The crypto revolution is ongoing. It is currently gaining popularity among the masses and is also becoming a popular replacement for fiat or traditional currency. However, people’s knowledge regarding cryptocurrency is still limited.
Most people know how to buy cryptocurrency from exchanges, purchase cryptocurrency with credit cards, trade crypto, etc. Countless resources exist online that can help you figure all these out. However, many people want to dive much deeper into cryptocurrency. For them, there are research papers.
Among all the research papers on cryptocurrency out there, let us look at some of the most interesting ones.
#1 “Bitcoin and Beyond: A Technical Survey on Decentralized Digital Currencies” by Christian Decker, Roger Wattenhofer
This paper by Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer, both associate professors at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, is a comprehensive introduction to Bitcoin’s technical aspects. It describes the Bitcoin protocol and transaction lifecycle, explaining why it is so innovative compared to other electronic payment systems.
The paper also provides a detailed overview of the current Bitcoin implementation, highlighting its security and privacy aspects.
If you’re looking for a good way to understand how Bitcoin works before delving into more advanced topics (such as what smart contracts are), you can start with this well-referenced paper.
#2 “Revisiting Bitcoin Transaction Malleability and MtGox” by David Lazar
Dave Lazar’s work gives you a good overview of MtGox (which was a bitcoin exchange), transaction malleability, and the history of how these two things coincided. It will give you a better understanding of how the bitcoin protocol works, as well as what happened to cause it to acquire so many bugs. This will help you understand the origin story behind some of the concerns that continue to plague cryptocurrency today.
Additionally, you’ll learn about how certain actors in the world’s bitcoin ecosystem—the Bitcoin Core development team and community—reacted differently to this situation and began focusing on different aspects of blockchain technology than one another.
#3 “Dropil Dex v2.0 Whitepaper” by Dropil
Next up is a whitepaper from Dropil, which is an AI-driven cryptocurrency platform. Dropil Dex, which stands for “Dropil Decentralized Exchange,” offers several trading services to users, including the ability to exchange tokens for other assets such as other cryptocurrencies or fiat currencies.
The paper begins by outlining the goal of its platform: to develop a decentralized exchange that’s easy to use and fully accessible through mobile devices. The company claims that its system will allow users to purchase cryptocurrency based on market trends and predictions generated by their artificial intelligence.
It also explains how their DROP token works within their system—as well as how they created it and distributed it (to investors).
#4 “Ethereum Casper Explained” by Vitalik Buterin
In this paper, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin introduces Casper, a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm that is being developed to improve the security and scalability of the Ethereum blockchain. The article explains in-depth how the algorithm works and what its potential benefits are.
If you’ve been curious about how blockchains like Ethereum work but have struggled to find an accessible explanation, this is a great place for you to start.
The paper gives a detailed walkthrough of how transactions occur on today’s Ethereum blockchain, versions of which can be traced back to the original Bitcoin blockchain protocol. It then explores PoS as an alternative means of verifying transactions, including some of the issues it may face and how those problems might be addressed by Casper’s algorithmic approach.
#5 “A Non-Technical Explanation of the DAI Credit System” by MakerDAO
MakerDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that consists of a system of smart contracts and several teams with different roles and responsibilities. MakerDAO’s goal is to provide a DAI credit system that uses Ethereum as collateral for those who want to borrow DAI stablecoins. If you’re interested in understanding how this technology works, this paper provides an overview of MakerDAO’s DAI credit system but does so in a way that doesn’t require any technical knowledge or familiarity with blockchain or cryptocurrency.
For beginners, it can be helpful to start with a beginner-level blog post about the topic before diving into this paper, but if you’re already interested and have some prior exposure to crypto topics, then it’s worth taking some time to read this paper.
Knowing how to read research papers is vital. You cannot enjoy going through these papers if you do not know how to read them properly. Once you get that sorted, you can start going through these papers and get a better understanding of cryptocurrencies.