On Bitcoin and red balloons

Babaioff, Moshe; Dobzinski, Shahar; Oren, Sigal; Zohar, Aviv

doi:10.1145/2325702.2325704

Cited by 88 publications

(150 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…In [8], Elias investigates the legal aspects of privacy in Bitcoin. In [9], Babaioff et al address the lack of incentives for Bitcoin users to include recently announced transactions in a block. Furthermore, in [7], Syed et al propose a userfriendly technique for managing Bitcoin wallets.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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: 99%

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Gervais

Karame

Čapkun

et al. 2014

IEEE Secur. Privacy

259

183

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“…Babaioff et al show that, as the Bitcoin protocol is currently defined, it does not provide incentives for nodes to broadcast transactions; in fact, it provides strong disincentives [26]. However, the Bitcoin economy seems to be -at least in this respect -working well in practice.…”

Section: Incentive Modeling Of the Bitcoin Economymentioning

confidence: 99%

Game-Theoretic Analysis of DDoS Attacks Against Bitcoin Mining Pools

Johnson

Lászka

Großklags

et al. 2014

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

167

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Abstract. One of the unique features of the digital currency Bitcoin is that new cash is introduced by so-called miners carrying out resourceintensive proof-of-work operations. To increase their chances of obtaining freshly minted bitcoins, miners typically join pools to collaborate on the computations. However, intense competition among mining pools has recently manifested in two ways. Miners may invest in additional computing resources to increase the likelihood of winning the next mining race. But, at times, a more sinister tactic is also employed: a mining pool may trigger a costly distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to lower the expected success outlook of a competing mining pool. We explore the trade-off between these strategies with a series of game-theoretical models of competition between two pools of varying sizes. We consider differences in costs of investment and attack, as well as uncertainty over whether a DDoS attack will succeed. By characterizing the game's equilibria, we can draw a number of conclusions. In particular, we find that pools have a greater incentive to attack large pools than small ones. We also observe that larger mining pools have a greater incentive to attack than smaller ones.

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“…As in address unlinkability, we measure profile indistinguishability against A by measuring the degree of profile distinguishability that A can achieve, i.e., we assess the advantage of A in approximating GT prof over A R by Prof A = Sim(E prof , GT prof ) − Sim(E R prof , GT prof ). 7 We quantify Sim(E prof , GT prof ) and Prof A by relying on two commonly used entropy based distance metrics, namely: the Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) and the Adjusted Mutual Information, (AMI). NMI assesses the similarity of two groupings of the same items (in our case, E prof and GT prof ), and takes higher values (1) the more identical the groupings are [19,20].…”

Section: Quantifying Privacy In Bitcoinmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [7], Babaioff et al address the lack of incentives for Bitcoin users to include recently announced transactions in a block, while in [4], Syed et al propose a user-friendly technique for managing Bitcoin wallets. In [14], Karame et al thoroughly 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.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating User Privacy in Bitcoin

Androulaki

Karame²,

Roeschlin

et al. 2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

544

383

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Abstract. Bitcoin is quickly emerging as a popular digital payment system. However, in spite of its reliance on pseudonyms, Bitcoin raises a number of privacy concerns due to the fact that all of the transactions that take place are publicly announced in the system. In this paper, we investigate the privacy provisions in Bitcoin when it is used as a primary currency to support the daily transactions of individuals in a university setting. More specifically, we evaluate the privacy that is provided by Bitcoin (i) by analyzing the genuine Bitcoin system and (ii) through a simulator that faithfully mimics the use of Bitcoin within a university. In this setting, our results show that the profiles of almost 40% of the users can be, to a large extent, recovered even when users adopt privacy measures recommended by Bitcoin. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that comprehensively analyzes, and evaluates the privacy implications of Bitcoin.

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On Bitcoin and red balloons

Cited by 88 publications

References 2 publications

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Game-Theoretic Analysis of DDoS Attacks Against Bitcoin Mining Pools

Evaluating User Privacy in Bitcoin

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