Bitcoin’s Academic Pedigree: The concept of cryptocurrencies is built from forgotten ideas in research literature.

Abstract

We’ve seen repeatedly that ideas in the research literature can be gradually forgotten or lie unappreciated, especially if they are ahead of their time, even in popular areas of research. Both practitioners and academics would do well to revisit old ideas to glean insights for present systems. Bitcoin was unusual and successful not because it was on the cutting edge of research on any of its components, but because it combined old ideas from many previously unrelated fields. This is not easy to do, as it requires bridging disparate terminology, assumptions, etc., but it is a valuable blueprint for innovation.

References

1. Aspnes, J., et al. 2005. Exposing computationally challenged Byzantine imposters. Yale University Department of Computer Science; http://cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr1332.pdf.
2. Back, A. 1997. A partial hash collision based postage scheme; http://www.hashcash.org/papers/announce.txt.
3. Back, A. 2001. Hash cash; https://web.archive.org/web/20010614013848/http://cypherspace.org/hashcash/.
4. Back, A. 2002. Hashcash-a denial of service counter measure; http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf.
5. Bayer, D., Haber, S., Stornetta, W. S. Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping. Proceedings of Sequences 1991; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4613-9323-8_24.
6. Benaloh, J., de Mare, M. 1991. Efficient broadcast timestamping; http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.38.9199.
7. Boyle, T. F. 1997. GLT and GLR: Component architecture for general ledgers; https://linas.org/mirrors/www.gldialtone.com/2001.07.14/GLT-GLR.htm.
8. Castro, M., Liskov, B. 1999. Practical Byzantine fault tolerance. Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation; http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf.
9. Chaum, D. 1981. Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM 24(2): 84-90; https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358563.
10. Chaum, D. 1983. Blind signatures for untraceable payments. Advances in Cryptology: 199-203.
11. Chaum, D. 1985. Security without identification: transaction systems to make Big Brother obsolete. Communications of the ACM 28(10): 1030-1044; https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=4373.
12. Chaum, D., et al. 1988. Untraceable electronic cash. Advances in Cryptology: 319-327; https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=88969.
13. Dai, W. 1998; http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt.
14. Douceur, J. R. 2002. The Sybil attack; https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=687813.
15. Dwork, C., Naor, M. 1992. Pricing via processing or combatting junk mail; https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=705669.
16. Felten, E. 2017. Smart contracts: neither smart nor contracts? Freedom to Tinker; https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/02/20/smart-contracts-neither-smart-not-contracts/.
17. Franklin, M. K., Malkhi, D. 1997. Auditable metering and lightweight security; http://www.hashcash.org/papers/auditable-metering.pdf.
18. Gabber, E., et al. 1998. Curbing Junk E-Mail via Secure Classiffication. http://www.hashcash.org/papers/secure-classification.pdf.
19. Garay, J. A., et al. 2015. The bitcoin backbone protocol: analysis and applications. Advances in Cryptology: 281-310; https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/765.pdf.
20. Goldberg, I. 2000. A pseudonymous communications infrastructure for the Internet. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Berkeley; http://moria.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/ian-thesis.pdf.
21. Grigg, I. 2005. Triple entry accounting; http://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html.
22. Haber, S., Stornetta, W. S. 1991. How to timestamp a digital document. Journal of Cryptology 3(2): 99-111; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-38424-3_32.
23. Haber, S., Stornetta, W. S. 1997. Secure names for bit-strings. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security: 28-35; http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=266430.
24. Jakobsson, M., Juels, A. 1999. Proofs of work and bread pudding protocols; http://www.hashcash.org/papers/bread-pudding.pdf.
25. Juels, A., Brainard, J. 1999. Client puzzles: a cryptographic countermeasure against connection completion attacks. Proceedings of Networks and Distributed Security Systems: 151-165; https://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/99/proceedings/papers/juels.pdf.
26. Just, M. 1998. Some timestamping protocol failures; http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/98/just.pdf.
27. Lamport, L., et al. 1982. The Byzantine Generals Problem. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 4(3): 382-401; https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=357176.
28. Lamport, L. 1989. The part-time parliament. Digital Equipment Corporation; https://computerarchive.org/files/mirror/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/tech_reports/SRC-RR-49.pdf.
29. Lamport, L. 2001. Paxos made simple; http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf.
30. Laurie, B. 2014. Certificate Transparency. acmqueue 12(8); https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2668154.
31. Levy, K. E. C. 2017. Book-smart, not street-smart: blockchain-based smart contracts and the social workings of law. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 3: 1-15; http://estsjournal.org/article/view/107.
32. Melara, M., et al. 2015. CONIKS: bringing key transparency to end users. Proceedings of the 24th Usenix Security Symposium; https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity15/sec15-paper-melara.pdf.
33. Merkle, R. C. 1980. Protocols for public key cryptosystems. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy; http://www.merkle.com/papers/Protocols.pdf.
34. Nakamoto, S. 1998. Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system; https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
35. Nakamoto, S. 2008. Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper; http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/11/.
36. Narayanan, A., et al. 2016. Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction. Princeton University Press; http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/.
37. Pass, R., et al. 2017. Analysis of the blockchain protocol in asynchronous networks. Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-56614-6_22.
38. Pinkas, B., Sander, T. 2002. Securing passwords against dictionary attacks. Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security: 161-170; https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=586133.
39. Reuters. 2014. Mind your wallet: why the underworld loves bitcoin; http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/14/mind-your-wallet-why-the-underworld-loves-bitcoin.html.
40. Sirer, E. G. 2016. Bitcoin guarantees strong, not eventual, consistency. Hacking, Distributed; http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/03/01/bitcoin-guarantees-strong-not-eventual-consistency/.
41. Szabo, N. 1994. Smart contracts; http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/smart.contracts.html.
42. Szabo, N. 2008. Bit gold. Unenumerated; https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html.
43. Wattenhofer, R. 2016. The Science of the Blockchain. Inverted Forest Publishing.
44. Rivest, R. L., Shamir, A. 1996. PayWord and MicroMint: Two simple micropayment schemes. International Workshop on Security Protocols.