Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies

By George Danezis, Sarah Meiklejohn. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2015

307 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, build a decentralized blockchain-based transaction ledger, main- tained through proofs-of-work that also serve to generate a monetary supply. Such decentralization has benefits, such as independence from national political control, but also significant limitations in terms of computational costs and scalability. We introduce RSCoin, a cryptocurrency framework in which central banks maintain complete control over the monetary supply, but rely on a distributed set of authorities, or mintettes, to prevent double-spending. While monetary policy is centralized, RSCoin still provides strong transparency and auditability guarantees. We demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, the benefits of a modest degree of centralization, such as the elimination of wasteful hashing and a scalable system for avoiding double- spending attacks.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a4fd978b5693a866bae6dc0423bcf0deb652f31

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Dan Boneh
2. Elaine Shi
3. Dawn Song
4. Brent Waters
5. Ari Juels
6. George Danezis
7. Mariana Raykova
8. Jiaping Wang

In Information Systems

1. Elaine Shi
2. Jiaping Wang
3. Hao Wang
4. Ari Juels
5. Dan Boneh
6. Sarah Meiklejohn
7. George Danezis
8. Andrew K. Miller

In Management Information Systems

1. Jiaping Wang
2. Hao Wang
3. Kai Spohrer
4. Marten Risius

Citations in the corpus

• A Smart Contract for Boardroom Voting with Maximum Voter Privacy (2017, result): “This new blockchain can have a larger block size to store more transactions on-chain and may be maintained in a centralised manner similar to RSCoin [9].”
• Ouroboros: A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol (2017, background): “It is also interesting to contrast a PoS-based blockchain protocol with a classical consensus blockchain that relies on a fixed set of authorities (see, e.g., [7]).”
• Chainspace: A Sharded Smart Contracts Platform (2017, unknown): “RSCoin [10] is a permissioned blockchain.”
• Blockchain-Based Dynamic Key Management for Heterogeneous Intelligent Transportation Systems (2017, background): “Danezis and Meiklejohn [30] presented a new cryptocurrency.”
• Zether: Towards Privacy in a Smart Contract World (2020, background): “[31, 22, 66] operate in a model that falls somewhere between a fully decentralized setting like that of Bitcoin/Ethereum and a centralized setting like that of modern financial systems.”
• SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains (2017, background): “Permissioned systems like RSCoin can use a trusted source of randomness for committee reconfiguration, but this can be problematic in a permissionless setting which would require a shared random coin [27, 49].”
• The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols (2016, background): ““Confederation cryptocurrency” is an oft-cited vision [24, 25, 48], where a conglomerate of financial institutions jointly contribute to a Byzantine agreement protocol to allow fast and robust settlement of transactions.”
• A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains (2016, methodology): “E LASTICO is related to other sharding protocols in distributed databases, e.g. , Google’s Spanner [15], Scatter [16], RSCoin [39].”
• A review on consensus algorithm of blockchain (2017, background): “Firstly, study on the digital currency that based on blockchain, including the decentralized and centralized digital currency [4].”
• The technology of retail central bank digital currency (2020, background): “One example is the proposal of Danezis and Meiklejohn (2016), which shifts real-time communications from the central bank to dynamically appointed intermediaries.”
• Bitcoin and Beyond: A Technical Survey on Decentralized Digital Currencies (2016, background): “The authors of [126] intentionally break with Bitcoin’s”
• RapidChain: Scaling Blockchain via Full Sharding (2018, background): “Danezis and Meiklejohn [22] propose RSCoin, a sharding-based technique to make centrally-banked cryptocurrencies scalable.”
• Monoxide: Scale out Blockchains with Asynchronous Consensus Zones (2019, methodology): “This model is used by Bitcoin and many blockchain systems [11, 32, 23].”
• OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger via Sharding (2018, methodology): “Unlike permissioned blockchains [16], where the validators are known, permissionless blockchains need to deal with the potential of Sybil attacks [19] to remain secure.”
• The Macroeconomics of Central Bank Issued Digital Currencies (2016, background): “For an example of a proposal for a permissioned system, see Danezis and Meiklejohn (2016).”
• A Blockchain Research Framework (2017, background): “Danezis and Meiklejohn (2016) discuss different forms of centralization within a cryptocurrency framework to show that the reduction of inefficient hashing and a scalable system due to a modest degree of centralization can reduce the danger of double spending attacks.”
• Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM (2017, background): “RSCoin [26], a scheme for central bank cryptocurrency issuance that supports auditability like Solidus, but similarly does not inherently support transaction confidentiality.”