Liar, Liar, coins on fire!: Penalizing equivocation by loss of bitcoins

Ruffing T, Kate A, Schröder D (2015)


Publication Language: English

Publication Status: Published

Publication Type: Conference contribution, Conference Contribution

Publication year: 2015

Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery

Pages Range: 219-230

ISBN: 9781450338325

DOI: 10.1145/2810103.2813686

Abstract

We show that equivocation, i.e., making conflicting statements to others in a distributed protocol, can be monetarily disincentivized by the use of crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin. To this end, we design completely decentralized non-equivocation contracts, which make it possible to penalize an equivocating party by the loss of its money. At the core of these contracts, there is a novel cryptographic primitive called accountable assertions, which reveals the party's Bitcoin credentials if it equivocates. Non-equivocation contracts are particularly useful for distributed systems that employ public append-only logs to protect data integrity, e.g., in cloud storage and social networks. Moreover, as double-spending in Bitcoin is a special case of equivocation, the contracts enable us to design a payment protocol that allows a payee to receive funds at several unsynchronized points of sale, while being able to penalize a double-spending payer after the fact.

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How to cite

APA:

Ruffing, T., Kate, A., & Schröder, D. (2015). Liar, Liar, coins on fire!: Penalizing equivocation by loss of bitcoins. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2015 (pp. 219-230). Association for Computing Machinery.

MLA:

Ruffing, Tim, Aniket Kate, and Dominique Schröder. "Liar, Liar, coins on fire!: Penalizing equivocation by loss of bitcoins." Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2015 Association for Computing Machinery, 2015. 219-230.

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