A New Method of Assigning Trust to User Addresses in Bitcoin

Abstract

Trust of user address (i.e., wallet address) in Bitcoin is dependent on not who user is but the amount of Bitcoin currency in user’s wallet address. So we cannot necessarily trust a Bitcoin user with wallet address. Actually, there is no method for assigning trust to user addresses in Bitcoin. Although we can provide trust to user address by inserting certificate into Bitcoin transaction using OP_RETURN, it still has some problems about wastefulness. In this paper, we propose a new method that efficiently assigns trust to user address using Bitcoin transfer only, which does not need to use OP_RETURN. Our proposed method can realize a trust providing mechanism for “Blockchain 1.0” without adding any new function. Main idea of our method is that “token coin” (Bitcoin transfer itself) can be used as a trust providing mechanism. For feasibility study, we experimentally show the trust assigning in the Bitcoin testnet. Furthermore, our method can be easily adopted into other cryptocurrencies.