Bitter to Better — How to Make Bitcoin a Better Currency

Abstract

Abstract. Bitcoin is a distributed digital currency which has attracted a substan-tial number of users. We perform an in-depth investigation to understand what made Bitcoin so successful, while decades of research on cryptographic e-cash has not lead to a large-scale deployment. We ask also how Bitcoin could become a good candidate for a long-lived stable currency. In doing so, we identify several issues and attacks of Bitcoin, and propose suitable techniques to address them. 1