The Bitcoin Research Day is dedicated to academic research that benefits Bitcoin, aimed to bring together researchers and developers. The event will consist of talks and open discussions on cryptography, P2P networks, and more.
The Bitcoin research prize is an award to recognize outstanding results that advance Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.
The results can be in cryptography, theoretical computer science, network theory, economics and neighboring fields.
A committee of leading researchers will choose the winners annually
Leading researchers will present contemporary theoretical work. Followed by discussion and open problems
Development challenges
Solutions implemented in Bitcoin and in the Lightning Network will be presented by the developers leading them. Possible next steps and practical wish lists will be stated and discussed
Bitcoin Research Prize Ceremony
An announcement of the winner and the runner-ups, followed by a presentation of the winner
Giulia Fanti is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests span the security, privacy, and efficiency of distributed systems. She is a two-time fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Cybersecurity and a member of NIST’s Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. Her work has been recognized with several awards, including best paper awards, a Sloan Fellowship, an Intel Rising Star Faculty Award, and an ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Award. She obtained her Ph.D. in EECS from U.C. Berkeley and her B.S. in ECE from Olin College of Engineering
Topic: Strategic Latency Reduction in Blockchain Peer-to-Peer Networks
Most permissionless blockchain networks run on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which offer flexibility and decentralization at the expense of performance (e.g., network latency). Historically, this tradeoff has not been a bottleneck for most blockchains. However, an emerging host of blockchain-based applications (e.g., decentralized finance) are increasingly sensitive to latency; users who can reduce their network latency relative to other users can accrue (sometimes significant) financial gains. In this work, we initiate the study of strategic latency reduction in blockchain P2P networks. We first define two classes of latency that are of interest in blockchain applications. We then show empirically that a strategic agent who controls only their local peering decisions can manipulate both types of latency, achieving 60% of the global latency gains provided by the centralized, paid service bloXroute, or, in targeted scenarios, comparable gains. Finally, we show that our results are not due to the poor design of existing P2P networks. Under a simple network model, we theoretically prove that an adversary can always manipulate the P2P network’s latency to their advantage, provided the network experiences sufficient peer churn and transaction activity
Josie Baker
Bio
Bitcoin Core contributor by day, privacy enthusiast by night. Particularly interested in the overlap of privacy and usability
Topic: The devil in the details: combining cryptographic protocols
Chelsea Komlo
Bio
Chelsea is a cryptography and privacy researcher. She is currently a member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy lab at the University of Waterloo, and a Staff Research Scientist at SandboxAQ. Previously, she served as Chief Scientist at the Zcash Foundation. Before moving into cryptography research, she worked as an engineer on open-source security and privacy related projects, including Tor, Enigmail, and the Off-The-Record (OTR) messaging protocol
Topic:
Jonas Nick
Bio
Jonas Nick is a researcher in the field of Bitcoin, working as part of Blockstream's research team. He has made contributions to the Bitcoin community through his involvement in co-authoring various Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), including the Taproot BIPs. Additionally, Jonas has collaborated on several scientific publications in cryptography, such as MuSig2 and Bulletproofs++ and contributes to the secp256k1 cryptographic library
Topic: Privacy and Scaling with zk-SNARKs and Client-Side Validation
The client-side validation approach removes transaction verification from the consensus rules. Instead, transaction data posted to the blockchain is only interpreted on each individual node ("client-side"). This approach allows building protocols with very low on-chain size and verification cost, while providing strong privacy. This session covers Shielded CSV, a novel client-side validation protocol that, in contrast to existing client-side validation protocols, only requires 64 bytes of on-chain space regardless of the size of the transaction and is fully private. The protocol's communication cost between transaction sender and receiver is independent of the transaction history. Furthermore, Shielded CSV can be instantiated with existing cryptographic zk-SNARK primitives. With a trust-minimized mechanism like BitVM2 to bridge between the blockchain and the client-side validation protocol, Shielded CSV adds strong privacy to Bitcoin and scales Bitcoin to 100 transactions per second. It has been described as "the most useful thing you can do with BitVM2". Even without a bridge, Shielded CSV can be used to create a private cryptocurrency pegged to bitcoin (for example via the one-way peg) that offers substantial advantage over existing private cryptocurrencies. These currencies require users to validate all transactions, which contain relatively large and computationally expensive Zero-Knowledge proofs. ShieldedCSV, however, only requires the recipient of a transaction to download the full transaction data, which results in significant reductions in computational and bandwidth costs. Furthermore, ShieldedCSV derives its resistance to double-spending from Bitcoin, eliminating the need for its own consensus mechanism.
Hannes Hartenstein
Bio
Hannes Hartenstein is a professor for computer science at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe, Germany, since 2003. He is heading a research group on decentralized systems and network services at KIT’s Institute of Information Security and Dependability (KASTEL)
Topic: From Monitoring Bitcoin to Verifying Lightning: Modeling Aspects of the Bitcoin Universe
We are monitoring the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network since 2015 and will report on some interesting observations and findings. Over the last years, this longitudinal monitoring study shows that the Bitcoin network is remarkably stable. However, we could also observe singular events that gave unique insights into the network's structure. We discuss what we know and what we do not know about the actual Bitcoin network and the corresponding quality of Bitcoin network models. Furthermore, we examine how to prove Lightning secure by formally modeling payment channels, assess the compatibility of corresponding first and second layer models, and close with some future research directions
Matthias Grundmann
Bio
Matthias Grundmann is a doctoral researcher at KIT. His research focuses on ways to better understand and improve the P2P network layer of Bitcoin as well as evaluating and improving payment channel networks as a second layer for blockchains
Topic: From Monitoring Bitcoin to Verifying Lightning: Modeling Aspects of the Bitcoin Universe
We are monitoring the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network since 2015 and will report on some interesting observations and findings. Over the last years, this longitudinal monitoring study shows that the Bitcoin network is remarkably stable. However, we could also observe singular events that gave unique insights into the network's structure. We discuss what we know and what we do not know about the actual Bitcoin network and the corresponding quality of Bitcoin network models. Furthermore, we examine how to prove Lightning secure by formally modeling payment channels, assess the compatibility of corresponding first and second layer models, and close with some future research directions
Sarah Meiklejohn
Bio
Sarah Meiklejohn is a Professor in Cryptography and Security at University College London and a Research Scientist at Google, where she works on security, transparency, and anti-abuse measures
Topic: De-Anonymization in Bitcoin
There are many heuristics that are used in practice to de-anonymize Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but it is often hard to assess their effectiveness given a lack of ground-truth data. This talk presents an overview of these heuristics, as well as new research to both improve them and increase our confidence in their results
Matt Corallo
Bio
Topic: Lighting Pathfinding Privacy and Reliability
Lightning pathfinding is critical both for reliability of payments and privacy of participants. This talk will discuss the problem space and current work
