I'm starting to think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that would make interesting research papers.  We need to found J Bitcoin.  This forum is useful for brainstorming and vetting ideas, but I think a lot of good work gets lost and forgotten in the noise.  It would be useful to publish highly-polished peer-reviewed manuscripts in an archival format accessible to everyone.

Looks like the correct search term is "Financial Cryptography".
Also the spring link (http://www.springer.com/generic/search/results?SGWID=0-40109-23-0-0&searchType=EASY_CDA&queryText=Financial+Cryptography+and+Data+Security&sortOrder=relevance&searchScope=books) seems to be the closest thing to something peer-reviewed.