The Bitcoin digital currency depends for its correctness and stability on a combination of cryptography, distributed algorithms, and incentivedriven behavior. We examine Bitcoin as a consensus game and determine that it relies on separate consensus about the rules and about game state. An important aspect of Bitcoin’s design is the mining mechanism, in which participants expend resources on sol...

Bitcoin is an electronic currency based on a peer-to-peer network for the propagation and verification of the transactions. Nowadays, cashless transactions are becoming increasingly popular and bitcoin could be an established currency for such transactions. Its distributed nature, though, and more specifically the delay overhead in transaction verification, not only makes the use of bitcoin ine...

Bitcoin is an electronic crypto-currency created in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym). At the time the original bitcoin client was written, the idea of a purely peer-to-peer (P2P) digital currency which did not require a trusted-thirdparty to confirm transactions / prevent double spending was unique. In the bitcoin network, all transactions are public, effectively rendering double-spending i...

The purpose of this study, is create a challenge and discussion concerning the existence of information about the Bitcoin price and return, which suggests the relationship of information and the strong performance it. The information trends are available at different time periods and the summary data related to the statistical descriptions for the price and return index are also discussed. In t...

The basic idea is to excise the bitcoin money generation formula, and otherwise apply bitcoin essentially “as is” over digital coins which are redeemable by the mint that minted them. This will preserve the bitcoin assured anonymity. The new bitcoin.BitMint solution will benefit from bitcoin’s double-spending prevention, and would otherwise enjoy all the benefits associated with money in a digi...

The question “what is Bitcoin” allows for many answers depending on the objectives aimed at when providing such answers. The question addressed in this paper is to determine a top-level classification, or type, for Bitcoin. We will classify Bitcoin as a system of type money-like informational commodity (MLIC).

There is no formal framework for describing the core structural concepts of Bitcoin or for attempting a correctness proof of the algorithm. This contribution presents several elements which may serve as building blocks. A distributed model for describing the states enclosed in a Bitcoin network is provided. Concepts for modeling the swarm behavior of Bitcoin are analyzed.

This paper sets out a brief, deliberately non-technical, overview of Bitcoin, a new, but becoming more mainstream, crypto currency, generated and managed by a distributed multi–agent system. Bitcoin was developed in late 2008 by “Satoshi Nakamoto”. The nature of Bitcoin as a disruptive currency, payments system and asset, is juxtaposed against the potential for its transactional ledger, the blo...

Abstract We document systematic differences in bitcoin prices across 11 different markets representing 26% of global bitcoin trade volume. These differences must — due to the identical nature of all bitcoin — result from characteristics of markets themselves. We examine differences across the markets and find that those which do not require customer identification for establishing an account ar...

We analyze how network effects affect competition in the nascent cryptocurrency market. We do so by examining early dynamics of exchange rates among different cryptocurrencies. While Bitcoin essentially dominates this market, our data suggest no evidence of a winner-take-all effect early in the market. Indeed, for a relatively long period, a few other cryptocurrencies competing with Bitcoin (th...