Information propagation in the Bitcoin network

Decker, Christian; Wattenhofer, Roger

doi:10.1109/p2p.2013.6688704

Cited by 956 publications

(710 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…In [6], Karame et al investigate double-spending attacks in Bitcoin and show that double-spending fast payments in Bitcoin can be performed in spite of the measures recommended by Bitcoin developers. This analysis was later extended in [10].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 94%

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Gervais

Karame

Čapkun

et al. 2014

IEEE Secur. Privacy

259

183

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Bitcoin has achieved large-scale acceptance and popularity by promising its users a fully decentralized and low-cost virtual currency system. However, recent incidents and observations are revealing the true limits of decentralization in the Bitcoin system. In this article, we show that the vital operations and decisions that Bitcoin is currently undertaking are not decentralized. More specifically, we show that a limited set of entities currently control the services, decision making, mining, and the incident resolution processes in Bitcoin. We also show that third-party entities can unilaterally decide to "devalue" any specific set of Bitcoin addresses pertaining to any entity participating in the system. Finally, we explore possible avenues to enhance the decentralization in the Bitcoin system.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 94%

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Gervais

Karame

Čapkun

et al. 2014

IEEE Secur. Privacy

259

183

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show abstract

“…In that way, Decker and Wattenhofer [12] analyzed the block propagation time for 10,000 blocks and discovered that it followed an exponential curve, being the median block propagation time 6.5 seconds while the mean was located at 12.6 seconds. However, the distribution showed a long tail, implying that a short percentage of the nodes (5%) required more than 40 seconds to receive the blocks.…”

Section: Routing Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

Cryptocurrency Networks: A New P2P Paradigm

Delgado-Segura

Pérez-Solà

Herrera-Joancomartí

et al. 2018

Mobile Information Systems

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P2P networks are the mechanism used by cryptocurrencies to disseminate system information while keeping the whole system as much decentralized as possible. Cryptocurrency P2P networks have new characteristics that propose new challenges and avoid some problems of existing P2P networks. By characterizing the most relevant cryptocurrency network, Bitcoin, we provide details on different properties of cryptocurrency networks and their similarities and differences with standard P2P network paradigms. Our study allows us to conclude that cryptocurrency networks present a new paradigm of P2P networks due to the mechanisms they use to achieve high resilience and security. With this new paradigm, interesting research lines can be further developed, both in the focused field of P2P cryptocurrency networks and also when such networks are combined with other distributed scenarios.

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“…Our semantics does not have the full complexity of the blockchains used in Bitcoin or Ethereum, yet it exhibits two key properties of blockchains: blockchain extensions must preserve consistency and blocks may be received in the wrong order. Note, however, that although receiving blocks in the wrong order is an important logical possibility, it only happens rarely in practice: in the Bitcoin protocol the average generation time of a new block is 10 minutes; the average time until a node receives a block is only 6.5 seconds [6]. In order to illustrate the dynamics of our simple blockchain logic, we state some valid principles of BCL in the following example.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Logic of Blockchain Updates

Brünnler

Flumini

Studer

2017

Logical Foundations of Computer Science

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Abstract. Blockchains are distributed data structures that are used to achieve consensus in systems for cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin) or smart contracts (like Ethereum). Although blockchains gained a lot of popularity recently, there is no logic-based model for blockchains available. We introduce BCL, a dynamic logic to reason about blockchain updates, and show that BCL is sound and complete with respect to a simple blockchain model.

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Information propagation in the Bitcoin network

Cited by 956 publications

References 9 publications

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Cryptocurrency Networks: A New P2P Paradigm

A Logic of Blockchain Updates

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