A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names

By Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole, Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage. 2013

484 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bitcoin is a purely online virtual currency, unbacked by either physical commodities or sovereign obligation; instead, it relies on a combination of cryptographic protection and a peer-to-peer protocol for witnessing settlements. Consequently, Bitcoin has the unintuitive property that while the ownership of money is implicitly anonymous, its flow is globally visible. In this paper we explore this unique characteristic further, using heuristic clustering to group Bitcoin wallets based on evidence of shared authority, and then using re-identification attacks (i.e., empirical purchasing of goods and services) to classify the operators of those clusters. From this analysis, we characterize longitudinal changes in the Bitcoin market, the stresses these changes are placing on the system, and the challenges for those seeking to use Bitcoin for criminal or fraudulent purposes at scale.

Subfields: Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

CoinShuffle: Practical Decentralized Coin Mixing for Bitcoin (2014, background): “In this direction, some third-party mixing services [12, 13, 14] were first to emerge, but they have been prone to thefts [9].”
A Blockchain Research Framework (2017, background): “Regarding anonymity, deanonymization attacks through analyzing transaction logs (Meiklejohn et al. 2013; Ron and Shamir 2013) are argued to be a major technology adoption hindrance (Kosba et al. 2015).”
Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey (2018, background): “However, it is shown in [53], [46] that blockchain cannot guarantee the transactional privacy since the values of all transactions and balances for each public key are publicly visible.”
An inquiry into money laundering tools in the Bitcoin ecosystem (2013, background): “Meiklejohn, Pomarole, Jordan, et al. [13] identify a large number of intermediaries by interacting with them and using a change address heuristic to identify addresses of the same user.”
SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains (2017, background): “sactions and their meta-data. The original Bitcoin announcement promised ‘anonymity’ as a property of the new system; however, the weak form of pseudonymity offered can be bypassed by tracing attacks [101]. Permissioned systems, such as BigchainDB [100], have the ability to protect privacy by restri”
BitIodine: Extracting Intelligence from the Bitcoin Network (2014, background): “The forensic approach proposed in [5] focuses on investigating the use of Bitcoin for criminal or fraudulent purposes at scale.”
Price manipulation in the Bitcoin ecosystem (2018, background): “They successfully link transactions back to popular Bitcoin service providers, such as currency exchanges [14].”
Is Bitcoin Really Untethered? (2020, methodology): “To reduce the complexity of the network, we adopt methods from the computer science literature (Androulaki et al. (2013), Meiklejohn et al. (2013), Reid and Harrigan (2013), Ron and Shamir (2013)) to cluster-related Bitcoin wallets.”
Measuring the Longitudinal Evolution of the Online Anonymous Marketplace Ecosystem (2015, background): “[31] provide a detailed analysis of transaction traceability in the Bitcoin network, and show which addresses are related to Silk Road, which in turn could be a useful way of assessing the total volumes of that marketplace.”
SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies (2015, background): “The actual level of unlinkability depends heavily on implementation details that we term idioms of use, following [80].”
Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol (2015, background): “Overall, cryptocurrencies have garnered much attention from the financial and tech sectors, as well as academics; achieved wide market penetration in underground economies [38]; reached a $12B”