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We introduce Bitcoin-IPC, a software stack and protocol that scales Bitcoin towards helping it become the universal Medium of Exchange (MoE) by enabling the permissionless creation of fully programmable Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Layer-2 chains, called subnets, whose stake is denominated in L1 BTC. Bitcoin-IPC subnets rely on Bitcoin L1 for the communication of critical information, settlement, and security. Our design, inspired by SWIFT messaging and embedded within Bitcoin's SegWit mechanism, enables seamless value transfer across L2 subnets, routed through Bitcoin L1. Uniquely, this mechanism reduces the virtual-byte cost per transaction (vB per tx) by up to 23x, compared to transacting natively on Bitcoin L1, effectively increasing monetary transaction throughput from 7 tps to over 160 tps, without requiring any modifications to Bitcoin L1.

This paper investigates whether Bitcoin can be regarded as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), what insights it may offer for the broader DAO ecosystem, and how Bitcoin governance can be improved. First, a quantitative literature analysis reveals that Bitcoin is increasingly overlooked in DAO research, even though early works often classified it as a DAO. Next, the paper applies a DAO viability framework - centering on collective intelligence, digital democracy, and adaptation - to examine Bitcoin's organizational and governance mechanisms. Findings suggest that Bitcoin instantitates key DAO principles by enabling open participation, and employing decentralized decision-making through Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), miner signaling, and user-activated soft forks. However, this governance carries potential risks, including reduced clarity on who truly 'votes' due to the concentration of economic power among large stakeholders. The paper concludes by highlighting opportunities to refine Bitcoin's deliberation process and reflecting on broader implications for DAO design, such as the absence of a legal entity. In doing so, it underscores Bitcoin's continued relevance

This paper surveys innovative protocols that enhance the programming functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain, a key part of the "Bitcoin Ecosystem." Bitcoin utilizes the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model and a stack-based script language for efficient peer-to-peer payments, but it faces limitations in programming capability and throughput. The 2021 Taproot upgrade introduced the Schnorr signature algorithm and P2TR transaction type, significantly improving Bitcoin's privacy and programming capabilities. This upgrade has led to the development of protocols like Ordinals, Atomicals, and BitVM, which enhance Bitcoin's programming functionality and enrich its ecosystem. We explore the technical aspects of the Taproot upgrade and examine Bitcoin Layer 1 protocols that leverage Taproot's features to program non-fungible tokens (NFTs) into transactions, including Ordinals and Atomicals, along with the fungible token standards BRC-20 and ARC-20. Additionally, we categorize certain Bitcoin ecosystem protocols as Layer 2 solutions similar to Ethereum's, analyzing their impact on Bitcoin's performance. By analyzing data from the Bitcoin blockchain, we gather metrics on block capacity, m

The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chains, there is a need for new methods of Bitcoin security sharing. We introduce Bitcoin staking, a protocol that allows Bitcoin holders to trustlessly use their idle asset to secure a PoS chain. The key challenge is to enable automatic slashing of bitcoins on the Bitcoin chain upon safety violations on the PoS chain. We achieve this using double-authentication-preventing signatures, finality gadgets and bi-directional timestamping between Bitcoin and the PoS chain. Our design is entirely modular and can be integrated with any PoS chain. A version of this protocol was deployed to secure the Babylon mainnet in April 2025 and currently has over 58,000 bitcoins staked (about 4 billion USD at current prices) while paying only 0.05% APR reward to the stakers. This is 2 orders of magnitude cheaper security cost than in PoS chains secured by their native token.

