Prof. Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí (Dept. of Information and
Communications Engineering, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Thursday January 19, 2017; 10h30, Room G09, Télécom SudParis, Evry.

Title: Privacy in Bitcoin Transactions: New Challenges From
Blockchain Scalability Solutions

Abstract: Bitcoin has emerged as the most successful cryptocurrency
since its appearance back in 2009. However, its main drawback to become
a truly global payment system is its low capacity in transaction
throughput. At present time, some ideas have been proposed to increase
the transaction throughput with different impact on the scalability of
the system. Some of these ideas propose to decouple standard
transactions from the blockchain core, and to manage them through a
parallel payment network, sometimes referred as a lightning network,
relegating the bitcoin blockchain only for transactions which
consolidate multiple of those off-chain transactions. Such mechanisms
generate new actors in the bitcoin payment scenario, Payment Service
Providers, and new privacy issues arise regarding bitcoin users. In this
talk, we provide a comprehensive description on the bitcoin lightning
network and, we analyse its impact on user’s privacy and we outline some
research challenges on that topic.

Short Bio: Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí is an associate professor at the
Department of Information and Communications Engineering in the
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He finished a graduate in
Mathematics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 1994 and he received
his Ph.D. degree in 2000 from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. His
research interests include topics in the field of cryptography, privacy
and computer security and more precisely in the field of blockchain
technology and cryptocurrencies, topics in which, according to SCOPUS,
he is in the top 15th most active researchers. He has advised different
PhD thesis and has acted as a Principal Investigator in several research
projects. He has coauthored over 90 research papers in both national and
international publications, the vast majority indexed in relevant
research indexes, like ISI-JCR, ISI-WoK, SCOPUS or DBLP. He regularly
acts as a peer reviewer for several important journals and as an
external reviewer for the European Commission as well as for the
Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and
Education.