...
Chances are, you already heard a lot of things about Bitcoin and its variations: essentially, it is a decentralized currency, without any central bank/authority, allowing users to send payments (under pseudonymity) via a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. While the underlying security is well studied, privacy and performance aspects are not as well developed as they could be. For example, do you really want to wait 10 minutes until your payment is verified? We are interested in studying the design of P2P networks for Bitcoin (and blockchains more generally) which support faster transactions and high liquidity, while providing a high degree of robustness and privacy. In particular, we aim to design a robust network topology which cannot easily be partitioned (risk of "double-spending"), together with a clever routing mechanism. Possible research directions include:
If you are interested, contact us and we can discuss possible directions for your thesis/project. To get a feeling for some past research on these topics (non-exhaustive), please feel free to look at the following:
|
| This topic is available at all levels. For more information, please contact Prof Stefan Schmid atstefan_schmid@univie.ac.at |
...