Bitter to Better : How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency

By Simon Barber, Xavier Boyen, Elaine Shi, and Ersin Uzun.

In Financial Cryptography (FC 2012), volume 7397 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 399-414. Springer, 2012.

Abstract

Bitcoin is a distributed digital currency which has attracted a substantial number of users. We perform an in-depth investigation to understand what made Bitcoin so successful, while decades of research on cryptographic e-cash has not lead to a large-scale deployment. We ask also how Bitcoin could become a good candidate for a long-lived stable currency. In doing so, we identify several issues and attacks of Bitcoin, and propose suitable techniques to address them.

Material

- published paper (PS) (PDF) © Springer-Verlag
- author's version (PS) (PDF)
- presentation slides (HTML)

Reference

@InProceedings{Barber+Boyen+Shi+Uzun:FC-2012:bitcoin,
  author = {Simon Barber and Xavier Boyen and Elaine Shi and Erzin Uzun},
  title = {Bitter to Better : How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency},
  booktitle = {Financial Cryptography---FC 2012},
  series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  volume = {7397},
  pages = {399--414},
  publisher = {Berlin: Springer-Verlag},
  year = {2012},
  note = {Available at \url{http://www.cs.stanford.edu/~xb/fc12/}}
}