How to Regulate Bitcoin? Decentralized Regulation for a Decentralized Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin and Decentralized Trust Protocols

Bitcoin is the first decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic currency. It was created in November 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the anonymous author or group of authors of the groundbreaking article [1]. Moreover, Nakamoto released the first implementation of the protocol in an open source client software [2] and the genesis of bitcoins began on January 9th 2009. The Bitcoin pr...

CoinShuffle: Practical Decentralized Coin Mixing for Bitcoin

The decentralized currency network Bitcoin is emerging as a potential new way of performing financial transactions across the globe. Its use of pseudonyms towards protecting users’ privacy has been an attractive feature to many of its adopters. Nevertheless, due to the inherent public nature of the Bitcoin transaction ledger, users’ privacy is severely restricted to linkable anonymity, and a fe...

Secure and anonymous decentralized Bitcoin mixing

The decentralized digital currency Bitcoin presents an anonymous alternative to the centralized banking system and indeed enjoys widespread and increasing adoption. Recent works, however, show how users can be reidentified and their payments linked based on Bitcoin’s most central element, the blockchain, a public ledger of all transactions. Thus, many regard Bitcoin’s central promise of financi...

NeuCoin: the First Secure, Cost-efficient and Decentralized Cryptocurrency

NeuCoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency derived from Sunny King’s Peercoin, which itself was derived from Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin. As with Peercoin, proof-of-stake replaces proof-of-work as NeuCoin’s security model, effectively replacing the operating costs of Bitcoin miners (electricity, computers) with the capital costs of holding the currency. Proof-of-stake also avoids pro...

Moving Beyond Bitcoin to an Endogenous Theory of Decentralized Ledger Technology Regulation: An Initial Proposal