From the article: "To extend the lifetime of products, an agent is connected to the product. This agent has several roles. It depends on the phase of the lifecycle what these roles will be. One of the roles in the usage or recycling phase is to negotiate for buying spare parts in case a part of the product is broken. The same agent can also decide to offer spare parts to other agents to reuse working parts of a broken product. To accomplish this idea, a marketplace for agents has to be set up, where the auctions can take place. To support this concept, blockchain technology has been used. Blockchains are a new type of technology, known from bitcoins, but there are other cases where blockchains can be used. Blockchain is known for its decentralisation, transparency and for making trustful transactions. In this paper the working of different types of blockchains will be briefly explained and determined if they can be useful for online auctions by agents. A prototype of the marketplace using blockchains has been built."
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Publicatie ter gelegenheid van het op 17 oktober 2018 in Cursus- en Vergadercentrum Domstad plaatsgevonden Utrecht Blockchain Congres. Aanleiding was het feit dat het Blockchainlab van Hogeschool Utrecht recentelijk is erkend als regionaal én nationaal expertisecentrum op het gebied van blockchains. Afgaande op de positieve reacties en de hoge opkomst kunnen we terugkijken op een geslaagd event.
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Rond 2008 werd de blockchain bedacht als een van de antwoorden op het wegvallen van het vertrouwen in de banken als bemiddelaars in financiële transacties. Het is bedacht om betalingen te verrichten met bitcoins, een alternatieve munt die zonder tussenkomst van banken wordt gebruikt. In hoeverre kan de blockchain gebruikt worden in archivering?
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Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain have in recent years been presented as a new general-purpose technology that could underlie many aspects of social and economic life, including civics and urban governance. In an urban context, over the past few years, a number of actors have started to explore the application of distributed ledgers in amongst others smart city services as well as in blockchain for good and urban commons-projects. DLTs could become the administrative backbones of such projects, as the technology can be set-up as an administration, management and allocation tool for urban resources. With the addition of smart contracts, DLTs can further automate the processing of data and execution of decisions in urban resource management through algorithmic governance. This means that the technological set-up and design of such DLT based systems could have large implications for the ways urban resources are governed. Positive contributions are expected to be made toward (local) democracy, transparent governance, decentralization, and citizen empowerment. We argue that to fully scrutinize the implications for urban governance, a critical analysis of distributed ledger technologies is necessary. In this contribution, we explore the lens of “the city as a license” for such a critical analysis. Through this lens, the city is framed as a “rights-management-system,” operated through DLT technology. Building upon Lefebvrian a right to the city-discourses, such an approach allows to ask important questions about the implications of DLTs for the democratic governance of cities in an open, inclusive urban culture. Through a technological exploration combined with a speculative approach, and guided by our interest in the rights management and agency that blockchains have been claimed to provide to their users, we trace six important issues: quantification; blockchain as a normative apparatus; the complicated relationship between transparency and accountability; the centralizing forces that act on blockchains; the degrees to which algorithmic rules can embed democratic law-making and enforcing; and finally, the limits of blockchain's trustlessness.
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From the article: "This article evaluates the application of blockchain technology to improve organic or fair-trade food traceability from “Farm to Fork” in light of European regulations. This study aims to shed light on the challenges in the organic food chain to overcome, the drivers for blockchain technology, and the challenges in current projects."
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The current standard in accounting practice is the double-entry approach. Basis of the double-entry approach is that every financial event brings two equal and offsetting entries. Since these financial events are not automatically confirmed by both parties, the accounting quality can be improved. The blockchain mechanism possibly offers a different take on accounting. Based on an experimentation approach, data was collected to compare the double-entry method with the blockchain-based triple-entry method. The results show that the main difference concerns determining the completeness of the financial statement items. In the situation of double-entry accounting, segregation of duties is applied to do so. In the blockchain situation, the underlying mechanism of the blockchain already ensures this.
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Blockchains draw everything they touch into a market logic. Is resistance possible?Activist and artistic engagements with blockchain technology point to (at least) threedifferent sets of tactics that aim to subvert this affordance of the technology. The firstis part of an accellerationist logic: riding the waves of capital until capitalism finallycrashes, funding alternative values with whatever profit was accrued while it lasted.The second are part of prefigurative politics: building alternative blockchain systems,often in the form of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, that perform adifferent kind of politics and social organization, for example cooperativism or self-organized art funding. Then, there are those that explore how blockchain’s logics canbe subverted to make space for different ways of relating in non-financial and more-than-human ways. In this short essay I would like to focus on this third tactic, and toexplore what it might mean, I've been inspired by Patricia de Vries’ take on “plot workas an artistic praxis” (2022) that builds on decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter describedas “the plot system” that represented small, imperfect corners of relative self-deter-mination within the larger context of colonial plantations (Wynter 1971, 96). De Vriesasks how artistic work, implicated as it is in institutional and capitalist logics, can per-form plot work to create space for relating outside of those logics. But before I adressthis question, it is important to understand what Wynter understands as the logic ofthe plantation.
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Data, the raw material from which information is derived, is stored, copied, moved and modified more easily than ever. This quantum leap reaches levels outside our imagination. Surrounded by sensors, recommendation systems, invisible algorithms, spreadsheets and blockchains, the ‘difference that makes a difference’ can no longer be identified. Big Data is a More Data ideology, driven by old school hypergrowth premisses. As Nathan Jurgenson once observed: “Big Data always stands in the shadow of the bigger data to come. The assumption is that there is more data today and there will necessarily be even more tomorrow, an expansion that will bring us ever closer to the inevitable pure ‘data totality.” (2) Nothing symbolizes the current hypergrowth obsession better than Big Data. Let’s investigate what happens when we apply degrowth to data and reserve datafication–as a decolonial project, a collective act of refusal, an ultimate sign of boredom. We’re done with you, data system, stand out of my light.
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Deze PDF laat in korte teksten en infographics zien waar het kenniscentrum zich in 2018 mee heeft beziggehouden.
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