Related papers: On Bitcoin and Red Balloons
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that has applications in many domains such as cryptocurrency, smart contracts, supply chain management, and many others. Distributed consensus is a fundamental component of blockchain systems…
Blockchain has received a widespread attention because of its decentralized, tamper-proof, and transparent nature. Blockchain works over the principle of distributed, secured, and shared ledger, which is used to record, and track data…
Current cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, build a decentralized blockchain-based transaction ledger, maintained through proofs-of-work that also generate a monetary supply. Such decentralization has benefits, such as independence…
Bitcoin is built on a blockchain, an immutable decentralised ledger that allows entities (users) to exchange Bitcoins in a pseudonymous manner. Bitcoins are associated with alpha-numeric addresses and are transferred via transactions. Each…
Bitcoin derives a verifiable temporal order from probabilistic block discovery and cumulative proof-of-work rather than from a trusted global clock. We show that block arrivals exhibit stable exponential behavior across difficulty epochs,…
Proponents of blockchains believe that this technology will revolutionize e-commerce. To evaluate this belief, we invite several groups of students to transact on a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace built on the platform provided by…
Decentralization is a fundamental design element of the Web3 economy. Blockchains and distributed consensus mechanisms are touted as fault-tolerant, attack-resistant, and collusion-proof because they are decentralized. Recent analyses,…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As…
Most popular blockchain solutions, like Bitcoin, rely on proof-of-work, guaranteeing that the output of the consensus is agreed upon with high probability. However, this probability depends on the delivery of messages and that the…
While online interactions and exchanges have grown exponentially over the past decade, most commercial infrastructures still operate through centralized protocols, and their success essentially depends on trust between different economic…
One of the most innovative aspects of blockchain technology consists in the introduction of an incentive layer to regulate the behavior of distributed protocols. The designer of a blockchain system faces therefore issues that are akin to…
The old mantra of decentralizing the Internet is coming again with fanfare, this time around the blockchain technology hype. We have already seen a technology supposed to change the nature of the Internet: peer-to-peer. The reality is that…
In many online systems, individuals provide services for each other; the recipient of the service obtains a benefit but the provider of the service incurs a cost. If benefit exceeds cost, provision of the service increases social welfare…
Proof-of-Stake systems randomly choose, on each round, one of the participants as a consensus leader that extends the chain with the next block such that the selection probability is proportional to the owned stake. However, distributed…
Bitcoin demonstrated the possibility of a financial ledger that operates without the need for a trusted central authority. However, concerns persist regarding its security and considerable energy consumption. We assess the consensus…
Numerous electronic cash schemes have been proposed over the years - however none have been embraced by financial institutions as an alternative to fiat currency. David Chaum's ecash scheme was the closest to something that mimicked a…
Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will attempt to construct the one-to-many…
Bitcoin is a digital currency designed to rely on a decentralized, trustless network of anonymous agents. Using a pseudonymous-address-linking procedure that achieves >99% sensitivity and >99% specificity, we reveal that between launch…
Blockchain technology is among the fastest-growing technologies in the world today. It has been adopted in diverse areas but mostly in financial systems, such as Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Therefore, it is a niche that has attracted interest…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…