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Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
Although Bitcoin was intended to be a decentralized digital currency, in practice, mining power is quite concentrated. This fact is a persistent source of concern for the Bitcoin community. We provide an explanation using a simple model to…
What happens to mining when the Bitcoin price changes, when there are mining supply shocks, the price of energy changes, or hardware technology evolves? We give precise answers based on the technical forces and incentives in the system. We…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
Explaining changes in bitcoin's price and predicting its future have been the foci of many research studies. In contrast, far less attention has been paid to the relationship between bitcoin's mining costs and its price. One popular notion…
Bitcoin and other similar digital currencies on blockchains are not ideal means for payment, because their prices tend to go up in the long term (thus people are incentivized to hoard those currencies), and to fluctuate widely in the short…
Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency that records alltransactions in a distributed append-only public ledger calledblockchain. The security of Bitcoin heavily relies on the incentive-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) based distributed consensus…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable…
In recent years, cryptocurrencies have attracted growing attention from both private investors and institutions. Among them, Bitcoin stands out for its impressive volatility and widespread influence. This paper explores the predictability…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
Cryptocurrency mining processes always lead to a high energy consumption at considerably high production cost, which is nearly one-third of cryptocurrency (e.g. Bitcoin) price itself. As the core of mining process is based on SHA-256…
A cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital currency that is designed for secure and private asset transfer and storage. As a currency, it should be difficult to counterfeit and double-spend. In this paper, we review and analyze the major…
Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin, a cryptography-enabled peer-to-peer digital payment system, has been gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. An effort designed to overcome a cluster of bottlenecks inherent in…
We argue that the current POW based consensus algorithm of the Bitcoin network suffers from a fundamental economic discrepancy between the real world transaction (txn) costs incurred by miners and the wealth that is being transacted. Put…
Bitcoin is the world's first decentralized digital currency. The rate at which bitcoins enter circulation is cut in half every 4 years, approximately. These events are considered landmarks in Bitcoin's history, and as such are widely…
Bitcoin is a representative decentralized currency system. For the security of Bitcoin, fairness in the distribution of mining rewards plays a crucial role in preventing the concentration of computational power in a few miners. Here,…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
The Bitcoin network is burning a large amount of energy for mining. In this paper we estimate the lower bound for the global energy cost for a period of ten years from 2010, taking into account changing oil costs, improvements in hashing…
Bitcoin is a digital currency and payment system based on classical cryptographic technologies which works without a central administrator such as in traditional currencies. It has long been questioned what the impact of quantum computing…