Related papers: The False Premises and Promises of Bitcoin
Today's world is organized based on merit and value. A single global currency that's decentralized is needed for a global economy. Bitcoin is a partial solution to this need, however it suffers from scalability problems which prevent it…
Grassroots currencies are means for turning mutual trust into liquidity, with the goal of providing foundations for grassroots digital economies. Grassroots coins are units of debt that can be issued by anyone -- people, corporations,…
A collection of questions about Bitcoin and its hypothetical relatives Bitguilder and Bitpenny is formulated. These questions concern technical issues about protocols, security issues, issues about the formalizations of informational monies…
BitCoin transactions are malleable in a sense that given a transaction an adversary can easily construct an equivalent transaction which has a different hash. This can pose a serious problem in some BitCoin distributed contracts in which…
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is an emerging trend in digital payments, with the vast majority of central banks around the world researching, piloting, or even operating a digital version of cash. While design choices differ broadly,…
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…
Many blockchain-based algorithms, such as Bitcoin, implement a decentralized asset transfer system, often referred to as a cryptocurrency. As stated in the original paper by Nakamoto, at the heart of these systems lies the problem of…
Since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2008, many other cryptocurrencies have been introduced and gained popularity. Lack of interoperability and scalability amongst these cryptocurrencies was and still is, acting as a significant impediment…
Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have been implemented by only a handful of countries, but they are being explored by many more. CBDCs are digital currencies issued and backed by a central bank. Consumer trust can encourage or…
Although Bitcoin in its original whitepaper stated that it offers anonymous transactions, de-anonymization techniques have found otherwise. Therefore, alternative cryptocurrencies, like Dash, Monero, and Zcash, were developed to provide…
The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong…
In recent years, electronic retail payment mechanisms, especially e-commerce and card payments at the point of sale, have increasingly replaced cash in many developed countries. As a result, societies are losing a critical public retail…
The internet era has generated a requirement for low cost, anonymous and rapidly verifiable transactions to be used for online barter, and fast settling money have emerged as a consequence. For the most part, e-money has fulfilled this…
The famous new money Bitcoin is classified as a technical informational money (TIM). Besides introducing the idea of a TIM, a more extreme notion of informational money will be developed: exclusively informational money (EXIM). The…
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…
Motivated by the great success and adoption of Bitcoin, a number of cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are becoming increasingly popular. Although existing blockchain-based cryptocurrency schemes can ensure reasonable…
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…
Digital wallet as a software program or a digital device allows users to conduct various transactions. Hot and cold digital wallets are considered as two types of this wallet. Digital wallets need an online connection fall into the first…
Blockchain technology has been transforming the financial industry and has created a new crypto-economy in the last decade. The foundational concepts such as decentralized trust and distributed ledger are promising for distributed, and…
Bitcoin users are directly or indirectly forced to deal with public key cryptography, which has a number of security and usability challenges that differ from the password-based authentication underlying most online banking services. Users…