TY - GEN
T1 - A fistful of bitcoins
T2 - 13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2013
AU - Meiklejohn, Sarah
AU - Pomarole, Marjori
AU - Jordan, Grant
AU - Levchenko, Kirill
AU - McCoy, Damon
AU - Voelker, Geoffrey M.
AU - Savage, Stefan
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Anonymity
KW - Bitcoin
KW - Measurement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84890039053&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84890039053&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2504730.2504747
DO - 10.1145/2504730.2504747
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84890039053
SN - 9781450319539
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 127
EP - 139
BT - IMC 2013 - Proceedings of the 13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference
Y2 - 23 October 2013 through 25 October 2013
ER -