A fair protocol for data trading based on Bitcoin transactions

On-line commercial transactions involve an inherent mistrust between participant parties since, sometimes, no previous relation exists between them. Such mistrust may be a deadlock point in a trade transaction where the buyer does not want to perform the payment until the seller sends the goods and the seller does not want to do so until the buyer pays for the purchase. In this paper we present a fair protocol for data trading where the commercial deal, in terms of delivering the data and performing the payment, is atomic, since the seller cannot redeem the payment unless the buyer obtains the data and the buyer cannot obtain the data without performing the payment. The protocol is based on Bitcoin scripting language and the fairness of the protocol can be probabilistically enforced. (c) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.