Meiklejohn, S;
Pomarole, M;
Jordan, G;
Levchenko, K;
Mccoy, D;
Voelker, GM;
Savage, S;
(2016)
A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments among Men with No Names.
Communications of the ACM
, 59
(4)
pp. 86-93.
10.1145/2896384.
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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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments among Men with No Names |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/2896384 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2896384 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © held by authors. Publication rights licensed to ACM. The definitive Version of Record is available in the ACM Digital Library at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2896384 |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1490261 |
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