Rich specifications for Ethereum smart contract verification

Smart contracts are programs that execute in blockchains such as Ethereum to manipulate digital assets. Since bugs in smart contracts may lead to substantial financial losses, there is considerable interest in formally proving their correctness. However, the specification and verification of smart contracts faces challenges that rarely arise in other application domains. Smart contracts frequently interact with unverified, potentially adversarial outside code, which substantially weakens the assumptions that formal analyses can (soundly) make. Moreover, the core functionality of smart contracts is to manipulate and transfer resources; describing this functionality concisely requires dedicated specification support. Current reasoning techniques do not fully address these challenges, being restricted in their scope or expressiveness (in particular, in the presence of re-entrant calls), and offering limited means of expressing the resource transfers a contract performs. In this paper, we present a novel specification methodology tailored to the domain of smart contracts. Our specifications and associated reasoning technique are the first to enable: (1) sound and precise reasoning in the presence of unverified code and arbitrary re-entrancy, (2) modular reasoning about collaborating smart contracts, and (3) domain-specific specifications for resources and resource transfers, expressing a contract's behaviour in intuitive and concise ways and excluding typical errors by default. We have implemented our approach in 2vyper, an SMT-based automated verification tool for Ethereum smart contracts written in Vyper, and demonstrated its effectiveness for verifying strong correctness guarantees for real-world contracts.

Resources in Relational Packages: Social Capital as a Byproduct of Relational Work

Social capital theory offers a compelling explanation as to why people are committed to making resources available to others outside of formal institutions. In this article, we build on social capital theory to explain how actors overcome two practical problems endemic to these resource transfers. We present Viviana Zelizer’s relational work theory as a complimentary framework which accounts for when an individual may act on commitments to offer resources and which commitments to act upon when they are in conflict. Drawing on our empirical work on almsgiving to social outcasts and resource transfers at mourning ceremonies in Azerbaijan, we describe how people identify and ascribe their relationships to others by relying on available cultural conventions to mark economic transactions and other media as appropriate or inappropriate. By conceptualizing social capital in this way, we also obtain a process-tracing methodology useful for social researchers and for community activists to generate ideas on how to expand social capital in their own or others’ communities.

Resources in Relational Packages: Social Capital as a Byproduct of Relational Work

Social capital theory offers a compelling explanation as to why people are committed to making resources available to others outside of formal institutions. In this paper, we build on social capital theory to explain how actors overcome two practical problems endemic to these resource transfers. We present Viviana Zelizer’s relational work theory as a complimentary framework which accounts for when an individual may act on commitments to offer resources and which commitments to act upon when they are in conflict. Drawing on our empirical work on almsgiving to social outcasts and resource transfers at mourning ceremonies in Azerbaijan, we describe how people identify and ascribe their relationships to others by relying on available cultural conventions to mark economic transactions and other media as appropriate or inappropriate. By conceptualizing social capital in this way, we also obtain a process-tracing methodology useful for social researchers and for community activists to generate ideas on how to expand social capital in their own or others’ communities.

Global development cooperation in a COVID-19 world

COVID-19 and the economic response have amplified and changed the nature of development challenges in fundamental ways. Global development cooperation should adapt accordingly. This paper lays out the urgency for new methods of development cooperation that can deliver resource transfers at scale, oriented to addressing climate change and with transparency and better governance. It looks at what is actually happening to major donor countries’ development cooperation programs and where the principal gaps lie, and offers some thoughts on how to move forward, notwithstanding the clear geopolitical rivalries that are evident.The most immediate challenge is to provide a level of liquidity support to countries ravaged by the global economic downturn. Many developing countries will see double-digit declines in GDP, with some recording downturns not seen in peacetime. Alongside the short-term challenge of recovery, COVID-19 has laid bare longer-term trends that have pointed for some time to the lack of sustainability—environmental, social, and governance—in the way economic development was occurring in many places, including in advanced economies. This new landscape has significant implications for development cooperation in terms of scale, development/climate co-benefits, and transparency and accountability.

Reversing the Industrial Revolution

This chapter argues that energy technologies should be understood in terms of asymmetric global resource transfers and environmental load displacements. The fossil fuel technologies inaugurated during the Industrial Revolution and the renewable energy technologies designed to replace them are similarly entangled with such societal asymmetries. Both represent social strategies of time-space appropriation within a highly unequal world-system generated by the polarizing logic of all-purpose money. The dependence of modern technology on asymmetric flows of embodied labour time, land, matter, and energy is effectively obscured in mainstream economics by the exclusive focus on prices and market mechanisms. Given the land-saving logic of the turn to fossil energy, it is pertinent to ask whether a turn to renewables would imply a return of land constraints. To perceive modern technologies simply as politically neutral instruments for harnessing natural forces, disregarding their demands on land and other resources beyond the technological infrastructure itself, is an example of fetishism.

Accessing Resources in Arrival Neighbourhoods: How Foci-Aided Encounters Offer Resources to Newcomers

<p>Numerous studies have stressed the importance of social networks for the transfer of resources. This article focuses on recently arrived immigrants with few locally embedded network contacts, analysing how they draw on arrival-specific resources in their daily routines. The qualitative research in an arrival neighbourhood in a German city illustrates that routinised and spontaneous foci-aided encounters in semi-public spaces play an important role for newcomers in providing access to arrival-specific knowledge. The article draws on the concept of ‘micro publics,’ highlighting different settings facilitating interactions and resource transfers. Based on our research we developed a classification of different types of encounter that enable resource transfer. The article specifically focuses on foci-aided encounters, as these appear to have a great impact on newcomers’ access to resources. Institutionalised to varying degrees, these settings, ranging from local mosques to football grounds, facilitate interaction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ immigrants. Interviews reveal forms of solidarity between immigrants and how arrival-specific information relevant to ‘navigating the system’ gets transferred. Interestingly, reciprocity plays a role in resource transfers also via routinised and spontaneous foci-aided encounters.</p>

Neighbourhood-based social integration. The importance of the local context for different forms of resource transfer

Due to their lack of financial resources, poor residents of deprived neighbourhoods are very much reliant on support and assistance from their personal networks. Studies refer to the key importance of neighbourhood contacts transcending social boundaries to promote upward social mobility. Based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative findings, this paper looks at the importance of social mix within a person’s neighbourhood and immediate surroundings for transferring different kinds of resources. The results show that even residents of deprived neighbourhoods can call on a well-developed support network to deal with everyday problems. The contribution also shows that network contacts to people endowed with more resources are no guarantee for the upward social mobility of the less well endowed. Indeed, it would seem that ‘getting-ahead’ resources are also accessible via their homogeneous networks. Much more to the point, the immediate surroundings turn out to be an important spatial context for contacts and resource transfers, especially for families with children.