A Quantum Money Solution to the Blockchain Scalability Problem
- Creators
- Coladangelo, Andrea
- Sattath, Or
Abstract
We put forward the idea that classical blockchains and smart contracts are potentially useful primitives not only for classical cryptography, but for quantum cryptography as well. Abstractly, a smart contract is a functionality that allows parties to deposit funds, and release them upon fulfillment of algorithmically checkable conditions, and can thus be employed as a formal tool to enforce monetary incentives. In this work, we give the first example of the use of smart contracts in a quantum setting. We describe a simple hybrid classical-quantum payment system whose main ingredients are a classical blockchain capable of handling stateful smart contracts, and quantum lightning, a strengthening of public-key quantum money introduced by Zhandry [55]. Our hybrid payment system employs quantum states as banknotes and a classical blockchain to settle disputes and to keep track of the valid serial numbers. It has several desirable properties: it is decentralized, requiring no trust in any single entity; payments are as quick as quantum communication, regardless of the total number of users; when a quantum banknote is damaged or lost, the rightful owner can recover the lost value.
Additional Information
This Paper is published in Quantum under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Copyright remains with the original copyright holders such as the authors or their institutions. Published: 2020-07-16. A.C is supported by the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. O.S. is supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) grant No. 682/18 and 2137/19, and by the the Cyber Security Research Center at Ben-Gurion University.Attached Files
Published - q-2020-07-16-297.pdf
Submitted - 2002.11998.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 104773
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200806-102928042
- Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing
- 682/18
- Israel Science Foundation
- 2137/19
- Israel Science Foundation
- Ben-Gurion University
- Created
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2020-08-06Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field