research-article

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

Authors:

Sarah Meiklejohn,

Marjori Pomarole,

Kirill Levchenko,

Geoffrey M. Voelker,

Stefan SavageAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference

Pages 127 - 140

https://doi.org/10.1145/2504730.2504747

Published: 23 October 2013 Publication History

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 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.

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Index Terms

A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names
1. Applied computing
  1. Electronic commerce

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cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Internet measurement conference

October 2013

480 pages

ISBN:9781450319539

DOI:10.1145/2504730

General Chair:
Konstantina (Dina) Papagiannaki
Telefonica Research
,
Program Chairs:
Krishna Gummadi
MPI-SWS
,
Craig Partridge
Raytheon BBN Technologies

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

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 ACM 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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Publication History

Published: 23 October 2013

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October 23 - 25, 2013

Barcelona, Spain

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IMC '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 42 of 178 submissions, 24%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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Lan FYang JFeng HXu WQiu WZhao ZChen Y(2024)Research on ZKP Algorithm of Data Asset Security and Privacy Protection Based on Blockchain TechnologyInternational Journal of e-Collaboration10.4018/IJeC.34921120:1(1-20)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/IJeC.349211
Almomani AAl-Qerem AAl Khaldy MAlauthman MAldweesh ANahar K(2024)Cryptographic Techniques for Securing Blockchain-Based Cryptocurrency Transactions Against Botnet AttacksInnovations in Modern Cryptography10.4018/979-8-3693-5330-1.ch013(309-333)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-5330-1.ch013
Ali SHaq MKhan H(2024)Blockchain for AcademicsAchieving Secure and Transparent Supply Chains With Blockchain Technology10.4018/979-8-3693-0482-2.ch012(200-224)Online publication date: 18-Jan-2024
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