Structure and Anonymity of the Bitcoin Transaction Graph

Ober, Micha; Katzenbeisser, Stefan; Hamacher, Kay

doi:10.3390/fi5020237

Cited by 227 publications

(119 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…In [14], Ron and Shamir analyse the behaviour of Bitcoin users. In [12], Ober et al studied the time-evolution properties of Bitcoin by analyzing its transaction graph. Finally, in [11], Moore and Christin study the economic risks that investors face due to Bitcoin exchanges.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Gervais

Karame

Čapkun

et al. 2014

IEEE Secur. Privacy

259

183

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Bitcoin has achieved large-scale acceptance and popularity by promising its users a fully decentralized and low-cost virtual currency system. However, recent incidents and observations are revealing the true limits of decentralization in the Bitcoin system. In this article, we show that the vital operations and decisions that Bitcoin is currently undertaking are not decentralized. More specifically, we show that a limited set of entities currently control the services, decision making, mining, and the incident resolution processes in Bitcoin. We also show that third-party entities can unilaterally decide to "devalue" any specific set of Bitcoin addresses pertaining to any entity participating in the system. Finally, we explore possible avenues to enhance the decentralization in the Bitcoin system.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This enables any entity to "taint" coins that belong to a specific (set of) addresses and monitor their expenditure across the network. The literature features a number of proposals that cluster Bitcoin addresses [2,13,14], and gather behavioural information about these addresses [12,14].…”

Section: Coin Taintingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Gervais

Karame

Čapkun

et al. 2014

IEEE Secur. Privacy

259

183

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…ree different approaches have been taken to perform address clustering: using network layer data [26], performing analysis over the transaction graph [27][28][29], and analyzing Bloom filters [30].…”

Section: User Profilingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cryptocurrency Networks: A New P2P Paradigm

Delgado-Segura

Pérez-Solà

Herrera-Joancomartí

et al. 2018

Mobile Information Systems

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P2P networks are the mechanism used by cryptocurrencies to disseminate system information while keeping the whole system as much decentralized as possible. Cryptocurrency P2P networks have new characteristics that propose new challenges and avoid some problems of existing P2P networks. By characterizing the most relevant cryptocurrency network, Bitcoin, we provide details on different properties of cryptocurrency networks and their similarities and differences with standard P2P network paradigms. Our study allows us to conclude that cryptocurrency networks present a new paradigm of P2P networks due to the mechanisms they use to achieve high resilience and security. With this new paradigm, interesting research lines can be further developed, both in the focused field of P2P cryptocurrency networks and also when such networks are combined with other distributed scenarios.

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“…Mixing services (e.g., Bitcoin Fog) claim to obfuscate the origin of transactions, thus increasing the users' anonymity: their effectiveness is analyzed in [6]. Structural patterns in the topology and dynamics of the Bitcoin transaction graph that have implications for the users' anonymity are shown in [8], whereas [3] collected precious information about the Silk Road before the seizure by the FBI.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

BitIodine: Extracting Intelligence from the Bitcoin Network

Spagnuolo

2014

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

230

161

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Abstract. Bitcoin, the famous peer-to-peer, decentralized electronic currency system, allows users to benefit from pseudonymity, by generating an arbitrary number of aliases (or addresses) to move funds. However, the complete history of all transactions ever performed, called "blockchain", is public and replicated on each node. The data it contains is difficult to analyze manually, but can yield a high number of relevant information. In this paper we present a modular framework, BitIodine, which parses the blockchain, clusters addresses that are likely to belong to a same user or group of users, classifies such users and labels them, and finally visualizes complex information extracted from the Bitcoin network. BitIodine labels users (semi-)automatically with information on their identity and actions which is automatically scraped from openly available information sources. BitIodine also supports manual investigation by finding paths and reverse paths between addresses or users. We tested BitIodine on several real-world use cases, identified an address likely to belong to the encrypted Silk Road cold wallet, or investigated the CryptoLocker ransomware and accurately quantified the number of ransoms paid, as well as information about the victims. We release an early prototype of BitIodine as a library for building more complex Bitcoin forensic analysis tools.

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Structure and Anonymity of the Bitcoin Transaction Graph

Cited by 227 publications

References 5 publications

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?

Cryptocurrency Networks: A New P2P Paradigm

BitIodine: Extracting Intelligence from the Bitcoin Network

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