Dear Colleagues,

Electronic money is well known and widely used. However, when attempting to implement digital cash or digital forms of value, often some properties of real cash are omitted. Especially difficult is the design of a completely decentralized, peer-to-peer currency which prevents double spending on the one hand and allows value exchange in an anonymous form without interaction with a trusted third party. In the last two years, the crypto currency Bitcoin provided an interesting solution to this challenge. The open source project implements a probabilistic solution of a consensus problem and is accepted by its community, the algorithm however is still not sufficiently analyzed from a theoretical point of view.

This special issue of Future Internet is devoted to Bitcoin and to similar approaches to digital cash. Selected contributions from the Bitcoin Workshop (http://bitcoin.uni-rostock.de/index.php) will be published, and papers that explore the latest advances in digital cash regarding its design and observations of its impact are also warmly welcome.

Dr. Clemens H. Cap
Guest Editor

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• electronic money
• Peer-to-Peer architectures
• anonymous communication
• Proof-of-Work systems
• crypto coins
• financial cryptography