QUIC Bitcoin: Fast and Secure Peer-to-Peer Payments and Payment Channels

Abstract

Blockchain technologies allow for records to be publicly secured, without the need of a trusted authority. The Bitcoin white paper introduced blockchain technology in 2008, and Bitcoin is currently the most widely adopted protocol for this type of technology. One of the most common use-cases for Bitcoin is to use the underlying data structure as a public ledger for an electronic cash system. Using this public ledger, Bitcoin protocol allows direct transfer of value between peers (users or machines). The transfer of value occurs via transactions published on the ledger. Alternatively, transactions can be exchanged directly, peer-to-peer, and published on the ledger at a later stage. The latter approach improves transfer speed and system efficiency (e.g. bandwidth and data storage). Due to its vulnerability to man-in-the-middle attacks, however, the direct exchange of unpublished transactions was abandoned in the early days. In this paper, we propose a new method to send and receive unpublished Bitcoin transactions (i.e. peer-to-peer) using a recently introduced network protocol called QUIC, an alternative to TCP. QUIC allows for fast handshakes, secure and authenticated sessions, and it supports network switches (e.g. Wi-Fi to 5G). Using this protocol, we introduce a new type of peer-to-peer Bitcoin transactions, called QUIC Bitcoin Transactions. QUIC Bitcoin Transactions provide a secure and fast way to exchange unpublished transactions between users and machines. Finally, we introduce QUIC Bitcoin Channels, fast and encrypted Bitcoin payment channels. QUIC Bitcoin Transactions and QUIC Bitcoin Channels guarantee secure and encrypted peer-to-peer transactions, and they can be widely adopted without new hardware requirements, as they are implemented in TCP/IP application space.