Tracking bitcoin users activity using community detection on a network of weak signals.

Rémy Cazabet, Rym Baccour and Matthieu Latapy

The 6th International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications, Nov 2017, Lyon, France.

Abstract Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency attracting a lot of interest both from the gen- eral 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 activ- ity 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 transac- tion 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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