This work is the result of my master thesis in computer science from the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland.
Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer currency that allows users to to pay for things electronically. Bitcoin was created by a pseudonymous software developer going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, as an electronic payment system based on mathematical proof. Yet the largest challenge in Bitcoin for the coming years is scalability. Currently, Bitcoin can only handle a few transactions per second on the network. This is not sufficient in comparison to large payment infrastructures, which allow tens of thousands of transactions per second. As a potential scalability solution, the idea of payment channels was suggested by Satoshi in an email to Mike Hearn. A one-way payment channel specific for retail commercial transactions is presented, analyzed and optimized with threshold cryptography. The threshold scheme selected has been adapted and implemented into the Bitcoin cryptographic library to compute a special two-party threshold ECDSA signature.
- Maria Sisto, for the title page
- Loïc Monney, for the section title style, captions style and font idea
- EPFL, for the basic structure