PaymentA payment is the voluntary tender of money or its equivalent or of things of value by one party (such as a person or company) to another in exchange for goods or services provided by them, or to fulfill a legal obligation/philanthropy desire. The party making the payment is commonly called the payer, while the payee is the party receiving the payment. Payments can be effected in a number of ways, for example: the use of money, cheque, or debit, credit, or bank transfers, whether through mobile payment or otherwise the transfer of anything of value, such as stock, or using barter, or personal data, the exchange of one good or service for another.
Payment systemA payment system is any system used to settle financial transactions through the transfer of monetary value. This includes the institutions, payment instruments such as payment cards, people, rules, procedures, standards, and technologies that make its exchange possible. A common type of payment system, called an operational network, links bank accounts and provides for monetary exchange using bank deposits. Some payment systems also include credit mechanisms, which are essentially a different aspect of payment.
CryptoKittiesCryptoKitties is a blockchain game developed by Canadian studio Dapper Labs. The game allows players to buy, sell, and create NFTs using on Ethereum. These NFTs represent virtual cats. The game's popularity in December 2017 congested the Ethereum network, causing it to reach an all-time high in the number of transactions and slowing it down significantly. Dapper Labs was spun-off from Axiom Zen. Both companies are based in Vancouver, Canada.
CostIn production, research, retail, and accounting, a cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something or deliver a service, and hence is not available for use anymore. In business, the cost may be one of acquisition, in which case the amount of money expended to acquire it is counted as cost. In this case, money is the input that is gone in order to acquire the thing. This acquisition cost may be the sum of the cost of production as incurred by the original producer, and further costs of transaction as incurred by the acquirer over and above the price paid to the producer.
Consensus (computer science)A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty processes. This often requires coordinating processes to reach consensus, or agree on some data value that is needed during computation. Example applications of consensus include agreeing on what transactions to commit to a database in which order, state machine replication, and atomic broadcasts.
Smart contractA smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the reduction of need for trusted intermediators, arbitration costs, and fraud losses, as well as the reduction of malicious and accidental exceptions. Smart contracts are commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, and the smart contracts introduced by Ethereum are generally considered a fundamental building block for decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFT applications.
Multidimensional transformIn mathematical analysis and applications, multidimensional transforms are used to analyze the frequency content of signals in a domain of two or more dimensions. One of the more popular multidimensional transforms is the Fourier transform, which converts a signal from a time/space domain representation to a frequency domain representation. The discrete-domain multidimensional Fourier transform (FT) can be computed as follows: where F stands for the multidimensional Fourier transform, m stands for multidimensional dimension.
Self-replicating machineA self-replicating machine is a type of autonomous robot that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. The concept of self-replicating machines has been advanced and examined by Homer Jacobson, Edward F. Moore, Freeman Dyson, John von Neumann, Konrad Zuse and in more recent times by K.
Proof of stakeProof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. This is done to avoid the computational cost of proof-of-work (POW) schemes. The first functioning use of PoS for cryptocurrency was Peercoin in 2012, although the scheme, on the surface, still resembled a POW. For a blockchain transaction to be recognized, it must be appended to the blockchain.
Social costSocial cost in neoclassical economics is the sum of the private costs resulting from a transaction and the costs imposed on the consumers as a consequence of being exposed to the transaction for which they are not compensated or charged. In other words, it is the sum of private and external costs. This might be applied to any number of economic problems: for example, social cost of carbon has been explored to better understand the costs of carbon emissions for proposed economic solutions such as a carbon tax.
