An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System · HackerPapers discussions

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System — mentioned by feral

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 17:56:23 GMT

http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524 (This is also in my profile.)

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System — mentioned by DennisP

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 15:08:25 GMT

That is not correct. Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524 IP address is one of many ways that particular bitcoin addresses can be linked to real identities. The rest is graph analysis.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System — mentioned by davidjohnstone

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 12:53:40 GMT

There are a lot of dead Bitcoins around. This thread [1] documents about 70,000 lost Bitcoins, and you can be sure there's a lot more. The other way to lose Bitcoins, apart from losing a wallet or forgetting its password, is to make a transaction to a bad address (as in, a valid-according-to-the-protocol address that isn't anybodies). If I understand how it works correctly, you wouldn't fake ownership of a wallet per se; you would need to come up with private keys to match the public keys of the transactions that belong to that wallet, which I believe is equivalent to breaking SHA256. That…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System — mentioned by davidjohnstone

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:14:35 GMT

Crypto-currencies might be, but I don't think Bitcoin is an existential threat to the modern liberal state. The anonymity that every mainstream article claims Bitcoin has is not nearly as strong as it's made out to be[1][2][3]. The built-in deflationary aspect of Bitcoin seems to prevent it from being used as a "serious" currency. Hiding money under your mattress should never be the optimal approach to making more money. (It might not prevent people from using the currency, but it's highly sub-optimal.) The fragility of the currency concerns me (by which I mean the way it's possible to lose…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System — mentioned by betterunix

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 16:05:17 GMT

The biggest issue, in my view, is that you cannot have both scalability and secure offline transactions in a system like Bitcoin -- specifically, in any system that lacks currency issuing authorities. Chaum showed this long before there was a Bitcoin (sorry if this is not an article you can easily find for free): https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1754992 In layman's terms, the result is this: every time you make a secure digital cash transfer, the amount of information needed in future transfers of the money increases. The increase is, in the best case, linear in the number of offline…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System — mentioned by feral

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 22:34:50 GMT

Actually, I think the suggestion in the report is correct. I think that what they are getting at here, is the following scenario: Imagine that you have several addresses, with different balances, in the same wallet. If you do a payment using the normal client, which requires the total balance from all those addresses, this will create a transaction with all those addresses as inputs. In the Bitcoin protocol this provides unambiguous proof that the input addresses are all controlled by the same user. (With some provisos: obviously wallet services overlaid on the network complicate this; as do…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System — mentioned by feral

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:28:42 GMT

I've done some work on this (http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524) and the phenomenon that coderr describes is very widespread in practice (we can examine this passively, from the transaction history) and its linking identities we can be pretty sure the users didn't intend to have linked. I'd say that anyone concerned about anonymity should be using a client with the functionality that coderr's patch provides, and be incredibly careful using Bitcoin in general.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System — mentioned by morsch

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 07:41:49 GMT

See Fergal Reid, Martin Harrigan, An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System for an example of network analysis: http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.