Cryptocurrencies can be used merely to transfer value between identities, but many of the more interesting uses of cryptocurrencies require contracts, e.g, “a transfer of X coins from party S to party R should occur only if conditions A and B hold”. Bitcoin (and related cryptocurrencies) place strict limits on the language in which these conditions can be phrased. In particular, they have limited length and don’t allow loops.
In this talk I will discuss my thesis which I wrote with the guidance of Prof. Tal Moran from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.
In the work, we show how to augment the Bitcoin scripting language with a single “innocuous” operation to that allows us to create “meta conditions” with much more expressive power (e.g., as defined by arbitrarily-sized circuits).
We construct a protocol to compile such meta-conditions into a set of (augmented) Bitcoin transactions. We then show how to use this compiler to realize a full “meta-ledger” functionality, which we show is secure in the universal composability framework.
Yaron Kaner is a software engineer at Microsoft. He has recently obtained his M.Sc. in computer science at the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. He received a B.Sc. in electrical engineering and computer science from Tel Aviv University.