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Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has been characterised to be the next big thing and has already gained a broad recognition by experts in diverse fields. In this paper, we consider possible use cases and applications of the…
A major drawback in deploying central bank digital currencies (CDBC) is the offline puzzle, which requires that a CBDC must keep the provision given by cash, and, simultaneously, avoid double-spending, counterfeiting, and other issues. The…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
The regulatory framework of cryptocurrencies (and, in general, blockchain tokens) is of paramount importance. This framework drives nearly all key decisions in the respective business areas. In this work, a computational model is proposed…
We define and examine the shutdown problem for blockchain systems: how to gracefully end the system's operation at the end of its useful life. A particular focus is those blockchain systems that hold archival data of long-lived interest. We…
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…
Blockchains have a storage scalability issue. Their size is not bounded and they grow indefinitely as time passes. As of August 2017, the Bitcoin blockchain is about 120 GiB big while it was only 75 GiB in August 2016. To benefit from…
Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which…
Cryptocurrency networks such as Bitcoin have emerged as a distributed alternative to traditional centralized financial transaction networks. However, there are major challenges in scaling up the throughput of such networks. Lightning…
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…
Since the creation of Bitcoin 15 years ago, there has been an explosion in the number of permissionless blockchains. Each of these blockchains provides an open ledger that anyone can read from and write to. In this multi-chain world, an…
Since the invention of Bitcoin one decade ago, numerous cryptocurrencies have sprung into existence. Among these, proof-of-work is the most common mechanism for achieving consensus, whilst a number of coins have adopted "ASIC-resistance" as…
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…
Due to the shortage of available kidney organs for transplants, handling every donor kidney with utmost care is crucial to preserve the organ's health, especially during the organ supply chain where kidneys are prone to deterioration during…
The mining of bitcoin is modeled using system dynamics, showing that the past evolution of the network hash rate can be explained to a large extent by an efficient market hypothesis applied to the mining of blocks. The possibility of a…
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that relies on cryptography rather than trusted third parties such as central banks for its security. Underpinning the operation of the currency is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network that facilitates…
A blockchain, during its lifetime, records large amounts of data, that in a common usage its kept on its entirety. In a robotics environment, the old information is useful for human evaluation, or oracles interfacing with the blockchain but…
Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency, has attracted a lot of attention from academia, financial service industry and enthusiasts. The trade-off between transaction confirmation throughput and centralization of hash power do not allow…
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…
A decentralized blockchain is a distributed ledger that is often used as a platform for exchanging goods and services. This ledger is maintained by a network of nodes that obeys a set of rules, called a consensus protocol, which helps to…