Related papers: An analysis of Bitcoin OP_RETURN metadata
Cryptocurrency blockchains, beyond their primary role as distributed payment systems, are increasingly used to store and share arbitrary content, such as text messages and files. Although often non-financial, this hidden content can impact…
The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other domains are its…
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are realized using distributed systems and hence critically rely on the performance and security of the interconnecting network. The requirements on these networks and their usage, however can differ…
The application of Bitcoin enables people to understand blockchain technology gradually. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency that does not rely on third-party credit institutions, and the core of Bitcoin's underlying technology is…
We consider the execution of smart contracts on Bitcoin. There, every contract step corresponds to appending to the blockchain a new transaction that spends the output representing the old contract state, creating a new one for the updated…
We focus on the problem of botnet orchestration and discuss how attackers can leverage decentralised technologies to dynamically control botnets with the goal of having botnets that are resilient against hostile takeovers. We cover critical…
Bitcoin is the first and the most extensive decentralized electronic cryptocurrency system that uses blockchain technology. It uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to operate without a central authority and propagate system information such as…
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…
Despite the fact that it is publicly available, collecting and processing the full bitcoin blockchain data is not trivial. Its mere size, history, and other features indeed raise quite specific challenges, that we address in this paper. The…
Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency used worldwide. It provides pseudonymity to its users by establishing identity using public keys as transaction end-points. These transactions are recorded on an immutable public ledger called…
A bitcoin \textit{covenant} is a mechanism to enforce conditions on future bitcoin transactions. A bitcoin \textit{vault} is a specific type of covenant transaction that enforces a time-lock on the transfer of control of funds to a hot…
At the heart of the Bitcoin is a blockchain protocol, a protocol for achieving consensus on a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. To the extent that a blockchain protocol is used for applications such as contract signing and…
Improving transaction throughput is an important challenge for Bitcoin. However, shortening the block generation interval or increasing the block size to improve throughput makes it sharing blocks within the network slower and increases the…
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…
Resource-constrained devices are unable to maintain a full copy of the Bitcoin Blockchain in memory. This paper proposes a bidirectional payment channel framework for IoT devices. This framework utilizes Bitcoin Lightning-Network-like…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
As a disruptive technology, blockchain, particularly its original form of bitcoin as a type of digital currency, has attracted great attentions. The innovative distributed decision making and security mechanism lay the technical foundation…
This paper presents a stochastic model for block arrival times based on the difficulty retargeting rule used in Bitcoin, as well as other proof-of-work blockchains. Unlike some previous work, this paper explicitly models the difficulty…
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…
Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols…