Bitcoin Research

Two papers with real world monetary implications:

Two Bitcoins at the Price of One? Double-Spending Attacks on Fast Payments in Bitcoin

Don't know if this is fixed in the current implementation.

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System

Quote:

At the time of theft, the stolen Bitcoins had a market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars. We chose this case study to illustrate the potential risks to the anonymity of a user (the thief) who has good reason to remain anonymous.

Added

Bitcoin related news from popular media.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/03/mtgox_to_customers_your_call_is_important_to_us_not/

MtGox declared bankruptcy last week, taking more than $US400m worth of Bitcoin with it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/04/bitcoin_bank_flexcoin_shuts_down_after_hackers_strike/

Bitcoin bank Flexcoin pulls plug after cyber-robbers nick $610,000 Your money is gone. Kthxbye

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.