Blocks & Chains Bibliography

A Bibtex bibliography including eprints/pre-prints and peer-reviewed publications related to, or of relevance in, the field of cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technologies, commonly referred to as blockchains.

Papers in blockchain.bib are currently exported as .html to https://allquantor.at/blockchainbib.

The topics of the papers in this bibliography encompass various aspects that are directly or indirectly related to this interdisciplinary field e.g.,:

• Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
• Credit networks and payment channels
• Smart contract platforms
• Smart contract analysis and applications
• Distributed systems aspects
• Applied cryptography applicable in this context
• Economics and game theory
• Privacy and transparency
• General IT-Security related issues
• Regulatory and legal issues
• Usability and usable-security
• ...

Usage of this bibliography

Just reference the blockchain.bib in your bibtex \bibliography{} and compile your latex files as usual. See the test folder for an example based on an IEEE template.

Advanced usage: Download all papers

Make sure python 2 is running on your system

python2 --version

Make sure Pybtex! is installed

pip install pybtex

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

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

Advanced usage: Generate html files

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

Contribute

Generally contributions are welcome and might fall in the one of the following categories.

Contribute by adding/updating an entry in the blockchain.bib file

The requirements for a paper to be added to the bib are:

• It must be open-access and not locked behind a pay-wall
• It is either:
  1. A peer-reviewed paper which has been published on an academic venue (e.g., conferences proceeding, journal, workshop )
  2. A pre-print/eprint of a paper (published for example on http://arxiv.org) that has not been published at an peer-reviewed venue (yet). The criteria for a paper in this category are:
     • based on facts
     • systematic structure
     • no marketing
     • not pure speculation
     • written in comprehensible English

How to add/update an entry

1. Add or update the bib entry in blockchain.bib

2. Run the test/Makefile to see if everything builds as expected.

$ cd ./test
$ make test
...
  COMPILED SUCCESSFULLY!
...

3. issue pull request on github

Contribute code

This project is a quick-and-dirty approach and various evolutionary steps are possible e.g., :

• Migrate to another dataformat for entries (e.g., JSON-LD)
  • Add abstract to entries
  • Add tags to entries
• Migrate to a github.io page and use some lightweight JavaScript to filter entries
• Provide a simple (local) interface to add entries
• Generate the resulting .bib files based on custom selection

Notes

Note that only papers in blockchain.bib are currently exported as .html to https://allquantor.at/blockchainbib. There are also references in blockchain_online.bib to 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

Related bibliographies

A list of other (possibly outdated) collections of resources on this topic:

• Collection by Christian Decker:

  • https://github.com/cdecker/btcresearch

• Collection by Jeremy Clark:

  • http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/biblio.php#bitcoin

• Collection by Brett Scott:

  • 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/

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)
• Philipp Schindler (Suggestion of publications)
• Alexei Zamyatin (Suggestion of publications)
• Bernhard Haslhofer (Suggestion of publications)
• Andreas Kern (Suggestion of publications & code)