Bitcoin networks

Speaker: Jonathan Levin

Title: Bitcoin networks

Abstract: Bitcoin is the world’s first decentralised payments system. All existing payments systems have central trusted authorities at the core that process transactions on its network, verifying against the classical security threats that exist: fraud and double spending. Bitcoin, in this way, marks a departure from traditional payment systems removing any trust lines between agents. The Bitcoin blockchain is a history of all past transactions on the network. This presentation will introduce the basic design features of Bitcoin, the currency and the protocol and will introduce the structure of the dataset that is available to researchers and some of the initial being carried out. It presents the first dataset of this kind where market interactions are made public and time stamped enabling both spatial and temporal network analyses of economic exchanges.

Link: http://jonathanlevin.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/introduction-to-bitcoin-unique-features-and-data-availability.pdf