{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Securing and scaling cryptocurrencies","authors":[{"name":"Aviv Zohar","slug":"aviv-zohar","given":"Aviv","family":"Zohar","affiliation":"The Hebrew University of Jerusalem , Israel"}],"abstract":"Bitcoin, a protocol for a new permissionless decentralized digital currency hailed the arrival of a new application domain for computer science. Following Bitcoin's arrival, a series of innovations derived from the state of the art in several fields has been applied to cryptocurrencies, and has been slowly reshaping monetary and financial instruments on public distributed ledgers. It was soon clear however that Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies still require additional improvements. This challenging domain presents researchers in the field with new and exciting questions. I provide examples from two main research threads, related to the scalability of the protocol and to its underlying incentives.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2017/742","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2017/742","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2017/0742.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2017/742.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2017/bibtex/742","volume":{"slug":"2017","title":"Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2017","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2017/","year":2017,"location":"Melbourne, Australia","dates":"19-25 August 2017","editors":"Carles Sierra","isbn":"978-0-9992411-0-3","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2017"},"section":"Early Career","track":"Early Career","number":742,"pages":{"first":5161,"last":5165},"keywords":["Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Coordination and cooperation","Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: AI&Security and Privacy","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic paradigms, auctions and market-based systems"],"videos":[],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Abraham et al., 2016] Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kar- tik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Alexander Spiegelman. 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