BitLINK: Temporal Linkage of Address Clusters in Bitcoin Blockchain

Abstract

In the Bitcoin blockchain, an entity (e.g., a gambling service) may control multiple distinct address clusters. Links (i.e., trust relationships) between these disjoint address clusters can be established when one cluster is abandoned, and a new one is formed shortly thereafter. To link the clusters across time, we have developed a deep neural network model that exploits these synchronous actions derived from unlabeled data in a self-supervised manner. This model assesses whether two clusters exhibit synchronous temporal signatures indicative of a shared entity ownership.