Abstract
Bitcoin has been growing, since its inception in 2009, to gain a financial mainstream despite the constant fluctuations in its value. It is currently ranked as the most successful Crypto-Currency and decentralized payment system among the others. This success is due, to some extent, to its security, which depends mainly on the cutting-edge cryptographic innovations, such as the hashing functions, the elliptic curve digital signature (ECDSA), and the difficulty that regulates the mining process and allows the system to keep up with the increasing hash-rate. This paper provides an overview of Bitcoin difficulty and how it contributes to the security of this Crypto-Currency.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Coin market capitalization. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#charts. Accessed 26 Dec 2017
Certicom Research. Standards for Efficient Cryptography. SEC 2: Recommended Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters. (n.d.). http://www.secg.org/sec2-v2.pdf. Accessed 26 Dec 2017
Daulay, R.S.A., et al.: IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, vol. 260, p. 012002 (2017)
Garay, J., Kiayias, A., Leonardos, N.: The bitcoin backbone protocol with chains of variable difficulty. In: Katz, J., Shacham, H. (eds.) Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 10401. Springer, Cham (2017)
Eyal, I., Gencer, A.E., Sirer, E.G., van Renesse, R.: Cornell University. Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi16/nsdi16-paper-eyal.pdf. Accessed 10 Aug 2018
Bitcoin Difficulty. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty. Accessed 26 Dec 2017
Block Explorer. https://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f411475428afc90947ee320161bbf18eb6048. Accessed 27 Dec 2017
Andreas, M.: Antonopoulos. Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain, 2nd edn. (2017)
Block Explorer. https://blockexplorer.com/block/0000000000000000004e3c9d483093f88760b3c4c7083308785f6c880f81ab31. Accessed 10 Aug 2018
Bitcoin difficulty. https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty. Accessed 27 Dec 2017
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lamiri, A., Gueraoui, K., Zeggwagh, G. (2019). Bitcoin Difficulty, A Security Feature. In: Rocha, Á., Serrhini, M. (eds) Information Systems and Technologies to Support Learning. EMENA-ISTL 2018. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 111. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03577-8_41
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03577-8_41
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03576-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03577-8
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)