After more than six years from the launch of Bitcoin, it has become ev-ident that the decentralized transaction ledger functionality implemented through the blockchain technology can be used not only for cryptocur-rencies, but to register, confirm and transfer any kind of contract and property

of the gossip algorithm for a given network, which requires global knowledge at every node, we find a sparser network that has better spectral properties and faster convergence than the original denser one. This allows to reduce simultaneously both the convergence time and the communication cost involved

) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research

seminar participants for comments. I am particularly grateful to Zvi Griliches who encouraged this research when it was at a formative stage. All remaining errors are mine alone. Abstract Why did commercialization of the Internet go so well? This paper examines events in the Internet access market

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technique, computation coding, we can exploit the interference property of the wireless medium for efficient averaging. This then provides a new abstraction for the physical layer: reliable linear equations instead of reliable bit pipes. The “neighborhood gossip” algorithm operates modularly on top

We describe Fair Layered Increase/Decrease with Dynamic Layering (FLID-DL), a new multi-rate congestion control algorithm for layered multicast sessions. FLID-DL generalizes the receiver-driven layered congestion (RLC) control protocol introduced by Vicisano, Rizzo, and Crowcroft, ameliorating

The principle aim of this dissertation is to investigate the philosophical application of quantum information theory to interpretational issues regarding the theory of quantum mechanics. Recently, quantum information theory has emerged as a potential source for such an interpretation. The main

First, I would like to thank to Dimka Karastoyanova and Mariano Cilia for all the fruitful discussions, their guidance and support through the course of this project. Thanks also to Prof. Alejandro Buchmann who sponsored my stay at Technische Universität Darmstadt during the spring of 2004. The special thanks go to my advisor, Mariano Cilia, who has made all this possible. Finally, I’d like to thank to my family for all these years of support.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have become increasingly popular in the recent years, particularly in the form of online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These games support up to several ten thousand players interacting in a virtual game world. The current commercially successful games