Abstract
The decentralized digital currency Bitcoin is an anonymous alternative to the centralized banking system and enjoys widespread and increasing adoption. Since Bitcoin created, many other electronic currencies have been developed. We propose a protocol for an electronic currency for making anonymous payments that can be supervised by an auditor, who has sole access to the transaction history. Other electronic currencies provide only anonymity, which is convenient for making illegal transactions without regulation. For users, miners, and banks, the transactions of our electronic currency are anonymous, and only auditors can see how it is used. We make use of POW (prove-of-work) technique that allows for distributed decisionmaking within a network, namely the Bitcoin blockchain protocol. We combine the POW and blockchain technology of Bitcoin to give better protection against double-spending attacks.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Nakamoto S. Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Consulted, 2009. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Androulaki E, Karame G O, Roeschlin M, et al. Evaluating user privacy in Bitcoin. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2013. 34–51
McEliece R J, Sarwate D V. On sharing secrets and Reed-Solomon codes. Commun ACM, 1981, 24: 583–584
Reid F, Harrigan M. An analysis of anonymity in the Bitcoin system. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust, 2011. 1318–1326
Ron D, Shamir A. Quantitative analysis of the full Bitcoin transaction graph. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2013
Biryukov A, Pustogarov I. Bitcoin over tor isn’t a good idea. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2015. 122–134
The Guardian. Secrets, lies and Snowden’s email: why I was forced to shut down lavabit. Commun ACM, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/20/why-did-lavabit-shut-down-snowden-email
Henze M, Hiller J, Hohlfeld O, et al. Moving privacy-sensitive services from public clouds to decentralized private clouds. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering Workshops, 2016. 130–135
Ruffing T, Moreno-Sanchez P, Kate A. CoinShuffle: practical decentralized coin mixing for Bitcoin. In: Proceedings of European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, 2014
Meiklejohn S, Pomarole M, Jordan G, et al. A fistful of Bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. In: Proceedings of Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, 2013. 127–140
Chainalysis Inc. Chainalysis: blockchain analysis. 2016. https://www.chainalysis.com/
Elliptic Enterprises Limited. Elliptic: the global standard for blockchain intelligence. 2016. http://www.elliptic.co/
Barber S, Boyen X, Shi E, et al. Bitter to better–how to make bitcoin a better currency. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2012
Bissias G, Ozisik A P, Levine B N, et al. Sybil-resistant mixing for Bitcoin. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, 2014. 149–158
Bonneau J, Narayanan A, Miller A, et al. Mixcoin: anonymity for Bitcoin with accountable mixes. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2014
Sasson E B, Chiesa A, Garman C, et al. Zerocash: decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2014. 459–474
Saxena A, Misra J, Dhar A. Increasing anonymity in Bitcoin. In: Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security Workshop, 2014. 122–139
Valenta L, Rowan B. Blindcoin: blinded, accountable mixes for Bitcoin. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2015
Ziegeldorf J H, Grossmann F, Henze M, et al. Coinparty: secure multi-party mixing of Bitcoins. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, 2015
Miers I, Garman C, Green M, et al. Zerocoin: anonymous distributed e-cash from Bitcoin. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security Privacy, 2013. 397–411
Maxwell G. Coinjoin: Bitcoin privacy for the real world. 2013. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0
Noether S, Mackenzie A, Monero Research Lab. Ring confidential transactions. Ledger, 2016, 1: 1–18
Kumar A, Fischer C, Tople S, et al. A traceability analysis of Monero’s blockchain. 2017. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-66399-9 9
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFA0303903), Zhejiang Province Key R&D Project (Grant No. 2017C01062), and National Cryptography Development Fund (Grant No. MMJJ20170121).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wu, Y., Fan, H., Wang, X. et al. A regulated digital currency. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 62, 32109 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-018-9611-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-018-9611-3