Related papers: BATTLE for Bitcoin: Capital-Efficient Optimistic B…
The rigorous security model of Bitcoin's UTXO architecture often comes at the cost of developer usability, forcing a reliance on manual stack manipulation that leads to critical financial vulnerabilities like signature malleability,…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…
An urgent demand of deploying BFT consensus over the Internet is raised for implementing blockchain services. The deterministic (partial) synchronous protocols can be simple and fast in good network conditions, but are subject to…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
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…
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…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
The Bitcoin protocol prevents the occurrence of double-spending (DS), i.e. the utilization of the same currency unit more than once. At the same time a DS attack, where more conflicting transactions are generated, might be performed to…
In December 2015, a bounty emerged to establish both reliable communication and secure transfer of value between the Dogecoin and Ethereum blockchains. This prized "Dogethereum bridge" would allow parties to "lock" a DOGE coin on Dogecoin…
Research in transaction processing has made significant progress in improving the performance of multi-core in-memory transactional systems. However, the focus has mainly been on low-contention workloads. Modern transactional systems…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that serves as an alternative to existing transaction systems based on an external central authority for security. Although Bitcoin has many desirable properties, one of its fundamental…
In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced…
Distributed ledgers are common in the industry. Some of them can use blockchains as their underlying infrastructure. A blockchain requires participants to agree on its contents. This can be achieved via a consensus protocol, and several BFT…
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…
We consider the execution of smart contracts on Bitcoin. There, every contract step corresponds to appending to the blockchain a new transaction that spends the output representing the old contract state, creating a new one for the updated…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
Blockchain is a decentralized network to increase trust, integrity, and transparency of transactions. With the exponential growth of transactions in the realm of Blockchain, especially in Bitcoin, Blockchain size increases as all…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…