Exploring Entity Behavior on the Bitcoin Blockchain

Abstract

We contribute a visual exploration system for analyzing the behavior of individual entities exchanging Bitcoins. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, popular for allowing pseudonymous financial transactions. The Bitcoin blockchain is the public ledger of the Bitcoin system holding data on millions of individual transactions between pseudonymous addresses. These addresses belong to individual entities such as people, services, or enterprises. Understanding how the Bitcoin system is used, however, is difficult because it is unclear which addresses belong to the same entities. Our tool addresses this problem by clustering addresses and displaying transaction detail for individual entities