Bitter to better – how to make Bitcoin a better currency

Bitcoin is a distributed digital currency which has attracted a substantial number of users. We perform an in-depth investigation to understand what made Bitcoin so successful, while decades of research on cryptographic e-cash has not lead to a large-scale deployment. We ask also how Bitcoin could become a good candidate for a long-lived stable currency. In doing so, we identify several issues and attacks of Bitcoin, and we propose novel techniques to address them.

Citation

Barber, S.; Boyen, X.; Shi, E.; Uzun, E. Bitter to better - how to make Bitcoin a better currency. 16th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security; 2012 February 27 - March 2; Bonaire.