Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin, a cryptography-enabled peer-to-peer digital payment system, has been gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. An effort designed to overcome a cluster of bottlenecks inherent in existing centralized financial systems, Bitcoin has always been championed by the crypto community as an example of the spirit of decentralization. While the decentralized nature of Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm has often been discussed in great detail, no systematic study has so far been conducted to quantitatively measure the degree of decentralization of Bitcoin from an asset perspective -- How decentralized is Bitcoin as a financial asset? We present in this paper the first systematic investigation of the degree of decentralization for Bitcoin based on its entire transaction history. We proposed both static and dynamic analysis of Bitcoin transaction network with quantifiable decentralization measures developed based on network analysis and market efficiency study. Case studies are also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed metrics.
翻译:自2009年问世以来,学术界和业界日益重视Bitcoin这一加密的同侪数字支付系统,它日益受到学术界和工业界的注意。为了克服现有中央金融系统固有的一系列瓶颈,Bitcoin一直被隐匿社区所支持,作为权力下放精神的一个例子。虽然经常详细讨论Bitcoin的“工作证明”共识算法的分散性质,但迄今没有进行系统研究,从资产角度对Bitcoin的权力下放程度进行定量衡量 -- -- Bitcoin作为一种金融资产是如何分散的?我们在本文件中根据Bitcoin的整个交易历史,首次系统地调查其权力下放程度。我们提议对Bitcoin交易网络进行静态和动态分析,并根据网络分析和市场效率研究制定可量化的权力下放措施。还进行了个案研究,以证明我们拟议的指标的有效性。