2015/02/05 by Michael Fleder, Fleder, Michael, Michael S. Kester +3 · 13 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1502.01657
Bitcoins have recently become an increasingly popular cryptocurrency through which users trade electronically and more anonymously than via traditional electronic transfers. Bitcoin's design keeps all transactions in a public ledger. The sender and receiver for each transaction are identified only by cryptographic public-key ids. This leads to a common misconception that it inherently provides anonymous use. While Bitcoin's presumed anonymity offers new avenues for commerce, several recent studies raise user-privacy concerns. We explore the level of anonymity in the Bitcoin system. Our approach is two-fold: (i) We annotate the public transaction graph by linking bitcoin public keys to "real" people - either definitively or statistically. (ii) We run the annotated graph through our graph-analysis framework to find and summarize activity of both known and unknown users.