Abstract
Cryptomarkets (or darknet markets) are commercial hidden-service websites that operate on The Onion Router (Tor) anonymity network. Cryptomarkets accept primarily bitcoin as payment since bitcoin is pseudonymous. Understanding bitcoin transaction patterns in cryptomarkets is important for analyzing vulnerabilities of privacy protection models in cryptocurrecies. It is also important for law enforcement to track illicit online crime activities in cryptomarkets. In this paper, we discover interesting characteristics of bitcoin transaction patterns in cryptomarkets. The results demonstrate that the privacy protection mechanism in cryptomarkets and bitcoin is vulnerable. Adversaries can easily gain valuable information for analyzing trading activities in cryptomarkets.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bitcoin-blockchain-parser. https://github.com/alecalve/python-bitcoin-blockchain-parser. Accessed 10 Mar 2019
Bitcoin core. https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/. Accessed 10 Mar 2019
Five surprising facts about bitcoin. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/08/21/five-surprising-facts-about-bitcoin. Accessed 10 Mar 2019
How bitcoin lets you spy on careless companies. http://https://web.archive.org/web/20140209202222/www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/06/bitcoin-retail. Accessed 10 Mar 2019
How to parse the bitcoin blockchain. http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-to-parse-bitcoin-blockchain.html. Accessed 10 Mar 2019
Mapping the bitcoin economy could reveal users’ identities. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/518816. Accessed 10 Mar 2019
Running a full node. https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#what-is-a-full-node. Accessed 10 Mar 2019
Androulaki, E., Karame, G.O., Roeschlin, M., Scherer, T., Capkun, S.: Evaluating user privacy in bitcoin. In: Sadeghi, A.-R. (ed.) FC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7859, pp. 34–51. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_4
de Balthasar, T., Hernandez-Castro, J.: An analysis of bitcoin laundry services. In: Lipmaa, H., Mitrokotsa, A., Matulevičius, R. (eds.) NordSec 2017. LNCS, vol. 10674, pp. 297–312. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70290-2_18
Fleder, M., Kester, M.S., Pillai, S.: Bitcoin transaction graph analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.01657 (2015)
Genkin, D., Papadopoulos, D., Papamanthou, C.: Privacy in decentralized cryptocurrencies. Commun. ACM 61(6), 78–88 (2018)
Gilbert, M., Dasgupta, N.: Silicon to syringe: cryptomarkets and disruptive innovation in opioid supply chains. Int. J. Drug Policy 46, 160–167 (2017)
Harrigan, M., Fretter, C.: The unreasonable effectiveness of address clustering. In: 2016 International IEEE Conferences on Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing, Advanced and Trusted Computing, Scalable Computing and Communications, Cloud and Big Data Computing, Internet of People, and Smart World Congress (UIC/ATC/ScalCom/CBDCom/IoP/SmartWorld), pp. 368–373. IEEE (2016)
Meiklejohn, S., et al.: A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 127–140. ACM (2013)
Nakamoto, S., et al.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008)
Ron, D., Shamir, A.: Quantitative analysis of the full bitcoin transaction graph. In: Sadeghi, A.-R. (ed.) FC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7859, pp. 6–24. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_2
Ruffing, T., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Kate, A.: CoinShuffle: practical decentralized coin mixing for bitcoin. In: Kutyłowski, M., Vaidya, J. (eds.) ESORICS 2014. LNCS, vol. 8713, pp. 345–364. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11212-1_20
Spagnuolo, M., Maggi, F., Zanero, S.: BitIodine: extracting intelligence from the bitcoin network. In: Christin, N., Safavi-Naini, R. (eds.) FC 2014. LNCS, vol. 8437, pp. 457–468. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_29
Ziegeldorf, J.H., Grossmann, F., Henze, M., Inden, N., Wehrle, K.: CoinParty: secure multi-party mixing of bitcoins. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, pp. 75–86. ACM (2015)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chen, X. et al. (2019). Characteristics of Bitcoin Transactions on Cryptomarkets. In: Wang, G., Feng, J., Bhuiyan, M., Lu, R. (eds) Security, Privacy, and Anonymity in Computation, Communication, and Storage. SpaCCS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11611. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24907-6_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24907-6_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24906-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24907-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)