We analyze the first and second moment risk premia in the Bitcoin market based on options and realized returns and contrast them to the premia embedded in the main US stock index market. First, Bitcoin is much more volatile and has a higher variance risk premium than the S&P 500. By decomposing the return premium into different regions of the return state space, we find that while most of the S&P 500 equity premium comes from mildly negative returns, the corresponding negative Bitcoin returns (between three and one standard deviations) account for only one-third of the total Bitcoin premium (BP). Further, applying a novel clustering algorithm to a collection of estimated Bitcoin option-implied risk-neutral densities, we find that risk premia vary over time as a function of two distinct market volatility regimes. The low-volatility regime implies a relatively high share of BP attributable to positive returns and a high Bitcoin Variance Risk Premium (BVRP). In high-volatility states, the BP attributable to positive and negative returns is more balanced, and the BVRP is lower. These results suggest Bitcoin investors are more concerned about variance and upside risk in a low-vo

Mastering Bitcoin is essential reading for everyone interested in learning about bitcoin basics, the technical operation of bitcoin, or if you're building the next great bitcoin killer app or business. From using a bitcoin wallet to buy a cup of coffee, to running a bitcoin marketplace with hundreds of thousands of transactions, or collaboratively building new financial innovations that will transform our understanding of currency and credit, this book will help you engineer money. You're about to unlock the API to a new economy. This book is your key. This book will help you learn everything you need to know about decentralized digital money, which is one of the most exciting technical revolutions in decades. Just as the Internet has transformed dozens of industries - from media and entertainment to retailing, travel and many more - decentralized digital money, in the form of crypto-currencies, has the ability to transform the foundations of money, credit and financial services. It also has the power to transform other social activities and institutions that we don't usually associate directly with money, such as corporations, governance, voting and the law. As the first successful digital currency, bitcoin is the natural starting point for anyone interested in decentralized digital money, its implications and applications. Mastering Bitcoin describes the technical foundations of bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies, from cryptography basics, such as keys and addresses, to the data structures, network protocols and the consensus mechanism (mining) that underpin bitcoin. Each technical topic is explained with user stories, elegant analogies and examples, and code snippets illustrating the key concepts. The first two chapters offer a broad and accessible introduction to bitcoin that is intended for all audiences, from new non-technical users to investors and business executives seeking to better understand bitcoin. The remainder of the book dives into the technical details of bitcoin's operation and is aimed at professional developers, engineers, software and systems architects, systems administrators and technically-minded people interested in the inner workings of bitcoin and comparable crypto-currencies. Mastering Bitcoin is intended to be used as a reference book for technical professionals, as a self-study guide for bitcoin entrepreneurs, and as a textbook for university courses on bitcoin and digital currencies. Bitcoin is still in its infancy, and yet it has already spawned a multi-billion dollar, global economy that is growing exponentially. Both new and established companies are adding bitcoin as a payment method, and investors are funding a flurry of new bitcoin and related startups. Mastering Bitcoin can help you become part of this vibrant new economy. The time to get started is now.

Digitalisation transforms money from distinguishable physical objects into fungible informational units. A recent theoretical framework predicts that such indistinguishable wealth obeys bosonic occupancy statistics, leading to geometric ownership distributions and enhanced inequality. Using Bitcoin blockchain data, we test this prediction on 63 UTXO denominations across 72 monthly snapshots (2018--2023). A one-parameter geometric model describes the ownership distributions, reproducing both mean holdings and their temporal evolution; Jensen--Shannon divergence values lie below $0.08$ in $99.74\%$ of cases. The inferred inverse-temperature parameter satisfies the analytic mean--temperature relation to better than $0.1\%$ in every sample -- a self-consistency test that two-parameter alternatives cannot pass -- and remains within a narrow band across eight orders of magnitude in denomination and over six years. Bitcoin UTXO ownership statistics are therefore consistent with bosonic occupancy laws, suggesting that the informational nature of electronic money may act as a structural driver of inequality in digital economies.

The year 2024 witnessed a major development in the cryptocurrency industry with the long-awaited approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This innovation provides investors with a new, regulated path to gain exposure to Bitcoin through a familiar investment vehicle (Kumar et al., 2024). However, unlike traditional ETFs that directly hold underlying assets, Bitcoin ETFs rely on a creation and redemption process managed by authorized participants (APs). This unique structure introduces distinct characteristics in terms of premium/discount behavior compared to traditional ETFs. This paper investigates the premium and discount patterns observed in Bitcoin ETFs during first four-month period (January 11th, 2024, to May 17th, 2024). Our analysis reveals that these patterns differ significantly from those observed in traditional index ETFs, potentially exposing investors to additional risk factors. By identifying and analyzing these risk factors associated with Bitcoin ETF premiums/discounts, this paper aims to achieve two key objectives: Enhance market understanding: Equip and market and investors with a deeper comprehension of the unique liquidity risks inherent in Bitcoin

