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
Creative Commons Attribution
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},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1124}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1124}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.