below: installing the iframe plugin only works with a business plan in WordPress.com.

Clearly, I recommend to host your own WordPress.org website so that you can embed any iFrame code in your website.

How to Easily Embed iFrame Code in WordPress (3 Methods)

Last updated on December 16th, 2020 by Editorial Staff 214 Shares ShareTweetSharePin

Do you want to embed an iFrame code in a WordPress post or page?

IFrames provide an easy way to embed video or other content to your site without uploading it. Many third-party platforms like YouTube allow users to use iframe to embed content from their website.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily embed iFrame code in WordPress using multiple methods.

What is iFrame?

An iFrame lets you embed videos or other content on your site. This means you can display a video on your site without actually hosting that video.

The iframe is like opening a window on your site to display external content. The actual content is still loaded from the source that you are embedding from.

To add an iframe, you need to add a special HTML code. Don’t worry if that sounds quite technical.

We’re going to show you the easiest way to embed an iFrame in your WordPress blog.

Why Use iFrames?

A key reason to use iFrames is to avoid having to host videos or other resources on your site, which will use up your bandwidth and storage space.

Also, iFrames let you avoid infringing on other people’s copyrighted content. Instead of downloading their video or other content then uploading it to your site, you simply add it to your page using an iFrame.

Another advantage is that if the original content is changed, it will automatically be updated in the iFrame too.

There are also some drawbacks to using iFrames. Not all websites let you put their content into an iFrame. Also, the iFrame may end up too big or small for your page, and you will need to manually adjust it.

Another issue is that HTTPS sites can only use iFrames for content from other HTTPS sites. Similarly, HTTP sites can only use iFrames for content from other HTTP sites.

This is why many platforms like WordPress prefers oEmbed. You can use oEmbed to embed videos as well as some other types of content by simply pasting a URL into your WordPress post. The content will automatically be resized to fit, and it will be the right size even on mobile devices.

Important: WordPress doesn’t support oEmbed for Facebook and Instagram posts. For more on this, check out our full guide on the Facebook / Instagram oEmbed issue and how to fix it.

Another great alternative to iFrames is to use a social feeds plugin. We recommend using Smash Balloon‘s plugins. These let you display content from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Having said that, let’s take a look at three different ways to add iFrames to your site.

1. Use the Source’s Embed Code to Add iFrame in WordPress

Many large sites have an Embed option for their content. This gives you the special iFrame code that you need to add to your site.

On YouTube, you can get this code by going to the video on YouTube, then clicking the Share button below it.

Next, you will see a popup with several share options. Simply click on the Embed button.

Now, YouTube will show you the iFrame code. By default, YouTube will include the player controls. We also recommend that you enable the privacy-enhanced mode.

After that, go ahead and click the Copy button to copy the code.

Now, you can paste that code into any post or page on your site. We’re going to add it to a new page in the block editor.

To create a new page, go to Pages » Add New in your WordPress dashboard.

Then, add an HTML block to your page.

Now, you need to paste the YouTube iFrame code into this block.

You can then preview or publish your page to see the YouTube video embedded there.

Tip: If you’re using the old classic editor, you can still add iFrame code. You need to do so in the Text view.

Switching between the visual and text view on the Classic Editor can cause issues with the iFrame code.

2. Using the iFrame WordPress Plugin to Embed an iFrame

This method is useful as it allows you to create an iframe to embed content from any source, even if that source doesn’t provide an embed code.

First, you need to install and activate the iFrame plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, the plugin will start working straight away with no setup needed. Go ahead and edit or create a post or page. Then, add a shortcode block.

After that, you can use this shortcode to enter your iFrame code.

1	[iframe src="URL goes here"]

Simply replace URL goes here with the URL of the content you want to embed on your site. We are embedding a Google map.

Tip: You may need to use the Embed option to get the direct URL of the content. You need to use just the URL, not the rest of the embed code.

