Abstract
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency attracting a lot of interest both from the general public and researchers. There is an ongoing debate on the question of users’ anonymity: while the Bitcoin protocol has been designed to ensure that the activity of individual users could not be tracked, some methods have been proposed to partially bypass this limitation. In this article, we show how the Bitcoin transaction network can be studied using complex networks analysis techniques, and in particular how community detection can be efficiently used to re-identify multiple addresses belonging to a same user.
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Acknowledgements
We want to thank the authors of [11], and in particular Sarah Meiklejohn, for kindly sharing with us their dataset, result of their remarkable work. This work is funded in part by the European Commission H2020 FETPROACT 2016–2017 program under grant 732942 (ODYCCEUS), by the ANR (French National Agency of Research) under grants ANR-15-CE38-0001 (AlgoDiv) and ANR-13-CORD-0017-01 (CODDDE), by the French program PIA - Usages, services et contenus innovants" under grant O18062-44430 (REQUEST), and by the Ile-de-France program FUI21 under grant 16010629 (iTRAC).
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Remy, C., Rym, B., Matthieu, L. (2018). Tracking Bitcoin Users Activity Using Community Detection on a Network of Weak Signals. In: Cherifi, C., Cherifi, H., Karsai, M., Musolesi, M. (eds) Complex Networks & Their Applications VI. COMPLEX NETWORKS 2017. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 689. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72150-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72150-7_14
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