Bitcoins and secure financial transaction processing, recent advances

Bitcoins have opened a new chapter in the arena of electronic financial transactions. Due to their decentralized nature and independence from the need of a third party for authorizing transactions, they are seen as an alternative choice for payments by many firms and financial institutions. But like all other prevalent financial transaction technologies, they are also having their securities issues of their own kind. The current article discusses the security issues associated with the bitcoins based financial transaction processing system and various proposed research endeavors to combat them in recent years.