Related papers: encointer -- Local Community Cryptocurrencies with…
Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are…
Electronic cash (e-cash) is a digital alternative to physical currency that allows anonymous transactions between users and merchants. Typically, coins in an e-cash scheme are only dispensed through a central bank. A drawback of this…
Sybil resistance is a key requirement of decentralized consensus protocols. It is achieved by introducing a scarce resource (such as computational power, monetary stake, disk space, etc.), which prevents participants from costlessly…
Ring signatures are cryptographic protocols designed to allow any member of a group to produce a signature on behalf of the group, without revealing the individual signer's identity. This offers group members a level of anonymity not…
The anonymity of blockchain has accelerated the growth of illegal activities and criminal behaviors on cryptocurrency platforms. Although decentralization is one of the typical characteristics of blockchain, we urgently call for effective…
Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a new form of digital money that has not escaped the eyes of cyber-attackers. Traditionally, they have been maliciously used as a medium of exchange for proceeds of crime in the cyber dark-market by…
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…
We put forward the idea that classical blockchains and smart contracts are potentially useful primitives not only for classical cryptography, but for quantum cryptography as well. Abstractly, a smart contract is a functionality that allows…
We present an identity management scheme built into the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing for identities that are as indelible as the blockchain itself. Moreover, we take advantage of Bitcoin's decentralized nature to facilitate a shared control…
Cryptocurrencies offer an alternative to traditional methods of electronic value exchange, promising anonymous, cash-like electronic transfers, but in practice they fall short for several key reasons. We consider the false choice between…
The Blockchain and the programs running on it, called Smart Contracts, are more and more applied in all fields requiring trust and strong certifications. In this work we compare public and permissioned blockchains for industrial…
Banking as an essential service can be hard to access in remote, rural regions where the network connectivity is intermittent. Although micro-banking has been made possible by SMS or USSD messages in some places, their security flaws and…
In order to stay up to date with world issues and cutting-edge technol-ogies, the newspaper plays a crucial role. However, collecting news is not a very easy task. Currently, news publishers are collecting news from their correspond-ents…
Today's world is organized based on merit and value. A single global currency that's decentralized is needed for a global economy. Bitcoin is a partial solution to this need, however it suffers from scalability problems which prevent it…
Bitcoin and many other similar Cryptocurrencies have been in existence for over a decade, prominently focusing on decentralized, pseudo-anonymous ledger-based transactions. Many protocol improvements and changes have resulted in new…
Digital payments have replaced physical banknotes in many aspects of our daily lives. Similarly to banknotes, they should be easy to use, unique, tamper-resistant and untraceable, but additionally withstand digital attackers and data…
Blockchain is a distributed database which is cryptographically protected against malicious modifications. While promising for a wide range of applications, current blockchain platforms rely on digital signatures, which are vulnerable to…
Bitcoin cryptocurrency system enables users to transact securely and pseudo-anonymously by using an arbitrary number of aliases (Bitcoin addresses). Cybercriminals exploit these characteristics to commit immutable and presumably untraceable…
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…
In recent years, electronic retail payment mechanisms, especially e-commerce and card payments at the point of sale, have increasingly replaced cash in many developed countries. As a result, societies are losing a critical public retail…