Upcoming paper: A formal model of Bitcoin transactions

Post date: 05-Dec-2017 15:03:29

Upcoming paper (to be presented at Financial Cryptography 2018)

A formal model of Bitcoin transactions

Nicola Atzei, Massimo Bartoletti, Stefano Lande, Roberto Zunino

Abstract. We propose a formal model of Bitcoin transactions, which is sufficiently abstract to enable formal reasoning, and at the same time is concrete enough to serve as an alternative documentation to Bitcoin. We use our model to formally prove some well-formedness properties of the Bitcoin blockchain, for instance that each transaction can only be spent once. We release an open-source tool through which programmers can write transactions in our abstract model, and compile them into standard Bitcoin transactions.