Related papers: Emulating OP_RAND in Bitcoin
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…
Most online lotteries today fail to ensure the verifiability of the random process and rely on a trusted third party. This issue has received little attention since the emergence of distributed protocols like Bitcoin that demonstrated the…
In this short note we show that the Bitcoin network can allow remote parties to gamble with their bitcoins by tossing a fair or biased coin, with no need for a trusted party, and without the possibility of extortion by dishonest parties who…
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
We present cryptocurrency-based lottery protocols that do not require any collateral from the players. Previous protocols for this task required a security deposit that is $O(N^2)$ times larger than the bet amount, where $N$ is the number…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
Bitcoin relies on a peer-to-peer overlay network to broadcast transactions and blocks. From the viewpoint of network measurement, we would like to observe this topology so we can characterize its performance, fairness and robustness.…
The Bitcoin protocol allows to save arbitrary data on the blockchain through a special instruction of the scripting language, called OP_RETURN. A growing number of protocols exploit this feature to extend the range of applications of the…
We propose a secure and efficient implementation of fungible tokens on Bitcoin. Our technique is based on a small extension of the Bitcoin script language, which allows the spending conditions in a transaction to depend on the neighbour…
We present three very simple variants of the classic Heads or Tails game using chips, each of which contributes to our understanding of the Bitcoin protocol. The first variant addresses the issue of temporary Bitcoin forks, which occur when…
We examine a protocol $\pi_{\text{beacon}}$ that outputs unpredictable and publicly verifiable randomness, meaning that the output is unknown at the time that $\pi_{\text{beacon}}$ starts, yet everyone can verify that the output is close to…
Scalability problems in programmable blockchains have created a strong demand for secure methods that move the bulk of computation outside the blockchain. One of the preferred solutions to this problem involves off-chain computers that…
The Bitcoin transaction graph is a public data structure organized as transactions between addresses, each associated with a logical entity. In this work, we introduce a complete probabilistic model of the Bitcoin Blockchain. We first…
This paper surveys innovative protocols that enhance the programming functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain, a key part of the "Bitcoin Ecosystem." Bitcoin utilizes the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model and a stack-based script…
Blockchain-based consensus protocols present the opportunity to develop new protocols, due to their novel requirements of open participation and explicit incentivization of participants. To address the first requirement, it is necessary to…
It is known that Bitcoin enables achieving fairness in secure computation by imposing monetary penalties on adversarial parties. This functionality is called secure computation with penalties. Bentov and Kumaresan (Crypto 2014) introduced…
Atomic swaps are a fundamental primitive for the trustless exchange of digital assets across blockchains: they guarantee that either both parties receive the agreed assets or neither party transfers. While this all-or-nothing guarantee is…
Algorand is a recent, open-source public or permissionless blockchain system that employs a novel proof-of-stake byzantine consensus protocol to efficiently scale the distributed transaction agreement problem to billions of users. In…
We present BATTLE for Bitcoin, a DoS-resilient dispute layer that secures optimistic bridges between Bitcoin and rollups or sidechains. Our design adapts the BATTLE tournament protocol to Bitcoin's UTXO model using BitVM-style FLEX…
The rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which enable transactions with a degree of pseudonymity, has led to a surge in various illicit activities, including ransomware payments and transactions on darknet markets. These illegal…