Related papers: Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea
The payment channel, which allows two parties to perform micropayments without involving the blockchain, has become a promising proposal to improve the scalability of decentralized ledgers such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Payment channels have…
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…
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
While anonymity networks such as Tor provide invaluable privacy guarantees to society, they also enable all kinds of criminal activities. Consequently, many blameless citizens shy away from protecting their privacy using such technology for…
Anonymous communication systems are subject to selective denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Selective DoS attacks lower anonymity as they force paths to be rebuilt multiple times to ensure delivery which increases the opportunity for more…
Owing to Satoshi Nakamoto's brilliant idea, a P2P public ledger is shown to be implementable in anonymous network. Any Internet user can then join the anonymous network and contribute to the P2P public ledger by providing their computing…
We present BitConduite, a visual analytics tool for explorative analysis of financial activity within the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency worldwide and a phenomenon that challenges the underpinnings of traditional…
PGP is built upon a Distributed Web of Trust in which the trustworthiness of a user is established by others who can vouch through a digital signature for that particular identity. Preventing its wholesale adoption are a number of inherent…
Lightning Network (LN) is designed to amend the scalability and privacy issues of Bitcoin. It's a payment channel network where Bitcoin transactions are issued off chain, onion routed through a private payment path with the aim to settle…
The Lightning Network is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that promises to enable rapid and private payment processing. In Lightning, multi-hop payments are secured by utilizing Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and encrypted on the…
In late 2017, a sudden proliferation of malicious JavaScript was reported on the Web: browser-based mining exploited the CPU time of website visitors to mine the cryptocurrency Monero. Several studies measured the deployment of such code…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
We examine a protocol $\pi_{\text{beacon}}$ that outputs unpredictable and publicly verifiable randomness, meaning that the output is unknown at the time that $\pi_{\text{beacon}}$ starts, yet everyone can verify that the output is close to…
We design and validate new block propagation protocols for the peer-to-peer (P2P) network of the Bitcoin blockchain. Despite its strong protection for security and privacy, the current Bitcoin blockchain can only support a low number of…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that has rapidly grown in popularity in recent years. Usually, the complete history of Bitcoin blockchain data must be queried to acquire variables with economic meaning. This task has…
To strengthen the anonymity of Bitcoin, several centralized coin-mixing providers (mixers) such as BitcoinFog.com, BitLaundry.com, and Blockchain.info assist users to mix Bitcoins through CoinJoin transactions with multiple inputs and…
Proof of work blockchain protocols using multiple hash types are considered. It is proven that the security region of such a protocol cannot be the AND of a 51\% attack on all the hash types. Nevertheless, a protocol called Merged Bitcoin…
One of the fundamental applications for a practically useful system of money is remuneration. Information pertaining to the amount of compensation awarded to different individuals is often considered sensitive, commanding a certain degree…
Distributed anonymity services, such as onion routing networks or cryptocurrency tumblers, promise privacy protection without trusted third parties. While the security of these services is often well-researched, security implications of…