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Bitcoin is a digital currency designed to rely on a decentralized, trustless network of anonymous agents. Using a pseudonymous-address-linking procedure that achieves >99% sensitivity and >99% specificity, we reveal that between launch…
The Payment Protocol standard BIP70, specifying how payments in Bitcoin are performed by merchants and customers, is supported by the largest payment processors and most widely-used wallets. The protocol has been shown to be vulnerable to…
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…
Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated by a distributed set of miners and transaction are broadcasted via a peer-to-peer network. While Bitcoin provides some level of anonymity (or rather pseudonymity)…
Blockchain systems benefit from lessons in prior art such as fault tolerance, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, and game theory. In this paper we argue that blockchain algorithms should tolerate both rational (self-interested)…
As time progresses, the need for more secure applications grows exponentially. The different types of sensitive information that is being transferred virtually has sparked a rise in systems that leverage blockchain. Different sectors are…
In this paper we revisit the mining strategies in proof of work based cryptocurrencies and propose two strategies, we call smart and smarter mining, that in many cases strictly dominate honest mining. In contrast to other known attacks,…
Many large decentralized systems rely on information propagation to ensure their proper function. We examine a common scenario in which only participants that are aware of the information can compete for some reward, and thus informed…
A key challenge for Bitcoin cryptocurrency holders, such as startups using ICOs to raise funding, is managing their FX risk. Specifically, a misinformed decision to convert Bitcoin to fiat currency could, by itself, cost USD millions. In…
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that features a distributed, decentralized and trustworthy mechanism, which has made Bitcoin a popular global transaction platform. The transaction efficiency among nations and the privacy benefiting from address…
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…
Systems and blockchains often have security vulnerabilities and can be attacked by adversaries, with potentially significant negative consequences. Therefore, infrastructure providers increasingly rely on bug bounty programs, where external…
Recently, blockchain has been applied in various fields to secure data exchanges and storage in decentralized systems. In a blockchain application where the task of the application which makes use of the data stored in a blockchain has to…
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)…
Conflicting transactions within blockchain networks not only pose performance challenges but also introduce security vulnerabilities, potentially facilitating malicious attacks. In this paper, we explore the impact of conflicting…
Bitcoin transactions include unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) as their inputs and generate one or more newly owned UTXOs at specified addresses. Each UTXO can only be used as an input in a transaction once, and using it in two or more…
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic…
The fundamental attack against blockchain systems is the double-spend attack. In this tutorial, we provide a very detailed explanation of just one section of Satoshi Nakamoto's original paper where the attack's probability of success is…
We analyze the economic incentives generated by the proof-of-stake mechanism discussed in the Ethereum Casper upgrade proposal. Compared with proof-of-work, proof-of-stake has a different cost structure for attackers. In Budish (2018),…