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Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin, a cryptography-enabled peer-to-peer digital payment system, has been gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. An effort designed to overcome a cluster of bottlenecks inherent in…
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
Blockchain is a distributed ledger, which is protected against malicious modifications by means of cryptographic tools, e.g. digital signatures and hash functions. One of the most prominent applications of blockchains is cryptocurrencies,…
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable…
Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 we have seen a great push towards public and private blockchains. In order to avoid fragmentation, a global network connecting all these blockchains is envisioned. Just like the Internet facilitates…
In recent years decentralized currencies developed through Blockchains are increasingly becoming popular because of their transparent nature and absence of a central controlling authority. Though a lot of computation power, disk space, and…
In this paper we revisit some major orthodoxies which lie at the heart of the bitcoin crypto currency and its numerous clones. In particular we look at The Longest Chain Rule, the monetary supply policies and the exact mechanisms which…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
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…
Owing to some special characteristics and features, blockchain is a very useful technique that can securely organize diverse devices in a smart city. It finds wide applications, especially in distributed environments, where entities such as…
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto proposed an electronic cash system (bitcoin) that is completely realized by peer-to-peer technology. The core value of this scheme is that it proposes a solution based on Proof-of Work, so that the cash system can…
One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography which has recently gained excessive popularity. Scientific research on bitcoin is less abundant. A paper at Financial Cryptography 2012…
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…
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…
Off-Chain transactions allow for the immediate transfer of Cryptocurrency between two parties, without delays or unavoidable transaction fees. Such capabilities are critical for mainstream Cryptocurrency adaption. They allow for the…
Proof-of-work computation used in cryptocurrencies has witnessed significant growth in the U.S. and many other regions around the world. One of the most significant bottlenecks for the scalable deployment of such computation is its energy…
In blockchain systems, especially cryptographic currencies such as Bitcoin, the double-spending and Byzantine-general-like problem are solved by reaching consensus protocols among all nodes. The state-of-the-art protocols include…
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…