Paper 2015/502
Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies
George Danezis and Sarah Meiklejohn
Abstract
Current cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, build a decentralized blockchain based transaction ledger, maintained through proofs-of-work that also serve to generate a monetary supply. Such decentralization has benefits, such as independence from national political control, but also significant limitations in terms of computational costs and scalability. We introduce RSCoin, a cryptocurrency framework in which central banks maintain complete control over the monetary supply, but rely on a distributed set of authorities, or mintettes, to prevent double-spending. While monetary policy is centralized, RSCoin still provides strong transparency and auditability guarantees. We demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, the benefits of a modest degree of centralization, such as the elimination of wasteful hashing and a scalable system for avoiding double-spending attacks.
Note: Camera-ready version for NDSS.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. NDSS 2016
- Contact author(s)
- s meiklejohn @ ucl ac uk
- History
- 2015-12-18: revised
- 2015-05-26: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2015/502
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/502,
author = {George Danezis and Sarah Meiklejohn},
title = {Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/502},
year = {2015},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/502}
}