Next, preview or publish your post. You should see the Google map embedded on your site.

You can optionally add parameters to the iFrame shortcode to change how the embedded content displays. For instance, you could set the width and height, and add or remove a scrollbar or border. You can find details on the iFrame plugin’s page.

Tip: If you’re using the Classic editor, you can simply paste the shortcode into your post or page. You don’t need to switch to the Text view.

3. Manually Creating the iFrame Code and Embedding in WordPress

If you prefer not to use an iFrame plugin, then you can create the iFrame code manually. To do this, you need to add an HTML block in the WordPress content editor.

First, you need to paste this code into your HTML block.

1	http://URL%20goes%20here

Simply replace “URL goes here” with the direct URL for the content that you want to embed. You only need the URL itself.

Here, we’re embedding a map from Google.

You can add extra parameters to the HTML tag. For instance, you could set the width and height of your iFrame. The code below means your embedded content will display 600 pixels wide and 300 pixels high.

1	http://URL%20goes%20here

This is useful if you need to restrict the embedded content to a smaller space.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily embed iFrame code in WordPress. You may also want to check out our ultimate guide on how to speed up your WordPress site, and our comparison of the best keyword research tools for improving your SEO rankings.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-easily-embed-iframe-code-in-wordpress loaded 24.10.2021

Nir Kshetri, University of North Carolina – Greensboro

Many developing countries don’t have a working system of tracking property rights, and what they do have can be fragile and incomplete. In Haiti, for instance, a large earthquake in 2010 destroyed all the municipal buildings that stored documents confirming many small farmers’ ownership of the land they worked. Even years later, many farmers didn’t have proof that they were landowners. People are still fighting over their land.

This sort of problem – caused by natural disasters or not – is widespread, causing financial hardship for families in the developing world. Without an official, enforceable legal title to their property, people can’t resolve disputes over who can use which land for what – like who can farm where. They also can’t borrow against their existing assets to invest in their homes, businesses or communities. The value of those properties, and the lost economic opportunities for owners of assets without formal documentation, has been estimated at US$20 trillion worldwide.

From researching blockchains and cryptocurrencies for the past three years, I have become convinced that these technologies have the potential to fight root causes of poverty – including by securely recording property ownership.

I’m far from alone: Blockchain-based land registries have started up in Bermuda, Brazil, Georgia, Ghana, Honduras, India, Russia and Rwanda. The problems these efforts are addressing are significant.

Current challenges in land registries

Across the world, land registries are inefficient and unreliable – or even downright corrupt. In Honduras, some government officials altered the country’s land ownership database, stealing property for themselves – including beachfront getaways.

In many African countries, more than 90 percent of rural land is not registered. In Ghana, 78 percent of land is unregistered, and the country’s courts have a long backlog of land dispute cases.

In India, millions of rural families lack legal ownership of the land they live and work on. The lack of secure land ownership is a bigger cause of poverty in the country than the caste system or a high illiteracy rate.

Brazil has no single centralized land registry. Instead, about 3,400 private agents – called “cartorios” – register and check land ownership. The system is confusing, with many different documents created in different historical periods. Most land documents lack specific geographic references on property boundaries. Little wonder, then, that the system is plagued by corruption and double allocations – two formal documents each saying someone else owns a piece of land.

These fragile and incomplete property rights systems in the developing world can affect the entire planet. In Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, illicit land grabbers forge deeds and use violence and bribery to falsely claim ownership of property, often under fake names, which the locals call “fantasmas,” or “ghosts.” Then they clear-cut the rainforest, which has serious environmental effects. Having “improved” the land by converting it to pasture, these land thieves then are eligible to register as the formal owners of the land they stole. This cycle has repeated for years, contributing to widespread Amazon deforestation.

