Bitcoin has recently raised substantial attention from a variety of players: media, academia, and regulators. While the price of Bitcoin has continuously and substantially gone down since its peak in December 2013, other metrics indicate a more optimistic prospect. The adoption of Bitcoin is increasing rapidly, even in off-line channels, with companies such as Microsoft, Paypal, EBay, Dell, and...

In this Chicago Fed Letter, I explain the digital currency called bitcoin. The current number of bitcoin units is around 11.8 million; and, unlike physical coins, they are divisible to the eighth decimal place. Bitcoins are traded on various online exchanges for other currencies. At the time of this writing, the average worth of a bitcoin over the previous six months had been a little over $100...

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...

The Bitcoin Market Potential Index conceptualizes and ranks the potential utility of bitcoin across 178 countries to show which countries have the greatest potential to see bitcoin adoption. The index utilizes a data set with 40 variables related to bitcoin’s current core functions: store of value, medium of exchange, and technology platform. The variables are grouped into the index’s seven equ...

In this study, I analyze Bitcoin transaction data and build an economic model on Bitcoin traders incentives to decompose the Bitcoin price into a utility-driven component, a speculative component, and a friction component. The model I build extends the LDA (Latent-Dirichlet-Allocation) model, and I perform a paralleled collapsed Gibbs Sampling method to estimate the realized incentives of each ...

Bitcoin is a digital currency and electronic payment system operating over a peer-to-peer network on the Internet. One of its most important properties is the high level of anonymity it provides for its users, who are identified by their Bitcoin addresses, which are random strings in the public records of transactions, the blockchain. When a user initiates a Bitcointransaction, their Bitcoin cl...

Designed to compete with fiat currencies, bitcoin proposes it is a crypto-currency alternative. Bitcoin makes a number of false claims, including: bitcoin can be a reserve currency for banking; hoarding equals saving; and that we should believe bitcoin can expand by deflation to become a global transactional currency supply. Bitcoin’s developers combine technical implementation proficiency with...

Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols have inherent scalability limits that trade-off between throughput and latency and withhold the realization of this potential. This paper presents Bitcoin-NG, a...

This thesis illustrates forensic research work on Bitcoin, an innovative Internet based global transaction system that attracts ascending popularity during the recent few years. As an open, public and scalable distributed payment system, Bitcoin brings forward significant economic and technological impact to our world. Meanwhile, a new notion of virtual currency, “Bitcoin” comes into existence ...

Bitcoin users are directly or indirectly forced to deal with public key cryptography, which has a number of security and usability challenges that differ from the password-based authentication underlying most online banking services. Users must ensure that keys are simultaneously accessible, resistant to digital theft and resilient to loss. In this paper, we contribute an evaluation framework f...