Besides “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, which is more like a brief description of the general framework, are there other ‘scientific or research grade’ studies about Bitcoin technology? Can similar decentralized crypto-currency models be found in the literature?
asked Sep 1 '11 at 12:57
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related question: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/36/46 – Artem Kaznatcheev Sep 1 '11 at 14:38
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2also, note that the paper you link has not been published or peer-reviewed and thus it is contentious if it counts as a scientific study. – Artem Kaznatcheev Sep 1 '11 at 14:38
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@Artem: Yes, that's a good guide to roughly understand the mechanisms of Bitcoin. But nothing really convincing in there. – Stéphane Gimenez Sep 1 '11 at 15:00
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Voting to close because there can't be an accepted complete answer to this question. – ripper234 Sep 1 '11 at 16:04
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1@ripper: The problem is that some knowledge about existing works is needed if we are to allow science/technology-related questions here. My opinion is that these questions are obviously on-topic here, but maybe we should start some discussion on meta? – Stéphane Gimenez Sep 1 '11 at 17:28
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Bitcoin is a relatively new phenomenon and the peer-review process takes a while, so there is not much out there yet.
The most notable is a network analysis of bitcoin transactions done around the alleged "allinvain" theft earlier this year.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524
Other than that, there are currently a few articles published in academic journals that focus on bitcoin (as well as pop-sci and pop-compsci articles in various places)
For example
Grinberg, Reuben, Bitcoin: An Innovative Alternative Digital Currency (April 21, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1817857
The best answer may be to do this in the form of a community wiki where articles published in academic journals can be posted by subject, as if bitcoin survives it will obviously start to receive a lot of attention.
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Thanks for the first link. The second one is not technology related. – Stéphane Gimenez Sep 1 '11 at 16:11
Yes, there are studies about decentralized digital currencies. Some of them use ideas very similar to what Bitcoin chose, for instance refer to chapter 2 of this thesis. The following Google scholar serarches will give you more reading:
and
http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=related:hCw5g5lkHWcJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
The basic premise of a decentralized mint is not a new idea, and has been studied for a while.
answered Sep 1 '11 at 14:50
I think that http://bitcoinacademic.wordpress.com could be able to help. There is a wide collection of academic research in many fields. However, you are right, there are not that many peer reviewed journal articles out there, but I do think some of this research is valuable and provides interesting insights.
Let's group all the answers in this Wiki. Suggestions shall be provided in new answers, relevant (voted) ones will be included in this list, sorted by category and publication date.
Distributed currency models
- [2008] Chapter 2 of Flavio Garcia PhD thesis: “Formal and Computational Cryptography: Protocols, Hashes and Commitments”.
Bitcoin studies
- [2011, Jul] ArXiv paper by F. Reid, M. Harrigan: “An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System”
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I think Garcia's thesis was published in 2008; the author was born in 1978... which can be a bit misleading on the title page of the pdf. – Artem Kaznatcheev Sep 1 '11 at 17:06
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Yes, this was looking rather strange :-) This is wiki, it means you are encouraged to fix mistakes by yourself. (Btw, that's also true for obvious mistakes in normal posts.) – Stéphane Gimenez Sep 1 '11 at 17:16
There are some papers on Bitcoin and related topics here: - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Research
answered Sep 1 '11 at 22:57
Christian Decker maintains a pretty extended list of academic studies about Bitcoin : https://cdecker.github.io/btcresearch/.
