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Date
2012Type
- Report
ETH Bibliography
yes
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Abstract
Bitcoin is quickly emerging as a popular digital payment system. However, in spite of its reliance on pseudonyms, Bitcoin raises a number of privacy concerns due to the fact that all of the transactions that take place are publicly announced in the system. In this paper, we investigate the privacy guarantees of Bitcoin in the setting where Bitcoin is used as a primary currency for the daily transactions of individuals. More specifically, we evaluate the privacy that is provided by Bitcoin (i) by analyzing the genuine Bitcoin system and (ii) through a simulator that mimics Bitcoin client’s behavior in the context where Bitcoin is used for all transactions within a university. In this setting, our results show that the profiles of almost 40% of the users can be, to a large extent, recovered even when users adopt privacy measures recommended by Bitcoin. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that comprehensively analyzes, and evaluates the privacy implications of Bitcoin. As a by-product, we have designed and implemented the first simulator of Bitcoin; our simulator can be used to model the interaction between Bitcoin users in generic settings. Show more
Publication status
publishedJournal / series
Cryptology ePrint ArchiveVolume
Publisher
Cryptology ePrint ArchiveSubject
Bitcoin; Anonymity; Privacy; Behavioral clusteringOrganisational unit
03755 - Capkun, Srdan / Capkun, Srdan
Notes
Received 19 October 2012, Last revised 24 October 2012.More
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ETH Bibliography
yes
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