How blockchain-based land registries work

Using a blockchain system to record transactions could help solve these problems. A blockchain is a secure database that’s stored in a distributed – but connected – set of computers around the internet. It’s not susceptible to tampering, and every addition to the database must be digitally signed, making clear who’s changing what and when. So instead of a system with multiple conflicting documents, some of which may have been forged or altered, there’s only one record with a clear history of modifications, including who did what when.

Blockchain transactions can include all kinds of information, including geographic boundaries or serial numbers and an owner’s identity. In Ghana, for instance, the nonprofit Bitland runs a blockchain-based land registry system with a written description of each parcel of land as well as GPS coordinates of boundary points and satellite photos of the area.

A collaboration between a U.S.-based blockchain startup and a Brazilian real estate registry has created a record-keeping system for land in the southern coastal municipalities of Pelotas and Morro Redondo. Its blockchain database contains details like the property’s address, the owner’s name and contact information, zoning rules and a unique identification number for the property itself.

Blockchain can provide other advantages too. For instance, when transferring land in the republic of Georgia, the buyer and the seller go to a public registry house and pay a fee between $50 and $200. Moving this process onto a blockchain could drop the costs to no more than 10 cents.

Remaining challenges

Just starting a blockchain-based database isn’t enough to solve these problems, though. Data must be accurate when it’s entered, and records must include enough information to be authoritative about the properties they’re referring to. A new technological system won’t fix much in countries where it’s hard to determine the legitimate owner in the first place. Also, bureaucrats may object to new record-keeping systems that reduce their power, status and privileges.

However, in places where governments or others who create the systems are viewed as fair and impartial and run a transparent process, blockchain-based land registry systems could give many of the world’s poorest people their first real asset. Once they have straightened out complex, corrupt and contradictory registry systems, people can safely invest in, borrow against and truly improve their properties, helping lift themselves out of poverty.

Nir Kshetri, Professor of Management, University of North Carolina – Greensboro

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Some websites do not offer a search function.
To do a Google search on a specific website, follow these steps:

1. Type site: in the search field, without adding a space after it.
2. Type the TLD or website URL that you want to confine the results to, add a space, and then enter a regular search term. Here are some examples: site:edu school. site:gov “George Washington” …
3. Press Enter to begin the search.

Example: if you want to search for bitcoin in our website, type:

site:schmitt-trading.com “bitcoin”

By BitcoinShirt on August 3, 2018

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to build your first e-commerce store and accept Bitcoin payments. We will build the website from scratch, together, step by step with no steps skipped. The software we’re going to use is free and open-source.

This setup is made for complete newbies with no coding or web-design knowledge. The tutorial includes lots of illustrations and easy-to-follow videos divided into steps.
a
When you complete the last step, you’ll have a professional looking, e-commerce store with your products or services, contact and about us page and a Bitcoin payment processor which will allow you to accept Bitcoin payments directly, with no fees or intermediate.

There are many tutorials on how to create a website or an e-commerce website on the internet. However, none of the guides explains how to accept Bitcoin.

My goal is to help non-tech savvy people to set up their website in a cost-effective and user-friendly way and start accepting Bitcoin through BTCPay Server, directly without fees or transaction cost.

If you’re a bit of an advanced user and you know how to create a website, this detailed article is separated into sections, so you can jump to the part which interests you the most. Already have a WoocCommerce store? Start here and learn how to accept Bitcoin.

If you’re a newbie, do not be afraid or overwhelmed. I invested a significant amount of time in breaking the entire process of launching the store into tiny pieces, so there’s no need to do everything in a day.  Each step will give you a certain sense of accomplishment, and you’ll see the results, with each completed stage.

The tutorial is paginated into multiple pages. Each page represents a step. Each step has a video explanation. At the bottom of each page, you will see a button to proceed to the next phase.

Let’s now take a look at all the steps.

