Related papers: Bitcoin Beacon
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
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…
We introduce proof of spending in a block-chain system. In this system the probability for a node to create a legal block is proportional to the total amount of coins it has spent in history.
We introduce Unity, a new consensus algorithm for public blockchain settings. Unity is an eventual consistency protocol merging the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a coherent stochastic process. It encompasses hardware and…
This paper investigates whether Bitcoin can be regarded as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), what insights it may offer for the broader DAO ecosystem, and how Bitcoin governance can be improved. First, a quantitative literature…
We present Union, a trust-minimized bridge protocol that enables secure transfer of BTC between Bitcoin and a secondary blockchain. The growing ecosystem of blockchain systems built around Bitcoin has created a pressing need for secure and…
Blockchain protocols typically aspire to run in the permissionless setting, in which nodes are owned and operated by a large number of diverse and unknown entities, with each node free to start or stop running the protocol at any time. This…
Blockchain has been considered as an important technique to enable secure management of virtual network functions and network slices. To understand such capabilities of a blockchain, e.g. transaction confirmation time, demands a thorough…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Properties of the bitcoin backbone protocol have been investigated in some depth: the blockchain growth property quantifies the number of blocks added to the blockchain…
Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile financial instruments with more and more new retail investors joining the scene with each passing day. Bitcoin has always proved to determine in which way the rest of the cryptocurrency market is headed…
Cryptocurrency systems can be subject to deanonimization attacks by exploiting the network-level communication on their peer-to-peer network. Adversaries who control a set of colluding node(s) within the peer-to-peer network can observe…
This paper studies binary hypothesis testing based on measurements from a set of sensors, a subset of which can be compromised by an attacker. The measurements from a compromised sensor can be manipulated arbitrarily by the adversary. The…
The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements,…
We report our experience in the formal verification of the reference implementation of the Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain is the backbone component of the new Proof-of-Stake Ethereum 2.0 network: it is in charge of tracking information…
Bitcoin-NG is among the first blockchain protocols to approach the \emph{near-optimal} throughput by decoupling blockchain operation into two planes: leader election and transaction serialization. Its decoupling idea has inspired a new…
Longest-chain blockchain protocols, such as Bitcoin, guarantee liveness even when the number of actively participating users is variable, i.e., they are adaptive. However, they are not safe under network partitions, i.e., they do not…
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the…
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…
Bitcoin is a digital financial asset that is devoid of a central authority. This makes it distinct from traditional financial assets in a number of ways. For instance, the total number of tokens is limited and it has not explicit use value.…