[Bitcoin-development] New paper: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

[Andrew Miller <amiller@cs.umd.edu>]

We (Joseph Bonneau, myself Arvind Narayanan, Jeremy Clark, Ed Felten,
Josh Kroll -- from Stanford, Maryland, Concordia, Princeton) have
written a “systemization” paper about Bitcoin-related research. It’s
going to appear in the Oakland security conference later this year
(IEEE Security and Privacy) but we wanted to announce a draft to this
community ahead of time.

http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/BMCNKF15-IEEESP-bitcoin.pdf

One of the main goals of our work is to build a bridge between the
computer science research community and the cryptocurrency community.
Many of the most interesting ideas and proposals for Bitcoin come from
this mailing list and forums/wikis/irc channels, where many academic
researchers simply don’t know to look! In fact, we started out by
scraping all the interesting posts/articles we could find and trying
to figure out how we could organize them. We hope our paper helps some
of the best ideas and research questions from the Bitcoin community
bubble up and inspires researchers to build on them.

We didn’t limit our scope to Bitcoin, but we also decided not to
provide a complete survey of altcoins and other next-generation
cryptocurrency designs. Instead, we tried to explain all the
dimensions along which these designs differ from Bitcoin.

This effort has roughly been in progress over two years, though it
stopped and restarted several times along the way.

If anyone has comments or suggestions, we still have a week before the
final version is due, and regardless we plan to continue updating our
online version for the forseeable future.