Data Security and Privacy in Bitcoin System: A Survey

To date, bitcoin has been the most successful application of blockchain technology and has received considerable attention from both industry and academia. Bitcoin is an electronic payment system based on cryptography rather than on credit. Regardless of whether people are in the same city or country, bitcoin can be sent by any one person to any other person when they reach an agreement. The market value of bitcoin has been rising since its advent in 2009, and its current market value is US160 billion. Since its development, bitcoin itself has exposed many problems and is facing challenges from all the sectors of society; therefore, adversaries may use bitcoin’s weakness to make considerable profits. This survey presents an overview and detailed investigation of data security and privacy in bitcoin system. We examine the studies in the literature/Web in two categories: 1) analyses of the attacks to the privacy, availability, and consistency of bitcoin data and 2) summaries of the countermeasures for bitcoin data security. Based on the literature/Web, we list and describe the research methods and results for the two categories. We compare the performance of these methods and illustrate the relationship between the performance and the methods. Moreover, we present several important open research directions to identify the follow-up studies in this area.