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CommitCoin: Carbon Dating Commitments with Bitcoin

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Book cover Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 7397))

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Abstract

In the standard definition of a commitment scheme, the sender commits to a message and immediately sends the commitment to the recipient interested in it. However the sender may not always know at the time of commitment who will become interested in it. Further, when the interested party does emerge, it could be critical to establish when the commitment was made. Employing a proof of work protocol at commitment time will later allow anyone to “carbon date” when the commitment was made, approximately, without trusting any external parties. We present CommitCoin, an instantiation of this approach that harnesses the existing computational power of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network; a network used to mint and trade digital cash.

Full version available: http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/677

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carleton University, Canada

    Jeremy Clark

  2. University of Waterloo, Canada

    Aleksander Essex

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  1. Jeremy Clark
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  2. Aleksander Essex
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, 1214 Amsterdam Avenue, 10027-7003, New York, NY, USA

    Angelos D. Keromytis

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Clark, J., Essex, A. (2012). CommitCoin: Carbon Dating Commitments with Bitcoin. In: Keromytis, A.D. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7397. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32946-3_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32946-3_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32945-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32946-3

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