Research

Toward De-Anonymizing Bitcoin by Mapping Users Location

Year 2015
Author Jules DuPont, Anna Cinzia Squicciarini
Publisher CODASPY '15 Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
Link View Research Paper
Categories

Bitcoin / Cryptocurrencies

The Bitcoin system (https://bitcoin.org) is a pseudo-anonymous currency that can dissociate a user from any real-world identity. In that context, a successful breach of the virtual and physical divide represents a signficant aw in the Bit-coin system [1]. In this project we demonstrate how to glean information about the real-world users behind Bitcoin transactions. We analyze publicly available data about the cryptocurrency. In particular, we focus on determining information about a Bitcoin user’s physical location by examining that user’s spending habits.