Related papers: Concentration Within Distribution: Unmasking Bitco…
The open availability of the entire history of the Bitcoin transactions opens up the possibility to study this system at an unprecedented level of detail. This contribution is devoted to the analysis of the mesoscale structural properties…
Cryptocurrencies have recently been in the spotlight of public debate due to their embrace by the new US President, with crypto fans expecting a 'bull run'. The global cryptocurrency market capitalisation is more than \$3.50 trillion, with…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native (and non-) tokens among participants. The complete historical bookkeeping and its wide availability opens up an unprecedented possibility, i.e. that of understanding…
The functioning of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin relies on the open availability of the entire history of its transactions. This makes it a particularly interesting socio-economic system to analyse from the point of view of network science.…
A main focus in economics research is understanding the time series of prices of goods and assets. While statistical models using only the properties of the time series itself have been successful in many aspects, we expect to gain a better…
How crypto flows among Bitcoin users is an important question for understanding the structure and dynamics of the cryptoasset at a global scale. We compiled all the blockchain data of Bitcoin from its genesis to the year 2020, identified…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (BLN), a so-called "second layer" payment protocol, was launched in 2018 to scale up the number of transactions between Bitcoin owners. In this paper, we analyse the structure of the BLN over a period of 18…
Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin, a cryptography-enabled peer-to-peer digital payment system, has been gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. An effort designed to overcome a cluster of bottlenecks inherent in…
Blockchain systems run consensus rules as code to agree on the state of the distributed ledger and secure the network. Changing these rules can be risky and challenging. In addition, it can often be controversial and take much effort to…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (BLN) was launched in 2018 to scale up the number of transactions between Bitcoin owners. Although several contributions concerning the analysis of the BLN binary structure have recently appeared in the…
Blockchain (BC) systems are highly distributed peer-to-peer networks that offer an alternative to centralized services and promise robustness to coordinated attacks. However, the resilience and overall security of a BC system rests heavily…
Bitcoin constructs temporal order internally rather than synchronizing to any external clock. Empirical evidence shows that its time evolution is non-continuous, probabilistic, and self-regulated. Block discovery follows a stochastic…
We construct and study the Google matrix of Bitcoin transactions during the time period from the very beginning in 2009 till April 2013. The Bitcoin network has up to a few millions of bitcoin users and we present its main characteristics…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) such as the Lightning Network offer an appealing solution to the scalability problem faced by many cryptocurrencies operating on a blockchain such as Bitcoin. However, PCNs also inherit the stringent…
We investigate the relationship between underlying blockchain mechanism of cryptocurrencies and its distributional characteristics. In addition to price, we emphasise on using actual block size and block time as the operational features of…
The mining of bitcoin is modeled using system dynamics, showing that the past evolution of the network hash rate can be explained to a large extent by an efficient market hypothesis applied to the mining of blocks. The possibility of a…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native tokens among participants, or the exchange of such tokens for fiat currencies in markets external to these public ledgers. The availability of their complete historical…
Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin (BTC) has garnered increasing attention from both academia and industry. However, due to the massive transaction volume, no systematic study has quantitatively measured the asset decentralization degree…
In this paper, we explore the partitioning attacks on the Bitcoin network, which is shown to exhibit spatial bias, and temporal and logical diversity. Through data-driven study we highlight: 1) the centralization of Bitcoin nodes across…
Bitcoin operates as a macroeconomic paradox: it combines a strictly predetermined, inelastic monetary issuance schedule with a stochastic, highly elastic demand for scarce block space. This paper empirically validates the Endogenous…