Source: https://bitcoinshirt.co/how-to-create-store-accept-bitcoin loaded 23.10.2021

Ana Santos Rutschman, Saint Louis University

The sprawling U.S. health care industry has trouble managing patient information: Every doctor, medical office, hospital, pharmacy, therapist and insurance company needs different pieces of data to properly care for patients. These records are scattered all over on each business’s computers – and some no doubt in filing cabinets too. They’re not all kept up to date with current information, as a person’s prescriptions change or new X-rays are taken, and they’re not easily shared from one provider to another.

For instance, in Boston alone, medical offices use more than two dozen different systems for keeping electronic health records. None of them can directly communicate with any of the others, and all of them present opportunities for hackers to steal, delete or modify records either individually or en masse. In an emergency, doctors may not be able to get crucial medical information because it’s stored somewhere else. That can result in direct harm to patients.

There might be a way out, toward a health care system where patients have accurate and updated records that are secure against tampering or snooping, and with data that can be shared quickly and easily with any provider who needs it. In my work on health care innovation at the Center for Health Law Studies, at Saint Louis University School of Law, I have been following the rise of a technology that may help us address the weaknesses in today’s health care record-keeping: blockchain.

A secure system to store private information

Blockchain systems, best known in connection with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, are networks of databases stored in different places that use securely encrypted messages to connect with each other over the internet. Information can’t be deleted, but it can be updated – though only by authorized users, whose identities are recorded along with their actions.

That would keep years of patient data secure and make any human errors in data entry easy to track down and correct. Patients themselves could review and update information, and even add new information they collect or observe about their own conditions. Both hacking and fraud would be extremely difficult.

There are many blockchain systems, each with its own security methods and practices, but developers are working to help them connect with each other, working out how to make the process of collecting records much cheaper and faster than today.

Helping patients and practitioners

Blockchain can also help other areas of the health care industry. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are developing blockchain-based systems to share data on threatening pathogens, analyze outbreaks, and manage the response to public health crises. Some commentators have even suggested that a blockchain system might help track opioid use and abuse.

Clinical trials, too, may benefit from blockchain. Today, patchy data and inefficient communication among all players involved in clinical trials pose serious problems. The drug discovery and development processes could see similar benefits.

Pharmaceutical companies currently monitor drug shipments and delivery through an inefficient web of scattered databases. In 2017, Pfizer and other drugmakers announced their support for MediLedger, seeking to transfer those tasks to a blockchain – which Walmart is already doing to track its food shipments.

First steps in the US

In addition to the major pharmaceutical companies’ supply-tracking experiment, other major U.S. health-care companies are beginning to explore blockchain technology. In early 2018, five of the country’s largest health-care companies started using a blockchain system to collect data on health-care providers’ demographics.

What’s most striking about this collaboration – including a medical claim processor and a national medical testing lab – is that it includes major health insurers that directly compete against each other: Humana and the UnitedHealth Group. That signals a potential shift toward industry-wide approaches to handling health care data.

Europe takes the lead

Europe offers some examples and useful guides for U.S. efforts to use blockchains in health care.

In 2016, the European Union began funding a multinational collaboration with privacy companies and leading research universities to build a blockchain system that would aggregate and share biomedical information between health care organizations and individual patients all across the EU. Among other things, this would offer patients secure personal health data accounts online, accessible from computers and mobile devices.

Using a similarly collaborative approach, Sweden recently began rolling out an interoperable blockchain health data platform called CareChain. CareChain is being publicized as “infrastructure that is owned and controlled by no one and everyone.” Companies and individual people can use the system to store health information from disparate sources. The system also lets developers create apps and services that can access the information, to analyze users’ data and offer them tips, ideas and products to improve their health.

Offering an idea of what’s possible is Estonia, which since 2012 has been using blockchain technology to secure health care data and transactions, including putting 95 percent of health data in electronic form. All of the country’s health care billing is handled electronically, and 99 percent of its prescriptions are digital.

That’s a future the U.S. could look forward to, as it experiments on its own and learns from the experience of these existing projects.

