Untangling Many-to-Many Transactions to Aid in Taint Analysis of the Bitcoin Blockchain

Abstract

Crypto currencies, specifically Bitcoin, are commonly used for illegal activities. In order to aid in preventing this, and catching users who behave in illegal activities, it is useful to be able to establish links between addresses based on the publicly available transaction data stored on the blockchain. While multiple methods of doing this for bitcoin have been proposed already, none attempt to determine the flows of bitcoin through many-to-many transactions. We use publicly available blockchain data along with an existing method for untangling many-to-many transactions in order to test the effectiveness of three different address clustering heuristics in simplifying many-to-many transactions. As of the deadline to submit this abstract, we have not concluded our experiments and do not have final results.