Bitcoin anonymity is one of the most attractive quality of this distributed, cryptographic, digital currency. The anonymity of Bitcoin gained a lot of media attention. But as all transactions in the network are stored publicly in the blockchain, allowing anyone to inspect and analyse them, the system does not provide real anonymity but pseudonymity.

There have already been studies showing the possibility to deanonymise Bitcoin users based on the transaction graph and publicly available data. Users could also be tracked by Bitcoin exchanges or shops, where they have to provide personal information that can then be linked to their Bitcoin addresses. So how can the anonymity of Bitcoin be the real thing?

Special bitcoin mixing services claim to obfuscate the origin of transactions and thereby increase the anonymity of its users. In this paper, the authors evaluate three of these services – Bitcoin Fog, BitLaundry, and the Send Shared functionality of Blockchain.info – by analysing the transaction graph. While Bitcoin Fog and Blockchain.info successfully mix a transaction, the authors are
able to find a direct relation between the input and output transactions in the graph of BitLaundry.

Discover how the anonymity of Bitcoin can be proved or disproved by downloading this research.