Abstract
The Bitcoin scheme is a rare example of a large scale global payment system in which all the transactions are publicly accessible (but in an anonymous way). We downloaded the full history of this scheme, and analyzed many statistical properties of its associated transaction graph. In this paper we answer for the first time a variety of interesting questions about the typical behavior of users, how they acquire and how they spend their bitcoins, the balance of bitcoins they keep in their accounts, and how they move bitcoins between their various accounts in order to better protect their privacy. In addition, we isolated all the large transactions in the system, and discovered that almost all of them are closely related to a single large transaction that took place in November 2010, even though the associated users apparently tried to hide this fact with many strange looking long chains and fork-merge structures in the transaction graph.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (2008)
Wallace, B.: The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin, Wired Magazine (November 23, 2011), http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/
NPR Staff: Silk Road: Not Your Father’s Amazon.com (June 12, 2011), http://www.npr.org/2011/06/12/137138008/silk-road-not-your-fathers-amazon-com
Brett, W.: Senators seek crackdown on “Bitcoin currency”, Reuters (June 8, 2011), http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/us-financial-bitcoins-idUSTRE7573T320110608
Reid, F., Harrigan, M.: An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System, arXiv:1107.4524v2 [physics.soc-ph] (May 7, 2012)
Hamacher, K., Katzenbeisser, S.: Bitcoin - An Analysis (December 29, 2011), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlWyTqL1hFA
Christin, N.: Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online, arXiv:1207.7139v1 [cs.CY] (July 31, 2012)
Bitcoin’s block number 0, http://blockexplorer.com/b/0
Bitcoin’s block number 180,000, http://blockexplorer.com/b/180000
Cormen, T.H., Leiserson, C.H., Rivest, R.L., Stein, C.: Data structures for Disjoint Sets. In: Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd edn., ch. 21, pp. 498–524. MIT Press, McGraw Hill (2001)
Forbes: Top 10 Bitcoin Statistics, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/07/31/top-10-bitcoin-statistics/
Block chain: Bitcoin charts, http://blockchain.info/charts
Bitcoin Days Destroyed, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Days_Destroyed
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ron, D., Shamir, A. (2013). Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph. In: Sadeghi, AR. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7859. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39883-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39884-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)