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International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods

ISoLA 2018: Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Industrial Practice pp 432–449Cite as

Fun with Bitcoin Smart Contracts

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11247))

Abstract

Besides simple transfers of currency, Bitcoin also enables various forms of smart contracts, i.e. protocols where users interact within pre-agreed rules, which determine (possibly depending on the actual interaction) how currency is eventually distributed. This paper provides a gentle introduction to Bitcoin smart contracts, which we specify by abstracting from the underlying Bitcoin machinery. To this purpose we exploit BitML, a recent DSL for smart contracts executable on Bitcoin.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To avoid ambiguities, the BitML semantics decorates contract terms with unique identifiers, referred to in authorization terms. Here we omit them for conciseness.

  2. 2.

    After compiling to Bitcoin, the actual length of the secret will be increased by \(\eta \), where \(\eta \) is a security parameter, large enough to avoid brute-force preimage attacks.

  3. 3.

    The BitML compiler always produces standard Bitcoin transactions, by exploiting the BALZaC tool (https://github.com/balzac-lang/balzac). This is crucial, since the Bitcoin network currently discards non-standard transactions.

  4. 4.

    The reason why BitML allows secrets to have small lengths is to make it easier to write some contracts, like e.g. those in Sect. 2.8.

  5. 5.

    https://ivy-lang.org/bitcoin.

  6. 6.

    https://blockchain.unica.it/balzac/.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by Aut. Reg. of Sardinia projects “Sardcoin” and “Smart collaborative engineering”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Massimo Bartoletti & Tiziana Cimoli

  2. Università degli Studi di Trento, Trento, Italy

    Roberto Zunino

Authors
  1. Massimo Bartoletti
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  2. Tiziana Cimoli
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  3. Roberto Zunino
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Massimo Bartoletti .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Bartoletti, M., Cimoli, T., Zunino, R. (2018). Fun with Bitcoin Smart Contracts. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Industrial Practice. ISoLA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11247. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_32

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03426-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03427-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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