A Nucleolus-Based Quota Allocation Model for the Bitcoin-Refunded Blockchain Network

The Bitcoin operates in a Blockchain network under which a group of participants are responsible for adding new blocks into the chain. These participants are called miners and the ones that successfully add a block into the network receive a reward for their work. As the technology evolved over the years, this "mining" process has become more challenging with miners facing long periods without positive cash flow, while still having costs associated. This resulting business architecture has driving participants away from the technology, jeopardizing its operations, and defying its progression. In order to cope with this issue, an alternative to provide miners' financial sustainability is to join a mining pool, which main purpose is to mitigate this cash flow sparsity by sharing the (more-recurrent) rewards obtained by the group. Therefore, in this work, we propose a reward sharing methodology for mining pools based on the Nucleolus of a stochastic cooperative game. A risk-averse value functional based on the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) is used to characterize the game's certainty equivalent. Two numerical experiments were conducted in this work: (i) one based on a small, illustrative network; and (ii) one derived from real data of the Bitcoin-refunded Blockchain network. The focus of the experiments is on the incremental value of the proposed methodology over using intuitive allocations (uniform and based on computational power) and in what extent the relative increase in the mining likelihood by playing as a group benefits the pool stability. Finally, we discuss and numerically analyze a nested procedure based on the proposed Nucleolus-based allocation seeking for higher "fairness" in sharing the pool rewards.

Use of BP Neural Networks to Determine China’s Regional CO2 Emission Quota

China declared a long-term commitment at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in 2020 to reduce CO2 emissions. This announcement has been described by Reuters as “the most important climate change commitment in years.” The allocation of China’s provincial CO2 emission quotas (hereafter referred to as quotas) is crucial for building a unified national carbon market, which is an important policy tool necessary to achieve carbon emissions reduction. In the present research, we used historical quota data of China’s carbon emission trading policy pilot areas from 2014 to 2017 to identify alternative features of corporate CO2 emissions and build a backpropagation neural network model (BP) to train the benchmark model. Later, we used the model to calculate the quotas for other regions, provided they implement the carbon emission trading policy. Finally, we added up the quotas to obtain the total national quota. Additionally, considering the perspective of carbon emission terminal, a new characteristic system of quota allocation was proposed in order to retrain BP including the following three aspects: enterprise production, household consumption, and regional environment. The results of the benchmark model and the new models were compared. This feature system not only builds a reasonable quota-related indicator framework but also perfectly matches China’s existing “bottom-up” total control quota approach. Compared with the previous literature, the present report proposes a quota allocation feature system closer to China’s policy and trains BP to obtain reasonable feature weights. The model is very important for the establishment of a unified national carbon emission trading market and the determination of regional quotas in China.

Fishing Fleet Development Program: Expectations аnd Realities

The review is devoted to the analysis of expert opinions on the interim results of the implementation of the program ‘Development of the fisheries complex’. The high rate of reduction of the fishing fleet, the increasing risks of a lack of production capacity and restrictions on the increase in the volume of production of aquatic biological resources, the low degree of processing of catches on ships and the lack of innovations in the fisheries complex were prerequisites for the development of the Federal Program ‘Development of the Fisheries Complex’, adopted in 2014. It was supposed to solve a number of tasks that ensure the departure from the raw material orientation of exports by stimulating the production of products with a high share of added value through the development of the scientific and technical potential of the fisheries complex. Its implementation has indeed contributed to a sharp increase in investment in the modernization of the existing fishing fleet and in the construction of new vessels due to the change in the principle of quota allocation. However, the analysis of the implementation of investment projects shows a steady lag behind the deadlines for putting new ships into operation, which leads to negative financial consequences for investor companies. Due to the late commissioning of fishing vessels, investor companies are unable to catch products and meet their financial obligations to financial institutions in a timely manner. The change in the historical principle of quota allocation and the introduction of a new ‘keel quota’ mechanism, deprives fishing enterprises of a certain part of the potential income with which these enterprises intended to cover previously made investments in the modernization and re-equipment of the fleet and coastal processing. It can be stated that at present this program supports only the shipbuilding complex, ignoring the financial interests of both fishing and fish processing enterprises. The author’s position is based on the fact that it is necessary to carry out not only the modernization and renewal of the fleet, but also to develop technologies for deep and waste-free processing of extracted aquatic bioresources within the framework of existing food programs. In terms of organizing the processing of waste generated during the extraction of aquatic bioresources, it is necessary to adjust the program ‘Development of the fisheries complex’

Research on China’s Regional Carbon Emission Quota Allocation in 2030 under the Constraint of Carbon Intensity

To achieve the goal of carbon dioxide emission reduction in 2030 promised to the United Nations, China unified the Carbon Trading System (CTS) in 2017 since carbon dioxide quota allocation is one of the core issues of carbon trading. It is imperative to establish a flexible carbon quota allocation system based on the unbalanced characteristics of resource endowment and economic development in different regions. Unlike previous distribution research, this paper considers five principles, which are fairness principle, efficiency principle, feasibility principle, development principle, and innovation principle. The maximum deviation method is used to research the carbon emission quota allocation in 30 provinces of China, and the results are compared with those under the single principle and the information entropy method. The results reveal that the distribution under the single principle is severely unbalanced, making the region have a strong sense of relative deprivation. The maximum deviation method is better than the information entropy method to achieve carbon intensity by 2030. It is also conducive to promote the coordinated development of the regional economy, narrow the poverty gap, and achieve sustainable development.