Bitcoin has found success as a decentralized digital currency, but it is only one step toward decentralized digital commerce. Indeed, creating decentralized marketplaces and mechanisms is a nascent and active area of research. In a new paper, we present escrow protocols for cryptocurrencies that bring us closer to decentralized commerce. In any online sale of […]
Search Results for: bitcoin
Bitcoin is unstable without the block reward
October 21, 2016 by
With Miles Carlsten, Harry Kalodner, and Matt Weinberg, I have a new paper titled On the instability of Bitcoin without the block reward, which Harry will present at ACM CCS next week. The paper predicts that miner incentives will start to go haywire as Bitcoin rewards shift from block rewards to transaction fees, based on […]
Bitcoin’s history deserves to be better preserved
September 15, 2016 by
Much of Bitcoin’s development has happened in the open in a transparent manner through the mailing list and the bitcoin-dev IRC channel. The third-party website BitcoinStats maintains logs of the bitcoin-dev IRC chats. [1] This resource has proved useful is linked to by other sources such as the Bitcoin wiki. When reading a blog post […]
Improving Bitcoin’s Privacy and Scalability with TumbleBit
September 13, 2016 by
Last week we unveiled TumbleBit, a new anonymous payments scheme that addresses two major technical challenges faced by Bitcoin today: (1) scaling Bitcoin to meet increasing use, and (2) protecting the privacy of payments made via Bitcoin. Our proof-of-concept source code and a pre-print of the latest version of our paper were both posted online […]
The Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available
February 9, 2016 by
The first complete draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available. We’re very happy with how the book turned out: it’s comprehensive, at over 300 pages, but has a conversational style that keeps it readable. If you’re looking to truly understand how Bitcoin works at a technical level and have a basic familiarity […]
