• DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-10512-3_2
• Corpus ID: 2357959

Modeling Bitcoin Contracts by Timed Automata

@article{Andrychowicz2014ModelingBC,
  title={Modeling Bitcoin Contracts by Timed Automata},
  author={Marcin Andrychowicz and Stefan Dziembowski and Daniel Malinowski and Lukasz Mazurek},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2014},
  volume={abs/1405.1861}
}

• Marcin Andrychowicz, Stefan Dziembowski, +1 author Lukasz Mazurek
• Published 8 May 2014
• Computer Science, Mathematics
• ArXiv

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cryptographic currency system. Since its introduction in 2008, Bitcoin has gained noticeable popularity, mostly due to its following properties: (1) the transaction fees are very low, and (2) it is not controlled by any central authority, which in particular means that nobody can “print” the money to generate inflation. Moreover, the transaction syntax allows to create the so-called contracts, where a number of mutually-distrusting parties engage in a protocol to jointly perform some financial task, and the fairness of this process is guaranteed by the properties of Bitcoin. Although the Bitcoin contracts have several potential applications in the digital economy, so far they have not been widely used in real life. This is partly due to the fact that they are cumbersome to create and analyze, and hence risky to use.