Towards Fairness and Decentralisation in Modern Cryptocurrencies

Abstract

The thesis examines and improves upon the properties of both fairness and decentralisation in modern cryptocurrencies, re-examining public key infrastructure, client puzzles and useful proofs of work in the blockchain context. The thesis also develops a framework construction for a novel directed-acyclic-graph-based cryptocurrency scheme. This framework represents a major result, being both the first academic and practically realisable proposal for using directed acyclic graphs in decentralised cryptocurrencies.