Extended Deadline

Workshop & Tutorial Bitcoin

Half day Tutorial and half day Workshop at the yearly conference of the German Society for Computer Science (GI), September 20, 2012 in Braunschweig (Germany).

Extended Deadline for Submission: April 30th, 2012

*There is the option to publish revised versions of the contribution in a special issue of "Future Internet".*

Coordinator: Clemens Cap (University of Rostock) clemens.cap@uni-rostock.de

Starting point: Bitcoin is a form of electronic money whose core properties root in stochastic replication consistency. The algorithm is completely decentralized and operates in a peer-to-peer environment. As a project, Bitcoin is an Open Source activity with contributions according to the crowd sourcing model.

The concept raises a number of challenging technical, economical, legal and architectural issues, which combine questions from the area of stochastic algorithms, replication consistency, cryptography, data protection and security, privacy enhancement and network analysis. The concept which is used in Bitcoin for electronic money may also be used for other decentralized, weakly-consistent, replicated registries, such as name services.

Bitcoin, the application of these ideas in the area of electronic money, realizes a cost effective and secure method for transferring monetary values, without the need for a trusted central institution. It is immune against attempts of political influence ("printing money"). In the economic and legal area there exist numerous questions with controversial answers.

The topic of Bitcoin being still very young, the first implementation was available in 2009. The project is undergoing dynamic and rapid development. The first European conference on Bitcoin was held in Prag in November 2011, hosting some 100 participants. In Berlin and Munich there are regular meetings furthering the development and use of Bitcoin, where you also can pay for your bar consumption in Bitcoin. Step by step Bitcoin is also adopted by the academic community: The first survey and scientific articles are being written.

At the yearly convention of the German Society of Informatics, a combination of a Tutorial and a Workshop on Bitcoin will be held.

The half-day tutorial will first provide in a series of coordinated talks an introduction to Bitcoin and will address the challenging questions – especially from the point of view of algorithms, system security and application programming. We will deal with the following topics:

* A Survey on Electronic Money
* Cryptographic Primitives in Electronic Payment Systems
* Introduction to the Block Chain Algorithm used in Bitcoin
* Non-Bitcoin Applications of the Block Chain, such as NameCoin
* Bitcoin in the Payment Process
* Bitcoin Security and Anonymity
* The Environmental Cost of Bitcoin
* Future Bitcoin Research Questions

The half-day workshop will then provide a forum for contributed publications.

Call for Papers: We are soliciting contributions of a maximum of 15 pages, preferably in English, of new, original and unpublished research results. The contributions will be blind-reviewed by at least three members of the organizational committee. Submissions from the organizational committee are welcome. Our target is an acceptance rate of 40 to 60%, accepted papers are published in the Conference Proceedings of the yearly meeting of the GI. The criteria for selection are originality, innovation, choice of topic and quality of the presentation. The contributions must be formatted according to the LNI-format available at http://www.gi-ev.de/service/publikationen/lni/

Target Group: The tutorial addresses computer scientists and researchers near to computer science and economy, who want to get a comprehensive introduction to Bitcoin or want to enter the field with own research and development activities. We attempt to provide a life video stream of the English spoken tutorial and will make the material available on an open license basis afterwards.

The workshop addresses the researcher and professional in the area of Bitcoin. The goal is to continue the discussions of the recent meetings in New York and Prag. While the preferred language is English, the workshop will be open for German contributions as well.

Contact

Program: Clemens Cap clemens.cap@uni-rostock.de
Organisation: Martin Garbe martin.garbe@uni-rostock.de
Webpage: http://bitcoin.uni-rostock.de
Submission: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=btc2012
Registry: http://www.informatik2012.de

Important Dates

Deadlines Submission: April 30th, 2012
Notice to authors: May 30th, 2012
Final version: June 15th, 2012

Organizers and Speakers at the Tutorial:
* Clemens Cap is professor for computer science at the University of Rostock. He is the author of an introductory paper on Bitcoin, published in HMD Wirtschaftsinformatik Nr. 283, Februar 2012. At the CeBIT 2012 fare he will demonstrate a prototype of a Bitcoin Wallet on an embedded system.
* Kay Hamacher is professor for bioinformatics and physics at TU Darmstadt. He presented an analysis of Bitcoin on the 28th yearly congress of the chaos computer club.
* Stefan Katzenbeisser is professor for security engineering at TU Darmstadt. He presented an analysis of Bitcoin on the 28th yearly congress of the chaos computer club.
* Jörn Loviscach is professor for engineering mathematics and technical computer science at FH Bielefeld. He was second editor in chief of the computer science journal c’t and is well known in the web for his explanatory videos. Together with one of his diploma students he published a survey article on Bitcoin in c’t 17/2011.

Programm Commitee (to be extended)
Clemens Cap (Universität Rostock)
Kay Hamacher (TU Darmstadt)
Stefan Katzenbeisser (TU Darmstadt)
Jörn Loviscach (FH Bielefeld)
Kurt Sandkuhl (Universität Rostock)
Jörg Schwenk (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)