Bitcoin has enjoyed wider adoption than any previous cryptocurrency; yet its success has also attracted the attention of fraudsters who have taken advantage of operational insecurity and transaction irreversibility. We study the risk that investors face from the closure of Bitcoin exchanges, which convert between Bitcoins and hard currency. We examine the track record of 80 Bitcoin exchanges established between 2010 and 2015. We find that nearly half (38) have since closed, with customer account balances sometimes wiped out. Fraudsters are sometimes to blame, but not always. Twenty-five exchanges suffered security breaches, 15 of which subsequently closed. We present logistic regressions using longitudinal data on Bitcoin exchanges aggregated quarterly. We find that experiencing a breach is correlated with a 13 times greater odds that an exchange will close in that same quarter. We find that higher-volume exchanges are less likely to close (each doubling in trade volume corresponds to a 12% decrease in the odds of closure). We also find that exchanges that derive most of their business from trading less popular (fiat) currencies, which are offered by at most one competitor, are less likely to close.
Studies of Internet censorship rely on an experimental technique called probing. From a client within each country under investigation, the experimenter attempts to access network resources that are suspected to be censored, and records what happens. The set of resources to be probed is a crucial, but often neglected, element of the experimental design. We analyze the content and longevity of 758,191 webpages drawn from 22 different probe lists, of which 15 are alleged to be actual blacklists of censored webpages in particular countries, three were compiled using a priori criteria for selecting pages with an elevated chance of being censored, and four are controls. We find that the lists have very little overlap in terms of specific pages. Mechanically assigning a topic to each page, however, reveals common themes, and suggests that handcurated probe lists may be neglecting certain frequentlycensored topics. We also find that pages on controversial topics tend to have much shorter lifetimes than pages on uncontroversial topics. Hence, probe lists need to be continuously updated to be useful. To carry out this analysis, we have developed automated infrastructure for collecting snapshots of webpages, weeding out irrelevant material (e.g. site "boilerplate" and parked domains), translating text, assigning topics, and detecting topic changes. The system scales to hundreds of thousands of pages collected.
Abstract. On May 15, 2001 ICANN announced the introduction of the biz and info generic top-level domains (gTLDs)-the first new gTLDs since the inception of the Domain Name System-aiming to "increase consumer choice and create opportunities for entities that have been shut out under the current name structure." The biz gTLD, in particular, was to become an alternative to the popular com top-level domain. In this paper we examine the current usage of the biz gTLD in order to determine whether it has evolved into the role intended by ICANN, and whether concerns expressed in the early discussions of this expansion have been justified. In particular, using DNS zone files, DNS probing, and Web crawler data, we attempt to answer the question of whether biz has become a viable alternative to com, giving trademark holders who find themselves unable to register a com name an attractive alternative; or whether it has merely induced defensive registrations by existing trademark holders who already had equivalent com domains.
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