Related papers: Bitcoin Beacon
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…
This paper presents Wrapless -- a lending protocol that enables the collateralization of bitcoins without requiring a trusted wrapping mechanism. The protocol facilitates a "loan channel" on the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing bitcoins to be…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions.…
The Ripple network is one of the most prominent blockchain platforms and its native XRP token currently has one of the highest cryptocurrency market capitalizations. The Ripple consensus protocol powers this network and is generally…
One of the defining features of Bitcoin and the thousands of cryptocurrencies that have been derived from it is a globally visible transaction ledger. While Bitcoin uses pseudonyms as a way to hide the identity of its participants, a long…
Blockchain systems benefit from lessons in prior art such as fault tolerance, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, and game theory. In this paper we argue that blockchain algorithms should tolerate both rational (self-interested)…
Bitcoin is firmly becoming a mainstream asset in our global society. Its highly volatile nature has traders and speculators flooding into the market to take advantage of its significant price swings in the hope of making money. This work…
Bitcoin has emerged as a fascinating phenomenon of the financial markets. Without any central authority issuing the currency, it has been associated with controversy ever since its popularity and public interest reached high levels. Here,…
In this paper we discuss Bitcoin, the leader among the existing cryptocurrencies, to analyse its trends, success factors, current challenges and probable solutions to make it even better. In the introduction section, we discuss the history…
We propose a scheme to preserve the anonymity of users in proof-of-asset transactions. We assume bitcoin-like cryptocurrency systems in which a user must prove the strength of its assets (i.e., solvency), prior conducting further…
The Bitcoin protocol prescribes certain behavior by the miners who are responsible for maintaining and extending the underlying blockchain; in particular, miners who successfully solve a puzzle, and hence can extend the chain by a block,…
We introduce a new permissionless blockchain architecture called ABC. ABC is completely asynchronous, and does rely on neither randomness nor proof-of-work. ABC can be parallelized, and transactions have finality within one round trip of…
As blockchains continue to seek to scale to a larger number of nodes, the communication complexity of protocols has become a significant priority as the network can quickly become overburdened. Several schemes have attempted to address…
Nakamoto consensus, the protocol underlying Bitcoin, has the potential to secure a new class of systems which agree on non-mathematical truths. As an example of this capability, we propose a design for a trustless, data availability oracle.…
The DFINITY blockchain computer provides a secure, performant and flexible consensus mechanism. At its core, DFINITY contains a decentralized randomness beacon which acts as a verifiable random function (VRF) that produces a stream of…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native (and non-) tokens among participants. The complete historical bookkeeping and its wide availability opens up an unprecedented possibility, i.e. that of understanding…
Decentralized payment systems such as Bitcoin have become massively popular in the last few years, yet there is still much to be done in understanding their formal properties. The vast majority of decentralized payment systems work by…
With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, a new wave of private information is being flushed into applications. This development raises privacy concerns, as private datasets can be stolen or abused for non-authorized…
Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but…