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

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Stefan SavageAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 59, Issue 4

Pages 86 - 93

https://doi.org/10.1145/2896384

Published: 23 March 2016 Publication History

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Abstract

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 consider the challenges for those seeking to use Bitcoin for criminal or fraudulent purposes at scale.

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Cited By

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O. Ayoola-Akinjobi O(2024)Block Chain Technology, Cryptocurrency and Revenue Generation: A Systematic ReviewAfrican Journal of Accounting and Financial Research10.52589/AJAFR-ES1BNPJP7:2(70-86)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.52589/AJAFR-ES1BNPJP
Cholevas CAngeli ESereti ZMavrikos ETsekouras G(2024)Anomaly Detection in Blockchain Networks Using Unsupervised Learning: A SurveyAlgorithms10.3390/a1705020117:5(201)Online publication date: 9-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/a17050201
Wu YZhao LZhang JShi LLiu LPanneerselvam J(2024)A BTN-Based Method for Multi-Entity Bitcoin Transaction Analysis and Influence AssessmentDistributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice10.1145/36861683:4(1-23)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686168
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Index Terms

A fistful of Bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names
1. Applied computing
2. Information systems
  1. World Wide Web
    1. Web applications
      1. Electronic commerce
        Digital cash
        Electronic funds transfer
        Online banking
        Secure online transactions

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Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 59, Issue 4

April 2016

87 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/2907055

Editor:
Moshe Y. Vardi
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 March 2016

Published in CACM Volume 59, Issue 4

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Cited By

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O. Ayoola-Akinjobi O(2024)Block Chain Technology, Cryptocurrency and Revenue Generation: A Systematic ReviewAfrican Journal of Accounting and Financial Research10.52589/AJAFR-ES1BNPJP7:2(70-86)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.52589/AJAFR-ES1BNPJP
Cholevas CAngeli ESereti ZMavrikos ETsekouras G(2024)Anomaly Detection in Blockchain Networks Using Unsupervised Learning: A SurveyAlgorithms10.3390/a1705020117:5(201)Online publication date: 9-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/a17050201
Wu YZhao LZhang JShi LLiu LPanneerselvam J(2024)A BTN-Based Method for Multi-Entity Bitcoin Transaction Analysis and Influence AssessmentDistributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice10.1145/36861683:4(1-23)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686168
O'Meara JTaneja MNicholls JKothale NFlinter SJurcut A(2024)JoinDetect: A Data-Led Machine Learning Approach to Detection of Coinjoin TransactionsProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good10.1145/3677525.3678633(5-13)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677525.3678633
Zhou XWang BGuo QSun HPan ZTian N(2024)Bidirectional Privacy-Preserving Network- Constrained Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Based on Secure Multiparty Computation and BlockchainIEEE Transactions on Power Systems10.1109/TPWRS.2023.326324239:1(602-613)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPWRS.2023.3263242
Guo YKarthikeyan HPolychroniadou AHuussin C(2024)PriDe CT: Towards Public Consensus, Private Transactions, and Forward Secrecy in Decentralized Payments2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP54263.2024.00170(3904-3922)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SP54263.2024.00170
Jacquot VHammad NDonnet B(2024)Efficient and Reliable Service Detection on Bitcoin2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)10.1109/ICBC59979.2024.10634453(512-520)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBC59979.2024.10634453
Brechlin ASchäfer JArmknecht F(2024)Buy Crypto, Sell Privacy: Investigating the Cryptocurrency Exchange Evonax2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)10.1109/ICBC59979.2024.10634385(1-7)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBC59979.2024.10634385
Kumar ASharma NChauhan RJoshi KSingh RKumari M(2024)Detecting Ransomware in Bitcoin Network: Experimental Insights2024 IEEE 3rd World Conference on Applied Intelligence and Computing (AIC)10.1109/AIC61668.2024.10731015(1349-1354)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/AIC61668.2024.10731015
Lamberty RKirste DKannengießer NSunyaev A(2024)HybCBDC: A Design for Central Bank Digital Currency Systems Enabling Digital CashIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.345845112(137712-137728)Online publication date: 2024
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