English

Renegotiation and recursion in Bitcoin contracts

Cryptography and Security 2020-04-23 v2 Programming Languages

Abstract

BitML is a process calculus to express smart contracts that can be run on Bitcoin. One of its current limitations is that, once a contract has been stipulated, the participants cannot renegotiate its terms: this prevents expressing common financial contracts, where funds have to be added by participants at run-time. In this paper, we extend BitML with a new primitive for contract renegotiation. At the same time, the new primitive can be used to write recursive contracts, which was not possible in the original BitML. We show that, despite the increased expressiveness, it is still possible to execute BitML on standard Bitcoin, preserving the security guarantees of BitML.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.00296,
  title  = {Renegotiation and recursion in Bitcoin contracts},
  author = {Massimo Bartoletti and Maurizio Murgia and Roberto Zunino},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.00296},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Full version of the paper presented at COORDINATION 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:58:50.510Z