An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System

By Fergal Reid, Martin Harrigan. 2011

1,157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Anonymity in Bit coin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will attempt to construct the one to-many mapping between users and public-keys and associate information external to the system with the users. Bitcoinfrustrates this attack by storing the mapping of a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In this paper we consider the topological structure of two networks derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide complementary views of the Bit coin system and have implications for anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate an alleged theft of Bit coins, which, at the time of the theft, had a market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contracts (2018, neutral): “As numerous studies have shown [64], [53], [56], [65], pseudonymity provides only weak privacy protection.”
Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (2014, background): “While users may employ many identities (or pseudonyms) to enhance their privacy, an increasing body of research shows that anyone can de-anonymize Bitcoin by using information in the block chain [4, 5, 6], such as the structure of the transaction graph as well as the value and dates of transactions.”
Bitcoin - Asset or Currency? Revealing Users' Hidden Intentions (2014, background): “For instance, Reid and Harrigan (2011) show that users and Bitcoin addresses may be mapped passively by the usage of centralized services such as currency exchanges and online wallets.”
An inquiry into money laundering tools in the Bitcoin ecosystem (2013, background): “Reid and Harrigan [12] analyze the network of Bitcoin users by combining addresses that are inputs of multi-input transactions and therefore must belong to the same sender.”
Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Practice (2014, background): “[43, 36] regarding privacy and anonymity in Bitcoin), there is no simple way to check if these duplicate public keys belong to the same or different owners.”
Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph (2013, methodology): “There was one previous reported attempt [5] to download and analyze the full Bitcoin history, which also used the same methodology to try to contract all the addresses which are believed to belong to the same user.”
Deanonymisation of Clients in Bitcoin P2P Network (2014, background): “This is not just a hypothetical case, since Bitcoin exchange rate can fall suddenly and rapidly, making block mining unproﬁtable.”