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Bitcoin Covenants Unchained

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Applications (ISoLA 2020)

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Abstract

Covenants are linguistic primitives that extend the Bitcoin script language, allowing transactions to constrain the scripts of the redeeming ones. Advocated as a way of improving the expressiveness of Bitcoin contracts while preserving the simplicity of the UTXO design, various forms of covenants have been proposed over the years. A common drawback of the existing descriptions is the lack of formalization, making it difficult to reason about properties and supported use cases. In this paper we propose a formal model of covenants, which can be implemented with minor modifications to Bitcoin. We use our model to specify some complex Bitcoin contracts, and we discuss how to exploit covenants to design high-level language primitives for Bitcoin contracts.

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Acknowledgements

Massimo Bartoletti is partially supported by Aut. Reg. of Sardinia project “Sardcoin”. Stefano Lande is partially supported by P.O.R. F.S.E. 2014–2020. Roberto Zunino is partially supported by MIUR PON 2018 “Distributed Ledgers for Secure Open Communities” ARS01_00587.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Massimo Bartoletti & Stefano Lande

  2. Università degli Studi di Trento, Trento, Italy

    Roberto Zunino

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  1. Massimo Bartoletti
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  2. Stefano Lande
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  3. Roberto Zunino
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Correspondence to Massimo Bartoletti , Stefano Lande or Roberto Zunino .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick and Lero, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Bartoletti, M., Lande, S., Zunino, R. (2020). Bitcoin Covenants Unchained. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Applications. ISoLA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12478. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61467-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61467-6_3

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