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
Creative Commons Attribution
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},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/502}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/502}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.