Related papers: Bitcoin covenants unchained
Using dedicated software to represent or enact legislation or regulation has the advantage of solving the inherent ambiguity of legal texts and enabling the automation of compliance with legal norms. On the other hand, the so-called…
BitCoin transactions are malleable in a sense that given a transaction an adversary can easily construct an equivalent transaction which has a different hash. This can pose a serious problem in some BitCoin distributed contracts in which…
The long-term success of cryptocurrencies largely depends on the incentive compatibility provided to the validators. Bribery attacks, facilitated trustlessly via smart contracts, threaten this foundation. This work introduces, implements,…
A blockchain-based smart contract or a "smart contract" for short, is a computer program intended to digitally facilitate the negotiation or contractual terms directly between users when certain conditions are met. With the advance in…
Many of the problems that arise in the context of blockchains and decentralized finance can be seen as variations on classical problems of distributed computing. The smart contract model proposed here is intended to capture both the…
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are realized using distributed systems and hence critically rely on the performance and security of the interconnecting network. The requirements on these networks and their usage, however can differ…
Bitcoin's consensus rules are encoded in the implementation of its reference client: "The code is the spec." Yet this code is unsuitable for formal verification due to side effects, mutable state, concurrency, and legacy design. A…
Blockchains are decentralized systems that provide trustable execution guarantees. Smart contracts are programs written in specialized programming languages running on blockchains that govern how tokens and cryptocurrency are sent and…
Consensus is one of the most fundamental distributed computing problems. In particular, it serves as a building block in many replication based fault-tolerant systems and in particular in multiple recent blockchain solutions. Depending on…
In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run…
This paper proposes a method of emulation of \verb|OP_RAND| opcode on Bitcoin through a trustless interactive game between transaction counterparties. The game result is probabilistic and doesn't allow any party to cheat, increasing their…
Bitcoin demonstrated the possibility of a financial ledger that operates without the need for a trusted central authority. However, concerns persist regarding its security and considerable energy consumption. We assess the consensus…
The Ethereum blockchain platform supports the execution of decentralised applications or smart contracts. These typically hold and transfer digital currency to other parties on the platform; however, they have been subject to numerous…
The transition to post-quantum cryptography in blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is often framed as a purely cryptographic problem. In practice, it also presents significant economic and infrastructural challenges: in globally…
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…
Designed to compete with fiat currencies, bitcoin proposes it is a crypto-currency alternative. Bitcoin makes a number of false claims, including: solving the double-spending problem is a good thing; bitcoin can be a reserve currency for…
Most blockchain platforms from Ethereum onwards render smart contracts as stateful reactive objects that update their state and transfer crypto-assets in response to transactions. A drawback of this design is that when users submit a…
Smart Contracts use computer technology to automate the performance of aspects of commercial agreements. Yet how can there be confidence that the computer code is faithful to the intentions of the parties? To understand the depth and…
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…
At the heart of the Bitcoin is a blockchain protocol, a protocol for achieving consensus on a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. To the extent that a blockchain protocol is used for applications such as contract signing and…