Ana Santos Rutschman, Assistant Professor of Law, Saint Louis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nir Kshetri, University of North Carolina – Greensboro

Thanks to blockchain, internet users have achieved some victories in the fight against China’s strict internet censorship.

A historic moment was made on April 23. Peking University‘s former student, Yue Xin, had penned a letter detailing the university’s attempts to hide sexual misconduct. The case involved a student, Gao Yan, who committed suicide in 1998 after a professor sexually assaulted and then harassed her.

The letter was blocked by Chinese social networking websites, but an anonymous user posted it on the Ethereum blockchain.

In another case, in July, Chinese citizens used blockchain to preserve an investigative story which condemned inferior vaccines being given to Chinese babies. The vaccines produced by Shenzhen-based Changsheng Bio-Tech failed to fight tetanus and whooping cough. The company has also allegedly faked data for about 113,000 doses of human rabies vaccine.

A blockchain is a secure database that’s stored in a distributed set of computers. Every addition to the database must be digitally signed, making clear who’s changing what and when.

To ensure that only authorized users have access to the information, blockchains use cryptography-based digital signatures that verify identities. A user signs transactions with a “private key,” which is generated when an an account is created. A private key typically is a long and random alphanumeric code, known only to the person who controls the account.

Using complicated algorithms, blockchains also create “public keys” from private keys. Public keys are known to the public and make it possible to share information. For instance, a bitcoin wallet address is a public key. Any bitcoin user can send payments to that address. However, only the person with the private key can spend the bitcoin.

From researching blockchain and China’s internet control measures, I can see that blockchain systems’ features are in conflict with the goals of the Chinese Communist Party. Truly decentralized blockchains will challenge the ability of authoritarian nations to maintain a tight grip over their populations.

Blockchain’s censorship-resistance features

Blockchain makes censorship extremely difficult.

Yue Xin’s letter, which was written in English and Chinese, and the story about the inferior vaccines have been inserted into the metadata of transactions in the Ethereum blockchain. Each transaction cost a few cents.

Since Ethereum transactions are permanent and public, anyone can read the letter. The posts cannot be tampered with. Since they are distributed among many computers in decentralized networks, it is not possible for Chinese internet censors to pressure any company to remove them.

The Chinese government has been alarmed about blockchain censorship resistance. Starting in February, a new regulation of the Cyberspace Administration of China requires users to provide real names as well as national ID card numbers or mobile phones to use blockchains. Law enforcement must be able to access data posted on the blockchain when necessary. Blockchain service providers are required to keep relevant records about transactions and other relevant information and report illegal use to authorities. They also need to prevent the production, duplication, publication and dissemination of contents that are banned by Chinese laws.

According to the new regulation, blockchain services are also required to remove “illegal information” quickly to stop it from spreading. This requirement is puzzling because, in commonly understood blockchains, information stored is immutable and thus cannot be removed.

Blockchains with Chinese characteristics

The Chinese strategy toward modern technology is to balance economic modernization and political control.

According to the World Economic Forum, blockchain is among six computing “mega-trends” that are likely to shape the world in the next decade. The Chinese government hopes that blockchain can address the diverse economic and social problems China faces, such as insurance fraud, environmental pollution and food safety.

The Chinese government is against truly decentralized blockchain systems such as bitcoin, which relies on users, also known as “nodes” or “peers,” competing to verify transactions. At least tens of thousands of computers from all over the world are connected at any point of time in the bitcoin network.

The former head of the People’s Bank of China’s digital currency research institute, Yao Qian, argued against the need for community consensus in which all users engage in transactions and governance related decisions. He favored a multi-center system, in which consensus is managed by several main nodes. Intervention can be applied in case of emergency. If needed, data can be rolled back, and transactions can be reversed. The system can even be shut down.

China has been the first nation to rank blockchains. Most blockchains that rank high are developed in China or have strong Chinese connections. It is easier for the government to access and control such blockchains. It is impossible for a Chinese blockchain company to operate and succeed in China without helping the government to achieve its censorship goals.

