Bitcoin and Block chain bibliography

A Bibtex bibliography including publications related to, or of relevance in, the field of cryptographic currencies and consensus ledgers, commonly referred to as block chains. Topics include but are not limited to:

Predecessors of Bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies
PoW based consensus ledgers i.e. cryptographic currencies like Bitcoin and its derivatives (e.g. Namecoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, ...)
BFT and BFT consensus ledgers
...

Structure of this bibliography

The scientific community adapted relatively slow to this emerging and fast moving field of cryptographic currencies and consensus ledgers, commonly refered to as block chains. This was one reason, that for quite a while the only resources available have been the Bitcoin source code, blog/forum/mailing list posts, and other online publications. Also the original Bitcoin paper which initiated the hype was published online without any prior peer-review.

Meanwhile a constant flow of peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications can be observed. This leads to an increasing number of available publications. Although peer-review is not always a guaranty for best quality, we initially distinguish publications in this field into three different categories. The nonnegotiable hard requirement for any category is that the work must be open-access and not locked behind pay-walls.

Note: that only papers in blockchain_peerreviewed.bib and blockchain_eprint.bib are currently exported as .html to https://allquantor.at/blockchainbib.

blockchain_peerreviewed.bib References in this category are peer-reviewed papers which have been (or will be) published on scientific venues (e.g. conferences proceedings, journals, workshops, etc.)
blockchain_eprint.bib References in this category are preprints/eprints of papers (for example on http://arxiv.org) that have not been published at an peer-reviewed venue (yet). Also well written structured whitepapers of alt-coins fall into this category. The criteria for a paper/publication in this category is:
- based on facts
- systematic structure
- no marketing
- not pure speculation
- written in comprehensible English
blockchain_online.bib References in this category are (fast changing) online resources like for example:
- github projects
- block explorer websites
- developer references (wiki entries, etc.)
- Again the requirements form above hold:
  - not purely marketing (some banners on websites are acceptable)
  - not pure speculation
  - written in comprehensible English

In respect to the original publication spirit of Bitcoin, we combine all references into a single blob file called blockchain.bib when executing make in the projects root directory.

Usage of this bibliography

Just reference the aggregated blockchain.bib in your bibtex \bibliography{}. See the test folder for an example based on an IEEE template.

Download papers

To download the papers into the ./papers folder type:

$ python fetch_pdfs.py ./blockchain_peerreviewed.bib papers/

Generate html list

To generate a html paper list you need to clone/install the bibloograpy tool by Philipp Winter.

$ git clone https://github.com/NullHypothesis/bibliograpy 
$ cd blockchainbib
$ bash generate.sh

Related work

A list of other collections of resources on this topic:

Jeremy Clarks collection:
- http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/biblio.php#bitcoin
Brett Scott collection (huge):
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VaWhbAj7hWNdiE73P-W-wrl5a0WNgzjofmZXe0Rh5sg/htmlview?usp=sharing&pli=1&sle=true
Collection in the Bitcoin wiki (subset of the above)
- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Research
Reading list repository of Blockstack:
- https://github.com/blockstack/reading-list
Publications section of IC3:
- http://www.initc3.org/publications
Collection in the Bitcoinbyte blog (outdated)
- https://thebitcoinbyte.wordpress.com/annotated-bibliography/

Contribute

Add/Update an entry in the .bib file

Add or update the bib entry in one of the three files: blockchain_peerreviewed.bib, blockchain_eprint.bib or blockchain_online.bib. Note: that only papers in blockchain_peerreviewed.bib and blockchain_eprint.bib are currently exported as .html to https://allquantor.at/blockchainbib. Do not edit the blockchain.bib file it will be auto generated when running make in the root of the project.
Run the test/Makefile to see if everything works as expected.

$ cd ./test
$ make 
$ evince bare_jrnl.pdf

License

Bibliography license: CC BY

Python code and .tpl templates license: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

Credits

All authors that created the publications listed in this bibliography
Philipp Winter (phw[at]nymity.ch) for the python fetch code and the .tpl templates
Aljosha Judmayer (ajudmayer[at]sba-research[dot]org) initiator of this endeavor
Nicolas Christin (Suggestion of publications)
Daniel Kraft (Suggestion of publications)
Nicholas Stifter (Suggestion of publications)

csxqli/blockchainbib