skip to main content
review-article
Free Access

Bitcoin: under the hood

Published:24 August 2015Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

The myths, the hype, and the true worth of bitcoins.

References

  1. Aaronson, S. Quantum copy-protection and quantum money. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity. IEEE, 2009, 229--242. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Anderson, R. and Murdoch, S.J. EMV: Why payment systems fail. Comm. ACM, 57, 6 (June 2014), 24--28. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Androulaki, E., Karame, G.O., Roeschlin, M., Scherer, T. and Capkun, S. Evaluating user privacy in Bitcoin. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, 2013, 34--51.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. Babaioff, M., Dobzinski, S., Oren, S. and Zohar, A. On bitcoin and red balloons. In Proceedings of the ACM Conf. on Electronic Commerce. ACM, 2012, 56--73. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. Back, A. et al. Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains; http://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Bamert, T., Decker, C., Elsen, L., Wattenhofer, R. and Welten, S. Have a snack, pay with bitcoins. In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, Sept. 2013.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  7. Ben-Sasson, E. et al. Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin. In Proceedings of the IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium. IEEE, 2014. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. BGP hijacking for cryptocurrency profit; http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threatintelligence/threats/bgp-hijacking-for-cryptocurrencyprofit/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. Bitcoin lightning network; https://lightning.network/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. BitLicense; http://www.dfs.ny.gov/legal/regulations/adoptions/dfsp200t.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Decker, C. and Wattenhofer, R. Information propagation in the Bitcoin Network. In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (Sept. 2013).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  12. Decker, C. and Wattenhofer, R. Bitcoin transaction malleability and MtGox. In Proceedings of the 19th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (Wroclaw, Poland, Sept. 2014).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Eyal, I. and Sirer, E.G. Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable. Financial Cryptography and Data Security, LNCS (2014). 436--454.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  14. Gervais, A., Karame, G., Capkun, S. and Capkun, V. Is Bitcoin a decentralized currency? IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 829 (2013).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. Heilman, E., Kendler, A., Zohar, A. and Goldberg, S. Eclipse attacks on Bitcoin's peer-to-peer network. In Proceedings of 24th USENIX Security Symposium. Aug. 2015 (to appear); http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  16. Karame, G., Androulaki, E. and Capkun, S. Two bitcoins at the price of one? Double-spending attacks on fast payments in Bitcoin. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 248 (2012).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Lamport, L., Shostak, R. and Pease, M. The byzantine generals problem. ACM Trans. Programming Lang. Systems 4, 3 (1982), 382--401. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Lewenberg, Y. Bachrach, Y. Sompolinsky, A. Zohar, and Rosenschein, J.S. Bitcoin mining pools: A cooperative game theoretic analysis. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. 2015, 919--927. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. Lewenberg, Y., Sompolinsky, Y. and Zohar, A. Inclusive block chain protocols. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, 2015 (to appear).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. Meiklejohn, S., Pomarole, M., Jordan, G., Levchenko, K., McCoy, D., Voelker, G.M. and Savage, S. A fistful of bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement. ACM, 127--140. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. Miller, A., Juels, A., Shi, E., Parno, B. and Katz, J. Permacoin: Repurposing Bitcoin work for data preservation; http://cs.umd.edu/amiller/permacoin.pdf, 2014.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. Miller, A. and JLaViola, Jr., J.J. Anonymous byzantine consensus from moderately hard puzzles: A model for Bitcoin, 2014.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Moore, T. and Christin, N. Beware the middleman: Empirical analysis of Bitcoin-exchange risk. Financial Cryptography. Springer, 2013, 25--33.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. Möser, M., Böhme, R. and Breuker, D. Towards risk scoring of Bitcoin transactions. Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 2014, 16--32.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  25. Nakamoto, S. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2008; https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  26. Ripple; https://ripple.com/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  27. Ron, D. and Shamir, A. Quantitative analysis of the full Bitcoin transaction graph. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, 2013, 6--24.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  28. Rosenfeld, M. Analysis of Bitcoin pooled mining reward systems. arXiv preprint (2011); arXiv:1112.4980.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  29. Rosenfeld, M. Analysis of hashrate-based double spending; https://bitcoil.co.il.Doublespend.pdf, 2012.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. Sompolinsky, Y. and Zohar, A. Secure high-rate transaction processing in Bitcoin. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, 2015 (to appear).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  31. Wiesner, S. Conjugate coding. ACM SIGACT News 15, 1 (1983) 78--88. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Bitcoin: under the hood

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Login options

      Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

      Sign in

      Full Access

      • Published in

        cover image Communications of the ACM
        Communications of the ACM  Volume 58, Issue 9
        September 2015
        119 pages
        ISSN:0001-0782
        EISSN:1557-7317
        DOI:10.1145/2817191
        • Editor:
        • Moshe Y. Vardi
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Copyright © 2015 ACM

        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 24 August 2015

        Permissions

        Request permissions about this article.

        Request Permissions

        Check for updates

        Qualifiers

        • review-article
        • Popular
        • Refereed

      PDF Format

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      HTML Format

      View this article in HTML Format .

      View HTML Format