Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Address Grouping Methods

Abstract

Nowadays, Bitcoin cryptocurrency is an alternative means of payment for purchases in many areas of our lives. However, fraudsters trying to seize cryptocurrency funds and often attack Bitcoin users. In this regard, methods are being developed to determine reliability of the transfer and prevent the loss of funds by the user. Data on all transactions in the Bitcoin network is publicly available, but does not contain any information about the user, except for the cryptocurrency wallet address, and the user is able to create a new transfer address for each transaction. To check reliability of a potential transfer recipient, algorithms for classifying the Bitcoin users are being developed. For classification, it is necessary to join Bitcoin addresses into groups related to the same user. As a rule, address grouping methods are based on the heuristic of combining transaction inputs and the heuristic of determining the recipient address in the transaction. However, such methods provide inaccurate and incomplete results, which leads to development of new approaches having their own advantages and disadvantages, which limits their scope. Data structure of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency blockchain is considered, as well as comparison of existing approaches to address grouping is provided