The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol

Common prefix, chain quality and chain growth, under a synchronous network and an honest majority of hash power.

Official external source only
Design paper
Official source

Record

Authors: Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias and Nikos Leonardos
Date: 2015
Publisher: Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias and Nikos Leonardos
Version: Source cited by the 2015 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.
Document ID: BLC-STUDY-0149
DOI: None recorded
Last reviewed: 1 October 2026
Licence: No licence recorded. Rights status under review.

No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.

Direct answer

Common prefix, chain quality and chain growth, under a synchronous network and an honest majority of hash power.

Where to read

Official source — ePrint 2014/765
Blockchain Lab study, the canonical readingOriginal commentary. Not a transcription of the paper.

Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.

Full text

Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.

What changed

A reading of the public document. Not a copy of it, and not a claim about a later network that reused the name.

Relationships

Canonical readingBitcoin Backbone study
Related paperBitcoin-NG
Related paperGHOST

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

Garay, J., Kiayias, A., & Leonardos, N. (2015). The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol. Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias and Nikos Leonardos. https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/765

BibTeX

@techreport{bitcoinbackbone2015,
  title = {The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol},
  author = {Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias and Nikos Leonardos},
  year = {2015},
  institution = {Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias and Nikos Leonardos},
  url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/765},
  note = {Rights status: Official external source only. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/bitcoin-backbone}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol
AU  - Juan Garay
AU  - Aggelos Kiayias
AU  - Nikos Leonardos
PY  - 2015
PB  - Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias and Nikos Leonardos
UR  - https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/765
N1  - Rights status: Official external source only
ER  -

CSL-JSON

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    "id": "BLC-STUDY-0149",
    "title": "The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol",
    "author": [
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        "literal": "Juan Garay"
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      {
        "literal": "Aggelos Kiayias"
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        "literal": "Nikos Leonardos"
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    "issued": {
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    "publisher": "Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias and Nikos Leonardos",
    "URL": "https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/765",
    "note": "Rights status: Official external source only. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

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Rights record

Source status: Official source
Use status: Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.
Rights: Official external source only
Training and retrieval: Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensing Corrections