Bitcoin Is Not Anonymous

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from University College Dublin have conducted an analysis of anonymity on Bitcoin, and found it is not inherently anonymous, and that in many cases, users and their transactions can be identified. They use techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate and visualize an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."

Comments

Re:Scaaam....

[derGoldstein]

From the Wikipedia article:
"A common criticism is that the initial bitcoin distribution is heavily advantageous towards early-adopters. As stated, bitcoins are distributed ("generated") as an award for the solution to a difficult proof-of-work problem. The drawback is that the amount of work that has to be done for one bitcoin is currently over 500,000 times more than the amount of work at which the first bitcoins were going. As more people join, and also because of a reward function that halves the number of rewarded bitcoins every so many blocks, it becomes harder to generate bitcoins over time, using the same computing power."

Initial group of users get the advantage... The more users join, the more value the initial group owns.
I'm thinking of a shape. A polyhedron. Followed by the word "scheme".

Re:Scaaam....

[DigiShaman]

Per the Bitcoin FAQ
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Is_it_not_a_waste_of_energy.3F

Is it not a waste of energy?
Spending energy on creating a free monetary system is hardly a waste. Also, services necessary for the operation of currently widespread monetary systems, such as banks and credit card companies, also spend energy, arguably more than Bitcoin would.

I call BS! It's certainly a waste of energy.

Why don't we use calculations that are also useful for some other purpose?
To provide security for the Bitcoin network, the calculations involved need to have some very specific features. These features are incompatible with leveraging the computation for other purposes.

Certainly they could encapsulate those "specific features" within the data stream and be stripped back off when importing the data for research. Right? That may or may not be possible depending on the premise and foundation of the protocol. But it doesn't seem like they even wanted to make the attempt here.