The blockchain most favored by the Chinese government, EOS, uses a model where users vote for representatives. Only the representatives verify transactions and make decisions regarding system updates. All transactions and governance decisions in EOS are processed and approved by only 21 main nodes, known as supernodes. Twelve of the EOS supernodes are in China. This makes it easier for the government to control blockchains, since the penalty of noncompliance with Chinese regulations is high for China-based supernodes.

The third-ranked blockchain, Ontology, and the seventh, Neo, have smaller numbers of main nodes: seven each. Censorship can be easily enforced in these blockchain thanks to small numbers of main nodes, mainly in China, involved in transactions and governance decisions.

Struggle for control

China’s approach to blockchain regulation reflects the tension it faces between using modern technologies to maintain control and using them to stimulate economic growth. The Chinese government wouldn’t allow blockchain implementation without significant modification. Blockchain applications modified to satisfy China’s have lost fundamental elements of the original technology.

The new laws, combined with the Chinese government’s indication of its favorite blockchains, could constrain activists’ ability to use blockchains to fight censorship. For instance, the supernodes of EOS froze accounts associated with email scams and stopped them from making transactions. It also reversed transactions that were previously confirmed.

These examples illustrate that blockchains are being developed that help suppress contents that are objectionable to the Chinese government. Activists who are vocal against the Chinese government may also be barred from using some blockchains, such as Neo. In this way, China could also emerge as a role model for other authoritarian regimes in developing censorship-enabled blockchain solutions.

Nir Kshetri, Professor of Management, University of North Carolina – Greensboro

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dragan Boscovic, Arizona State University

Takeaways

· Nonfungible tokens prove ownership of a digital item – image, sound file or text – in the same way that people own crypto coins.

· Unlike crypto coins, which are identical and worth the same, NFTs are unique.

· An NFT is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, which can be a lot if the NFT is made by a famous artist and the buyer is a wealthy collector.

---

An attorney friend recently asked me out of the blue about nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. What prompted his interest was the sale of a collage composed of 5,000 digital pieces, auctioned by Christie’s on March 11, 2021, for a remarkable US$69 million. Mike Winkelmann, an artist known as Beeple, created this piece of digital art, made an NFT of it and offered it for sale. The bidding started at $100, and the rest of the auctioning process transformed it into a historical event.

Similarly, it was hard to miss the news about the iconic GIF Nyan Cat being sold as a piece of art, Twitter’s founder transforming the first tweet into an NFT and putting it up for sale, or an NFT of a New York Times column earning half a million dollars for charity.

My friend’s questions were an attempt to understand where the underlying value of an NFT comes from. The issue is that perceptions of what the buyer is paying for are not easily framed in legal terms. NFT marketplaces do not always accurately describe the value proposition of the goods they are selling. The truth is that the value of any NFT is speculative. Its value is determined by what someone else is willing to pay for it and nothing else.

Turning something as ephemeral as a tweet into an item that can be sold requires two things: making it unique and proving ownership. The process is the same for cryptocurrencies, which turn strings of bits into virtual coins that have real-world value. It boils down to cryptography.

Keys and blocks

Cryptography is the technique used to protect privacy of a message by transforming it into a form that can be understood only by the intended recipients. Everyone else will see it as only an unintelligible sequence of random characters. This message manipulation is enabled by a pair of keys, public and private keys: You share your public key with your friend, who uses it to transform his message to you into an unintelligible sequence of random characters. You then use your private key to put it back into its original form.

The special mathematical properties of these two crypto keys are widely used to provide secrecy and integrity. Two crypto keys play the role of digital signatures and are commonly used in blockchain to enable both authentication and anonymity for transactions.