Over the past decade, the blockchain technology and its Bitcoin cryptocurrency have received considerable attention. Bitcoin has experienced significant price swings in daily and long-term valuations. In this paper, we propose a partial differential equation (PDE) model on the bitcoin transaction network for predicting bitcoin price. Through analysis of bitcoin subgraphs or chainlets, the PDE model captures the influence of transaction patterns on bitcoin price over time and combines the effect of all chainlet clusters. In addition, Google Trends Index is incorporated to the PDE model to reflect the effect of bitcoin market sentiment. The experiment shows that the average accuracy of daily bitcoin price prediction is 0.82 for 362 consecutive days in 2017. The results demonstrate the PDE model is capable of predicting bitcoin price. The paper is the first attempt to apply a PDE model to the bitcoin transaction network for predicting bitcoin price.

The purpose of this paper is to review the concept of cryptocurrencies in our economy. First, Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrencies' histories are analyzed. We then study the implementation of Bitcoin in the airline and real estate industries. Our study finds that many Bitcoin companies partner with airlines in order to decrease processing times, to provide ease of access for spending in international airports, and to reduce fees on foreign exchanges for fuel expenses, maintenance, and flight operations. Bitcoin transactions have occurred in the real estate industry, but many businesses are concerned with Bitcoin's potential interference with the U.S. government and its high volatility. As Bitcoin's price has been growing rapidly, we assessed Bitcoin's real value; Bitcoin derives value from its scarcity, utility, and public trust. In the conclusion, we discuss Bitcoin's future and conclude that Bitcoin may change from a short-term profit investment to a more steady industry as we identify Bitcoin with the "greater fool theory", and as the number of available Bitcoins to be mined dwindles and technology becomes more expensive.

Explaining changes in bitcoin's price and predicting its future have been the foci of many research studies. In contrast, far less attention has been paid to the relationship between bitcoin's mining costs and its price. One popular notion is the cost of bitcoin creation provides a support level below which this cryptocurrency's price should never fall because if it did, mining would become unprofitable and threaten the maintenance of bitcoin's public ledger. Other research has used mining costs to explain or forecast bitcoin's price movements. Competing econometric analyses have debunked this idea, showing that changes in mining costs follow changes in bitcoin's price rather than preceding them, but the reason for this behavior remains unexplained in these analyses. This research aims to employ economic theory to explain why econometric studies have failed to predict bitcoin prices and why mining costs follow movements in bitcoin prices rather than precede them. We do so by explaining the chain of causality connecting a bitcoin's price to its mining costs.

Bitcoin has increased investment interests in people during the last decade. We have seen an increase in the number of posts on social media platforms about cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin. This project focuses on analyzing user tweet data in combination with Bitcoin price data to see the relevance between price fluctuations and the conversation between millions of people on Twitter. This study also exploits this relationship between user tweets and bitcoin prices to predict the future bitcoin price. We are utilizing novel techniques and methods to analyze the data and make price predictions.

This study empirically analyzes the transaction activity of Bitcoin addresses linked to Russian intelligence services, which have liquidated over 7 Bitcoin (BTC), i.e., equivalent to approximately US$300,000 based on the exchange rate at the time. Our investigation begins with an observed anomaly in transaction outputs featuring the Bitcoin Script operation code, tied to input addresses identified by cyber threat intelligence sources and court documents as belonging to Russian intelligence agencies. We explore how an unauthorized entity appears to have gained control of the associated private keys, with messages embedded in the outputs confirming the seizure. Tracing the funds' origins, we connect them to cryptocurrency mixers and establish a link to the Russian ransomware group Conti, implicating intelligence service involvement. This analysis represents one of the first empirical studies of large-scale Bitcoin misuse by nation-state cyber actors.

