Awesome Decentralized Systems Papers

A curated list of the top papers in decentralized systems (cryptocurrencies, contracts, consensus, etc.)

Table of Contents

• Cryptocurrencies / Blockchains
• Smart Contracts
• Storage
• Consensus
• Prediction Markets

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Cryptocurrencies / Blockchains

• Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (2008), S. Nakamoto [pdf]
• Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure (2002), A. Back [pdf]
• The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments (2016), J. Poon and T. Dryja [pdf]
• Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (2014), E. Ben-Sasson et al. [pdf]
• An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System (2012), F. Reid and M. Harrigan [pdf]
• KARMA: A Secure Economic Framework for Peer-to-Peer Resource Sharing (2003), V. Vishnumurthy et al. [pdf]
• PPCoin: Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Stake (2013), S. King and S. Nadal [pdf]
• Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Protocol for Internet Applications (2001), I. Stoica et al. [pdf]

Smart Contracts

• Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform (2014), V. Buterin et al. [md]
• Ethereum: A Secure Decentralised Generalised Transaction Ledger (2014), G. Wood [pdf]
• Making Smart Contracts Smarter (2016), L. Luu et al. [pdf]

Storage

• BigchainDB: A Scalable Blockchain Database (2016), T. McConaghy et al. [pdf]
• Filecoin: A Cryptocurrency Operated File Storage Network (2014), J. Benet [pdf]
• Blockstack: A Global Naming and Storage System Secured by Blockchains (2016), M. Ali et al. [pdf]

Consensus

• Paxos Made Simple (2001), L. Lamport [pdf]
• The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols (2016), A. Miller et al. [pdf]

Prediction Markets

• On Decentralizing Prediction Markets and Order Books (2014), J. Clark et al. [pdf]
• Augur: a Decentralized, Open-Source Platform for Prediction Markets (2016), J. Peterson and J. Krug [pdf]
• Numeraire: A Cryptographic Token for Coordinating Machine Intelligence and Preventing Overfitting (2017), R. Craib et al. [pdf]

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Book / Survey / Review

• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (Book, 2016), A. Narayanan et al. [html]
• Mastering Bitcoin (Book, 2015), A. Antonopoulos [html]

Video Lectures / Tutorials / Blogs

(Lectures)

• ECE598AM, Cryptocurrency Security, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [web]
• MAS.S65, Blockchain Technologies: Decentralize all the Things, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [web]
• CS251P, Bitcoin Engineering, Stanford University [web]
• CS251, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies, Stanford University [web]
• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, Princeton University (Coursera) [web]
• 08-303, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Applications, Carnegie Mellon University [web]

(Blogs)

• Hacking, Distributed (Emin Gün Sirer) [web]
• Unenumerated (Nick Szabo) [web]
• Vitalik Buterin [web]
• Gavin Andresen [web]

License

awesome-decentralized-papers is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC-0) License. See LICENSE for the full license text.