A formal model of Bitcoin transactions

Nicola Atzei; Massimo Bartoletti; Stefano Lande; Roberto Zunino

Paper 2017/1124

A formal model of Bitcoin transactions

Nicola Atzei, Massimo Bartoletti, Stefano Lande, and Roberto Zunino

Abstract

We propose a formal model of Bitcoin transactions, which is sufficiently abstract to enable formal reasoning, and at the same time is concrete enough to serve as an alternative documentation to Bitcoin. We use our model to formally prove some well-formedness properties of the Bitcoin blockchain, for instance that each transaction can only be spent once. We release an open-source tool through which programmers can write transactions in our abstract model, and compile them into standard Bitcoin transactions.

Note: Fixed typo in size(nu)

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2018
Keywords: cryptocurrencies
Contact author(s): bart @ unica it
History: 2018-12-26: last of 4 revisions; 2017-11-24: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2017/1124
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/1124,
      author = {Nicola Atzei and Massimo Bartoletti and Stefano Lande and Roberto Zunino},
      title = {A formal model of Bitcoin transactions},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2017/1124},
      year = {2017},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1124}
}