Related papers: Lightning Network: a second path towards centralis…
As an emerging service framework built by combining cryptography, P2P network, consensus mechanism and innovative contract technology, blockchain has been widely used in digital finance, data sharing, message traceability and electronic…
Bitcoin is the first and highest valued cryptocurrency that stores transactions in a publicly distributed ledger called the blockchain. Understanding the activity and behavior of Bitcoin actors is a crucial research topic as they are…
We argue that the current POW based consensus algorithm of the Bitcoin network suffers from a fundamental economic discrepancy between the real world transaction (txn) costs incurred by miners and the wealth that is being transacted. Put…
The blockchain paradigm provides a mechanism for content dissemination and distributed consensus on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. While this paradigm has been widely adopted in industry, it has not been carefully analyzed in terms of its…
Privacy protection mechanisms are a fundamental aspect of security in cryptocurrency systems, particularly in decentralized networks such as Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin addresses are not directly associated with real-world identities, this…
We propose a decentralized routing algorithm that can be implemented in Bitcoin Lightning Network. All nodes in the network contribute equally to path searching. The algorithm is inspired from ant path searching algorithms.
A widespread security claim of the Bitcoin system, presented in the original Bitcoin white-paper, states that the security of the system is guaranteed as long as there is no attacker in possession of half or more of the total computational…
Anti-money laundering (AML) regulations play a critical role in safeguarding financial systems, but bear high costs for institutions and drive financial exclusion for those on the socioeconomic and international margins. The advent of…
As the most successful cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin constitutes a target of choice for attackers. While many attack vectors have already been uncovered, one important vector has been left out though: attacking the currency via the…
The enormous power consumption of Bitcoin has led to undifferentiated discussions in science and practice about the sustainability of blockchain and distributed ledger technology in general. However, blockchain technology is far from…
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 show downsides in communication and storage…
Blockchain technology is ushering in another break-out year, the challenge of blockchain still remains to be solved. This paper analyzes the features of Bitcoin and Bitcoin-NG system based on blockchain, proposes an improved method of…
Bitcoin's price has been described as following a power law (PL) in time, $P \sim t^{\beta}$ with $\hat\beta \approx 5.7$ over 2010-2026. We test this claim using the Clauset-Shalizi-Newman protocol applied to Bitcoin's tail-relevant…
The temporal aspect of blockchain transactions enables us to study the address's behavior and detect if it is involved in any illicit activity. However, due to the concept of change addresses (used to thwart replay attacks), temporal…
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…
Blockchain transaction networks are complex, with evolving temporal patterns and inter-node relationships. To detect illicit activities, we propose a hybrid GCN-GRU model that captures both structural and sequential features. Using real…
The dramatic adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the USA has revolutionized the financial landscape and provided unprecedented investment and transaction efficiency opportunities. The prime objective of this research project…
We revisit the fundamental question of Bitcoin's security against double spending attacks. While previous work has bounded the probability that a transaction is reversed, we show that no such guarantee can be effectively given if the…
Hacks are one of the most damaging types of cryptocurrency related crime, accounting for billions of dollars in stolen funds since 2009. Professional investigators at Chainalysis have traced these stolen funds from the initial breach on an…
Decentralized payment systems such as Bitcoin have become massively popular in the last few years, yet there is still much to be done in understanding their formal properties. The vast majority of decentralized payment systems work by…