This paper formally examines the network structure of Bitcoin CORE (BTC) and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) using complex graph theory to demonstrate that home-hosted full nodes are incapable of participating in or influencing the propagation topology. Leveraging established models such as scale-free networks and small-world connectivity, we demonstrate that the propagation graph is dominated by a densely interconnected miner clique, while full nodes reside on the periphery, excluded from all transaction-to-block inclusion paths. Using simulation-backed metrics and eigenvalue centrality analysis, we confirm that full nodes are neither critical nor operationally relevant for consensus propagation.

This paper examines the response of major cryptocurrencies to macroeconomic news announcements (MNA). While other cryptocurrencies exhibit no reaction to major MNA, Bitcoin responds negatively to inflation surprise. Price of Bitcoin decreases by 24 bps in response to a 1 standard deviation inflationary surprise. This reaction is inconsistent with widely-held beliefs of practitioners that Bitcoin can hedge inflation. I do not find support for the hypothesis that the negative response of Bitcoin to inflation is due to its negative exposure to interest rates. Instead, I find support for the hypothesis that Bitcoin is strongly affected by the shift in consumption-savings decisions, driven by the rise in inflation. Consistent with this view, Bitcoin has negative exposure to a proxy for the consumption-savings ratio.

This study, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, delves into the spatiotemporal dynamics of Bitcoin transactions, shedding light on the scaling laws governing its geographic usage. Leveraging a dataset of IP addresses and Bitcoin addresses spanning from October 2013 to December 2013, we explore the geospatial patterns unique to Bitcoin. Motivated by the needs of cryptocurrency businesses, regulatory clarity, and network science inquiries, we make several contributions. Firstly, we empirically characterize Bitcoin transactions' spatiotemporal scaling laws, providing insights into its spending behaviours. Secondly, we introduce a Markovian model that effectively approximates Bitcoin's observed spatiotemporal patterns, revealing economic connections among user groups in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Our measurements and model shed light on the inhomogeneous structure of the network: although Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized, there are significant geographical differences in the distribution of user activity, which has consequences for all participants and possible (regulatory) control over the system.

This is the first paper that estimates the price determinants of BitCoin in a Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity framework using high frequency data. Derived from a theoretical model, we estimate BitCoin transaction demand and speculative demand equations in a GARCH framework using hourly data for the period 2013-2018. In line with the theoretical model, our empirical results confirm that both the BitCoin transaction demand and speculative demand have a statistically significant impact on the BitCoin price formation. The BitCoin price responds negatively to the BitCoin velocity, whereas positive shocks to the BitCoin stock, interest rate and the size of the BitCoin economy exercise an upward pressure on the BitCoin price.

The behaviour of Bitcoin owners is reflected in the structure and the number of bitcoin transactions encoded in the Blockchain. Likewise, the behaviour of Bitcoin traders is reflected in the formation of bullish and bearish trends in the crypto market. In light of these observations, we wonder if human behaviour underlies some relationship between the Blockchain and the crypto market. To address this question, we map the Blockchain to a spin-lattice problem, whose configurations form ordered and disordered patterns, representing the behaviour of Bitcoin owners. This novel approach allows us to obtain time series suitable to detect a causal relationship between the dynamics of the Blockchain and market trends of the Bitcoin and to find that disordered patterns in the Blockchain precede Bitcoin panic selling. Our results suggest that human behaviour underlying Blockchain evolution and the crypto market brings out a fascinating connection between disorder and panic in Bitcoin dynamics.

We study to what extent the Bitcoin blockchain security permanently depends on the underlying distribution of cryptocurrency market outcomes. We use daily blockchain and Bitcoin data for 2014-2019 and employ the ARDL approach. We test three equilibrium hypotheses: (i) sensitivity of the Bitcoin blockchain to mining reward; (ii) security outcomes of the Bitcoin blockchain and the proof-of-work cost; and (iii) the speed of adjustment of the Bitcoin blockchain security to deviations from the equilibrium path. Our results suggest that the Bitcoin price and mining rewards are intrinsically linked to Bitcoin security outcomes. The Bitcoin blockchain security's dependency on mining costs is geographically differenced - it is more significant for the global mining leader China than for other world regions. After input or output price shocks, the Bitcoin blockchain security reverts to its equilibrium security level.