This paper explores the success of the anonymity of the Bitcoin Transaction Graph. The Bitcoin network of decentralised payment transactions has attracted a lot of attention from both Internet users and researchers in recent years. Bitcoin utilises a peer-to-peer network to issue anonymous payment transactions between different users. In the currently used Bitcoin clients, the full transaction history is available at each node of the network to prevent double spending without the need for a central authority, forming a valuable source for empirical research on network structure, network dynamics, and the implied anonymity challenges, as well as guidance on the future evolution of complex payment systems. The authors found dynamical effects of which some increase anonymity while others decrease it. Most importantly, several parameters of the Bitcoin transaction graph seem to have become stationary over the last 12–18 months. The authors discuss the implications.

Only limited information is available on the bitcoin transaction graph structure of the Bitcoin P2P network, as it is formed dynamically and a client only has knowledge of the peers to which its client is connected to. In contrast, the graph of all transactions can be re-constructed accurately from the publicly available block chain: the nodes of the graph correspond to Bitcoin addresses and the edges to transactions performed between these addresses. Take a look at this research paper to see more about the anonymity of Bitcoin.