Related papers: Tithonus: A Bitcoin Based Censorship Resilient Sys…
Censorship resistance with short-term inclusion guarantees is an important feature of decentralized systems, missing from many state-of-the-art and even deployed consensus protocols. In leader-based protocols the leader arbitrarily selects…
The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong…
Despite broad use of BFT consensus in blockchains, censorship resistance is weak: leaders can exclude transactions, a growing concern for trading and DeFi. We address this by introducing a new abstraction and protocol stack. First, we…
Bitcoin is an immutable permissionless blockchain system that has been extensively used as a public bulletin board by many different applications that heavily relies on its immutability. However, Bitcoin's immutability is not without its…
Internet censorship has been implemented in several countries to prevent citizens from accessing information and to suppress discussion of specific topics. This paper presents Infnote, a platform that helps eliminate the problem of sharing…
Although blockchain, the supporting technology of various cryptocurrencies, has offered a potentially effective framework for numerous decentralized trust management systems, its performance is still sub-optimal in real-world networks. With…
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic…
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…
This paper presents TetraBFT, a novel unauthenticated Byzantine fault tolerant protocol for solving consensus in partial synchrony, eliminating the need for public key cryptography and ensuring resilience against computationally unbounded…
Blockchain protocols are inherently limited in transaction throughput and latency. Recent efforts to address performance and scale blockchains have focused on off-chain payment channels. While such channels can achieve low latency and high…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…
Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…
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…
There is a resurgence of interest in Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems due to blockchains. However, leader-based BFT consensus protocols used by permissioned blockchains have limited scalability and robustness. To alleviate the leader…
Providing unrestricted access to sensitive content such as news and software is difficult in the presence of adaptive and resourceful surveillance and censoring adversaries. In this paper we leverage the distributed and resilient nature of…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…
Topos is an open interoperability protocol designed to reduce as much as possible trust assumptions by replacing them with cryptographic constructions and decentralization while exhibiting massive scalability. The protocol does not make use…
Recent work has demonstrated significant anonymity vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's networking stack. In particular, the current mechanism for broadcasting Bitcoin transactions allows third-party observers to link transactions to the IP…
We design and validate new block propagation protocols for the peer-to-peer (P2P) network of the Bitcoin blockchain. Despite its strong protection for security and privacy, the current Bitcoin blockchain can only support a low number of…
Today's internet concentrates identity, payments, communication, and content hosting under a small number of corporate intermediaries, creating single points of failure, enabling censorship, and extracting economic rent from participants.…