Poster: Modelling Bitcoin Contracts by Timed Automata

Bitcoin is a digital currency system introduced in 2008 by an anonymous developer using a pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” [15]. Despite its mysterious origins, Bitcoin became the first cryptographic currency that got widely adopted — as of January 2014 the Bitcoin capitalization is over $ 10 bln. The enormous success of Bitcoin was also widely covered by the media (see e.g. [12], [3], [13], [14]) and even attracted the attention of several governing bodies and legislatures, including the US Senate [13]. Bitcoin owes its popularity mostly to the fact that it has no central authority, the transaction fees are very low, and the amount of coins in the circulation is restricted, which in particular means that nobody can “print” money to generate inflation. The financial transactions between the participants are published on a public ledger maintained jointly by the users of the system, which is called the block chain.