A curated list of the top papers in decentralized systems (cryptocurrencies, contracts, consensus, etc.) This list has a focus on the technical aspects of decentralized systems primarily.
What is a decentralized system? A decentralized system is a system in which lower level components operate on local information to accomplish global goals. The global pattern of behaviour is an emergent property of dynamical mechanisms that act upon local components, such as indirect communication, rather than the result of a central ordering influence. (definition taken from here)
History While decentralized systems occupy a fairly broad set of research in privacy, security, finance, and more, they have become ever-more relevant in today's ecosystem. The academic side of the technology has recently gone through a renaissance period, after the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008.
- Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (2008), S. Nakamoto [pdf]
- Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure (2002), A. Back [pdf]
- The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments (2016), J. Poon and T. Dryja [pdf]
- Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (2014), E. Ben-Sasson et al. [pdf]
- An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System (2012), F. Reid and M. Harrigan [pdf]
- KARMA: A Secure Economic Framework for Peer-to-Peer Resource Sharing (2003), V. Vishnumurthy et al. [pdf]
- PPCoin: Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Stake (2013), S. King and S. Nadal [pdf]
- A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names (2013), S. Meiklejohn et al. [pdf]
- Reusable Proofs of Work (2004), H. Finney [html]
- B-Money (1998), W. Dai [html]
- SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies (2015), J. Bonneau et al. [pdf]
- Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform (2014), V. Buterin et al. [md]
- Ethereum: A Secure Decentralised Generalised Transaction Ledger (2014), G. Wood [pdf]
- Making Smart Contracts Smarter (2016), L. Luu et al. [pdf]
- BigchainDB: A Scalable Blockchain Database (2016), T. McConaghy et al. [pdf]
- Filecoin: A Cryptocurrency Operated File Storage Network (2014), J. Benet [pdf]
- Blockstack: A Global Naming and Storage System Secured by Blockchains (2016), M. Ali et al. [pdf]
- Paxos Made Simple (2001), L. Lamport [pdf]
- The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols (2016), A. Miller et al. [pdf]
- Power Fault Tolerance (2017), Protocol Labs [pdf]
- Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (1999), M. Castro et al. [pdf]
- On Decentralizing Prediction Markets and Order Books (2014), J. Clark et al. [pdf]
- Augur: a Decentralized, Open-Source Platform for Prediction Markets (2016), J. Peterson and J. Krug [pdf]
- Numeraire: A Cryptographic Token for Coordinating Machine Intelligence and Preventing Overfitting (2017), R. Craib et al. [pdf]
- Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (Book, 2016), A. Narayanan et al. [html]
- Mastering Bitcoin (Book, 2015), A. Antonopoulos [html]
(Lectures)
- ECE598AM, Cryptocurrency Security, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [web]
- MAS.S65, Blockchain Technologies: Decentralize all the Things, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [web]
- CS251P, Bitcoin Engineering, Stanford University [web]
- CS251, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies, Stanford University [web]
- Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, Princeton University (Coursera) [web]
- 08-303, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Applications, Carnegie Mellon University [web]
(Blogs)
- Hacking, Distributed (Emin Gün Sirer) [web]
- Unenumerated (Nick Szabo) [web]
- Vitalik Buterin [web]
- Gavin Andresen [web]
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