Bitcoin user analysis based on address clustering and community discovery algorithm

Abstract

Bitcoin’ s anonymity greatly protects users’ privacy, but it also makes regulation difficult. In Bitcoin, a random number generates a public-private key pair, the public key generates an address, and the private key is used for digital signatures. Users can generate multiple pairs of public and private keys to trade with multiple bitcoin addresses. Discovering the relationships between these addresses and clustering the addresses of individual users helps infer the identity of the addresses. By analyzing the association of addresses in UTXO , it is found that multiple input addresses of a transaction are controlled by the same user, and thus the bitcoin addresses can be clustered. The transactions between the user data obtained after clustering are communality, so the Louvain algorithm is further used to analyze the relationship between users, the visual results are used to present the association between users, and the impact of the number of users on the algorithm results is analyzed. Finally, the Leiden algorithm proposed to solve the problem that Louvain algorithm may have poor connectivity or even disconnection between communities is used to discover the community of the clustered user data. Compare the results of Leiden algorithm and Louvain algorithm and analyze the difference between the two results.