Related papers: Lightning Network: a second path towards centralis…
Q&A websites rely on user-generated responses, with incentives such as reputation scores or monetary rewards often offered. While some users may find it intrinsically rewarding to assist others, studies indicate that payment can improve the…
Context: Blockchain technology has drawn growing attention in the literature and in practice. Blockchain technology generates considerable amounts of data and has thus been a topic of interest for Machine Learning (ML). Objective: The…
Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. They allow multiple agents to route payments through one another. So far, the topology and…
Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC) in Lightning Network is susceptible to a griefing attack. An attacker can block several channels and stall payments by mounting this attack. A state-of-the-art countermeasure, Hashed Timelock Contract with…
In Bitcoin and Ethereum, nodes require large storage capacity to maintain all the blockchain data, such as transactions, UTXOs, and account states. As of May 2020, the storage size of the Bitcoin blockchain has expanded to 270 GB, and it…
Bitcoin is a decentralized, pseudonymous cryptocurrency that is one of the most used digital assets to date. Its unregulated nature and inherent anonymity of users have led to a dramatic increase in its use for illicit activities. This…
We study the temporal evolution of the holding-time distribution of bitcoins and find that the average distribution of holding-time is a heavy-tailed power law extending from one day to over at least $200$ weeks with an exponent…
Efficient and reliable block propagation on the Bitcoin network is vital for ensuring the scalability of this peer-to-peer network. To this end, several schemes have been proposed over the last few years to speed up the block propagation,…
Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are one of the most controversial and complex technological innovations in today's financial system. This study aims to forecast the movements of Bitcoin prices at a high degree of accuracy. To this aim,…
Blockchain technology is the first successful Bitcoin Network. It enables the ledger to become more decentralized and secure. Since it is not limited to bitcoin and controlled by third parties by government, corporations or banks, the…
The Bitcoin P2P network is at the core of all communications between clients. The reachable part of this network has been explored and analyzed by numerous studies. Unreachable nodes, however, are, in most part, overlooked. Nonetheless,…
Layer-2 (L2) protocols address the fundamental limitations of Layer-1 (L1) blockchains by offloading computation while anchoring trust to the parent chain. This architectural shift, while boosting throughput, introduces a new, complex…
This paper presents Wrapless -- a lending protocol that enables the collateralization of bitcoins without requiring a trusted wrapping mechanism. The protocol facilitates a "loan channel" on the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing bitcoins to be…
Blockchains are distributed data structures that are used to achieve consensus in systems for cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin) or smart contracts (like Ethereum). Although blockchains gained a lot of popularity recently, there is no…
The philosophy of blockchain technology is concerned, among other things, with blockchain ontology, how it might be characterised, how it is being created, implemented, and adopted, how it operates in the world, and how it evolves over…
Detection of power-law behavior and studies of scaling exponents uncover the characteristics of complexity in many real world phenomena. The complexity of financial markets has always presented challenging issues and provided interesting…
This study, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, delves into the spatiotemporal dynamics of Bitcoin transactions, shedding light on the scaling laws governing its geographic usage. Leveraging a dataset of IP addresses and…
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that relies on cryptography rather than trusted third parties such as central banks for its security. Underpinning the operation of the currency is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network that facilitates…
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…
As an append-only distributed database, blockchain is utilized in a vast variety of applications including the cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things (IoT). The existing blockchain solutions have downsides in communication and storage…