TITLE: Bitcoin Research
QUESTION [19 upvotes]: I have recently been assigned to advise a student on a senior thesis.  She has taken linear algebra, introductory real analysis, and abstract algebra.  Her interest is in cryptography.  And she has a love of Bitcoin.  The point of a senior thesis is to get a student to teach themselves a subject and learn to find and read mathematical papers.  Original work that could be published would be nice, but is often untenable.  
My question is whether anyone knows of any research that is/has being/been done in cryptography related to Bitcoin.  Thanks.

REPLY [10 votes]: there is a nice preprint server, widely used by cryptographic researchers: http://eprint.iacr.org
If you do a search, there are some papers talking more or less about bitcoin. I guess "Decentralized anonymous credentials" is a good begin for your student. This is indeed a well known area of research, and is the main point of bitcoins (with mining).
You may take a look at Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=bitcoin&btnG=&lr= there are many references dealing with bitcoins, probably some mathematical with a large interest.