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A regulated digital currency

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Abstract

The decentralized digital currency Bitcoin is an anonymous alternative to the centralized banking system and enjoys widespread and increasing adoption. Since Bitcoin created, many other electronic currencies have been developed. We propose a protocol for an electronic currency for making anonymous payments that can be supervised by an auditor, who has sole access to the transaction history. Other electronic currencies provide only anonymity, which is convenient for making illegal transactions without regulation. For users, miners, and banks, the transactions of our electronic currency are anonymous, and only auditors can see how it is used. We make use of POW (prove-of-work) technique that allows for distributed decisionmaking within a network, namely the Bitcoin blockchain protocol. We combine the POW and blockchain technology of Bitcoin to give better protection against double-spending attacks.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFA0303903), Zhejiang Province Key R&D Project (Grant No. 2017C01062), and National Cryptography Development Fund (Grant No. MMJJ20170121).

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Correspondence to Yanbing Wu.

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Wu, Y., Fan, H., Wang, X. et al. A regulated digital currency. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 62, 32109 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-018-9611-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-018-9611-3

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