Blockchain is a crucial technology for creating NFTs. It uses cryptography to chain blocks into a growing list of records. Each block is locked by a cryptographic hash, or string of characters that uniquely identifies a set of data, to the previous block. The transaction records of a chain of blocks are stored in a data structure called a Merkle tree. This allows for fast retrieval of past records. To be a party in blockchain-based transactions, each user needs to create a pair of keys: a public key and a private key. This design makes it very difficult to alter transaction data stored in blockchain.

Although blockchain was initially devised to support fungible assets like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it has evolved to enable users to create a special kind of crypto asset, one that is nonfungible, meaning provably unique. Ethereum blockchain is the basis for most of the currently offered NFTs because it supports the ERC-721 token standard, enabling NFT creators to capture information of relevance to their digital artifacts and store it as tokens on the blockchain.

When you pay for an NFT, what you get is the right to transfer the token to your digital wallet. The token proves that your copy of a digital file is the original, like owning an original painting. And just as masterpiece paintings can be copied and distributed as inexpensive posters, anyone can have a digital copy of your NFT.

Your private crypto key is proof of ownership of the original. The content creator’s public crypto key serves as a certificate of authenticity for that particular digital artifact. This pair of the creator’s public key and the owner’s private key is primarily what determines the value of any NFT token.

The very short history of NFTs

NFTs came to prominence in 2017 with a game called CryptoKitties, which enables players to buy and “breed” limited-edition virtual cats. From there, game developers adopted NFTs in a big way to allow gamers to win in-game items such as digital shields, swords or similar prizes, and other game collectibles. Tokenization of game assets is a real game-changer, since it enables transferring tokens between different games or to another player via NFT specialized blockchain marketplaces.

Besides gaming, NFTs are frequently used to sell a wide range of virtual collectibles, including NBA virtual trading cards, music, digital images, video clips and even virtual real estate in Decentraland, a virtual world.

NonFungible.com, a website that tracks NFT projects and marketplaces, puts the value of the total NFT market at $250 million, a negligible fraction of the total crypto coin market but still highly attractive to content creators. The contract behind the token, based on the ERC-721 standard for creating NFTs, can be set to let content creators continue to earn a percentage from all subsequent sales.

The NFT market is likely to grow further because any piece of digital information can easily be “minted” into an NFT, a highly efficient way of managing and securing digital assets.

Blockchain’s carbon footprint

For all the excitement, there are also concerns that NFTs are not eco-friendly because they are built on the same blockchain technology used by some energy-hungry cryptocurrencies. For example, each NFT transaction on the Ethereum network consumes the equivalent of daily energy used by two American households.

Security for most of today’s blockchain networks is based on special computers called “miners” competing to solve complex math puzzles. This is the proof-of-work principle, which keeps people from gaming the system and provides the incentive for building and maintaining it. The miner who solves the math problem first gets awarded with a prize paid in virtual coins. The mining requires a lot of computational power, which drives electricity consumption.

Ethereum blockchain technology is evolving and moving toward a less computationally intensive design. There are also emerging blockchain technologies like Cardano, which was designed from the outset to have a small carbon footprint and has recently launched its own fast-growing NFT platform called Cardano Kidz.

The speed of transformation of blockchain technology into a newer, more eco-friendly variant might well decide the future of the NFT market in the short term. Some artists who feel strongly about global warming trends are opposed to NFTs because of perceived ecological impact.

The coming crypto-economy

Whether or not the current NFT craze can keep its momentum going, NFTs have already accelerated a larger trend of digital economic innovation. NFTs have confirmed that the public is feeling increasingly favorable toward a crypto-economy and is embracing short-term risks in return for creating new business possibilities.

[Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

NFTs have already made significant inroads into the luxury and gaming industries, and have plenty of room to grow beyond these initial applications. The art sector will continue to be an important segment of the overall NFT market and is likely to gradually reach maturity over the next couple of years, although it is likely to be surpassed by other digital certificate applications like trademarks and patents, training and upskilling certificates.

Dragan Boscovic, Research Professor of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.