Related papers: Bitcoin covenants unchained
The Bitcoin payment system involves two agent types: Users that transact with the currency and pay fees and miners in charge of authorizing transactions and securing the system in return for these fees. Two of Bitcoin's challenges are (i)…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
Formal verification entails testing software to ensure it operates as specified. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into lines of code. They run on blockchain platforms and…
Blockchain systems have received much attention and promise to revolutionize many services. Yet, despite their popularity, current blockchain systems exist in isolation, that is, they cannot share information. While interoperability is…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
Consensus protocols have traditionally been studied in a setting where all participants are known to each other from the start of the protocol execution. In the parlance of the 'blockchain' literature, this is referred to as the…
Contracts are a form of lightweight formal specification embedded in the program text. Being executable parts of the code, they encourage programmers to devote proper attention to specifications, and help maintain consistency between…
A blockchain replaces central counterparties with time-consuming consensus protocols to record the transfer of ownership. This settlement latency slows cross-exchange trading, exposing arbitrageurs to price risk. Off-chain settlement,…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Properties of the bitcoin backbone protocol have been investigated in some depth: the blockchain growth property quantifies the number of blocks added to the blockchain…
Delegation of cryptographic signing rights has found many application in the literature and the real world. However, despite very advanced functionalities and specific use cases, existing solutions share the natural limitation that the…
Behavioral software contracts are a widely used mechanism for governing the flow of values between components. However, run-time monitoring and enforcement of contracts imposes significant overhead and delays discovery of faulty components…
The presented work continues the line of recent distributed computing communityefforts dedicated to the theoretical aspects of blockchains. This paper is the rst tospecify blockchains as a composition of abstract data types all together…
The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success but also encountered many challenges. One of the challenges has been the long confirmation time. Another challenge is the lack of incentives at certain steps of the…
Purposely modular, this protocol enables customization of several protocol properties, including the consensus properties implemented, blockchain type, the roots used, and virtual machine opcodes, among others. These modules enable…
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,…
Smart contracting protocols promise to regulate the transfer of cryptocurrency amongst participants in a trustless manner. A safe smart contract implementation should ensure that each participant can always append a contract transaction to…
Although blockchain, the supporting technology of various cryptocurrencies, has offered a potentially effective framework for numerous decentralized trust management systems, its performance is still sub-optimal in real-world networks. With…
Cross-chain swaps enable exchange of different assets that reside on different blockchains. Several protocols have been proposed for atomic cross-chain swaps. However, those protocols are not fault-tolerant, in the sense that if any party…
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…
Modular methods to transform Byzantine consensus protocols into ones that are fast and communication efficient in the common cases are presented. Small and short protocol segments called layers are custom designed to optimize performance in…