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Thesis Statement Of Bitcoin

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Bitcoin \footnote{Through out this thesis, Bitcoin (upper case) refers to the Bitcoin system while bitcoin (lower case) refers to the currency coin.} is a decentralized peer to peer electronic payment system based on cryptography or more accurately, a crypto-currency. The Bitcoin economy has grown at an incredibly fast rate with a current estimated market capitalization of about 3.5 billion US dollars since its introduction in 2009 \citep{bitcoinwatch}. While Bitcoin is still in its infancy and more of an experimental than an accepted currency, the trends suggest it has the potential to shape the future of electronic payments.

In the Bitcoin system (to be discussed in detail later), mining is the activity which creates new coins which are …show more content…

These blocks are added to the blockchain which is essentially a public distributed ledger of all Bitcoin transactions. It cannot be over emphasized that the integrity of the blockchain must be preserved at all times. The blockchain is maintained through consensus and the entity or entities with 51\% of the total computing power of the network determine the correct version of the blockchain. The basic claim of Bitcoin is that as long as no one entity controls more than 50\% of the total computing power of the network, the currency will remain decentralized \citep{nakamoto2008bitcoin}. It has been shown however that this claim relies on the premise that miners are honest and follow the protocol rules …show more content…

A race \footnote{It is a race for which branch gets extended in the next round of mining.} occurs when more than one competing block is added to the blockchain causing the blockchain to fork (have multiple branches of equal length) but eventually one branch wins (the branch on which the next block is mined). Not withstanding the differences in approach and terminology, it's easy to assume that both come to the same conclusion.

An analysis of the selfish-mine strategy is given in \citep{courtois2014subversive}. The authors of \citep{courtois2014subversive} suggest that the claims of \citep{eyal2014majority} are exaggerated, giving a number of reasons for their position. The key issues raised about the selfish-mine strategy as presented in \citep{eyal2014majority} are:
\begin{enumerate}
\item The assumption that there is only one pool and that all members of the pool follow the pool rules. There is no incentive to prevent multiple pools from forming and we show later that this has a negative effect on the success of the selfish-mine strategy. In addition, just because members joined the pool does not mean that they will behave according to the pool

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