Author Attribution in the Bitcoin Blocksize Debate on Reddit

Abstract

The block size debate has been a contentious issue in the Bitcoin com-munity on the social media platform Reddit. Many members of the com-munity suspect there have been organized attempts to manipulate the debate from people using multiple accounts to over-represent and mis-represent important issues on the debate. The following analysis uses techniques from authorship attribution and machine learning to deter-mine whether comments from user accounts that are active in the debate are from the same author. The techniques used are able to recall over 90 % of all instances of multiple account use and achieve up to 72 % for the true positive rate. 1