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Bitcoin has emerged as a revolutionary payment system with its decentralized ledger concept; however it has significant problems such as high transaction fees and low throughput. Lightning Network (LN), which was introduced much later,…
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…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native tokens among participants, or the exchange of such tokens for fiat currencies in markets external to these public ledgers. The availability of their complete historical…
This paper presents a new blockchain network simulator that uses bitcoin's original reference implementation as its main application. The proposed simulator leverages the use of lightweight virtualization technology to build a fine tuned…
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…
While the statistical and resilience properties of the Internet are no more changing significantly across time, the Darknet, a network devoted to keep anonymous its traffic, still experiences rapid changes to improve the security of its…
A major problem in the study of complex socioeconomic systems is represented by privacy issues$-$that can put severe limitations on the amount of accessible information, forcing to build models on the basis of incomplete knowledge. In this…
Peer-to-Peer protocols currently form the most heavily used protocol class in the Internet, with BitTorrent, the most popular protocol for content distribution, as its flagship. A high number of studies and investigations have been…
Ethereum is a permissionless blockchain ecosystem that supports execution of smart contracts, the key enablers of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, the expressiveness of Ethereum smart contracts is a…
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…
The Lightning Network (LN) is a prominent payment channel network aimed at addressing Bitcoin's scalability issues. Due to the privacy of channel balances, senders cannot reliably choose sufficiently liquid payment paths and resort to a…
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…
Utilizing graph analytics and learning has proven to be an effective method for exploring aspects of crypto economics such as network effects, decentralization, tokenomics, and fraud detection. However, the majority of existing research…
A proof of the security of the Bitcoin protocol is made rigorous, and simplified in certain parts. A computational model in which an adversary can delay transmission of blocks by time $\Delta$ is considered. The protocol is generalized to…
Monero, the leading privacy-focused cryptocurrency, relies on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to propagate transactions and blocks. Growing evidence suggests that non-standard nodes exist in the network, posing as honest nodes but are perhaps…
The spectacular success of Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology in recent years has provided enough evidence that a widespread adoption of a common cryptocurrency system is not merely a distant vision, but a scenario that might come true in…
The architectures of deployed anonymity systems such as Tor suffer from two key problems that limit user's trust in these systems. First, paths for anonymous communication are built without considering trust relationships between users and…
This paper develops a feedback-based method to preserve the topology privacy of consensus protocols in network systems. The key idea is to intentionally violate topology identifiability conditions, thereby preventing unique or accurate…
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…
As the use of Blockchain for digital payments continues to rise in popularity, it also becomes susceptible to various malicious attacks. Successfully detecting anomalies within Blockchain transactions is essential for bolstering trust in…