Soon after its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been adopted by cyber-criminals, which rely on its pseudonymity to implement virtually untraceable scams. One of the typical scams that operate on Bitcoin are the so-called Ponzi schemes. These are fraudulent investments which repay users with the funds invested by new users that join the scheme, and implode when it is no longer possible to find ...

Bitcoin is a “crypto currency”, a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of creating (minting) the new coins which are later put into circulation. Miners spend electricity on solving cryptographic puzzles and they are also gatekeeper...

We show how the Bitcoin currency system (with a small modification) can be used to obtain fairness in any two-party secure computation protocol in the following sense: if one party aborts the protocol after learning the output then the other party gets a financial compensation (in bitcoins). One possible application of such protocols is the fair contract signing: each party is forced to complet...

The Bitcoin ecosystem has suffered frequent thefts and losses affecting both businesses and individuals. The insider threat faced by a business is particularly serious. Due to the irreversibility, automation, and pseudonymity of transactions, Bitcoin currently lacks support for the sophisticated internal control systems deployed by modern businesses to deter fraud. We seek to bridge this gap. W...

Bitcoin as deployed today does not scale. Scalability research has focused on two directions: 1) redesigning the Blockchain protocol, and 2) facilitating ‘off-chain transactions’ and only consulting the Blockchain if an adjudicator is required. In this paper we focus on the latter and provide an overview of Bitcoin payment networks. These consist of two components: payment channels to facilitat...

Bitcoin prevents double-spending using the blockchain, a public ledger kept with every client. Every single transaction till date is present in this ledger. Due to this, true anonymity is not present in bitcoin. We present a method to enhance anonymity in bitcoin-type cryptocurrencies. In the blockchain, each block holds a list of transactions linking the sending and receiving addresses. In our...

We propose Mixcoin, a protocol to facilitate anonymous payments using the Bitcoin currency system. We build on the emergent phenomenon of currency mixes, adding an accountability mechanism to expose theft. Unlike other proposals to improve anonymity in Bitcoin, our scheme can be deployed immediately with no changes to Bitcoin itself. We demonstrate that incentives of mixes and clients can be al...

The anonymity of the Bitcoin system has some shortcomings. Analysis of Transaction Chain (ATC) and Analysis of Bitcoin Protocol and Network (ABPN) are two important methods of deanonymizing bitcoin transactions. Nowadays, there are some anonymization methods to combat ATC but there has been little research into ways to counter ABPN. This paper proposes a new anonymization technology called Tran...

This paper proposes a technique for creating Bitcoin transactions enriched with special " marker addresses " 1 to make it possible to easily identify the originating party and allow for special treatment by the recipient. In particular this technique can be used to implement secure zero-confirmation transactions between trusted parties without requiring an additional communication channel besid...

Bitcoin is designed to protect user anonymity (or pseudonymity) in a financial transaction, and has been increasingly adopted by major e-commerce websites such as Dell, Payal and Expedia. While the anonymity of Bitcoin transactions has been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to the security of post-transaction correspondence. In a commercial application, the merchant and the us...