Evaluating User Privacy in Bitcoin

Androulaki, Elli; Karame, Ghassan; Roeschlin, Marc; Scherer, Tobias; Čapkun, Srđjan

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_4

Cited by 514 publications

(387 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…It has also generated interest in academic circles due to issues it creates in user privacy e.g. [2], as well as attempts to gain insights into is behind transactions e.g. [3] and attempts to better understand its implications as a payment system e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bitcoin Mining and its Energy Footprint

O'Dwyer¹,

Malone²

2014

25th IET Irish Signals &Amp; Systems Conference 2014 and 2014 China-Ireland International Conference on Information and Communi

352

165

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-Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency that has generated considerable public interest, including both booms in value and busts of exchanges dealing in Bitcoins. One of the fundamental concepts of Bitcoin is that work, called mining, must be done in checking all monetary transactions, which in turn creates Bitcoins as a reward. In this paper we look at the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining. We consider if and when Bitcoin mining has been profitable compared to the energy cost of performing the mining, and conclude that specialist hardware is usually required to make Bitcoin mining profitable. We also show that the power currently used for Bitcoin mining is comparable to Ireland's electricity consumption.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bitcoin Mining and its Energy Footprint

O'Dwyer¹,

Malone²

2014

25th IET Irish Signals &Amp; Systems Conference 2014 and 2014 China-Ireland International Conference on Information and Communi

352

165

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“…Given their differences, although ideas showed in Bitcoin heuristics available in the literature [45,46,63,64,75,77,81] can be minimally reused when it comes to studying Bitcoin payments within Ripple, they cannot be directly applied to the fullest extent to the Ripple network. In this work, we notice this ineffectiveness of the Bitcoin heuristics to Ripple, and work towards designing novel clustering heuristics that particularly consider the IOU credit network graph.…”

Section: Comparison With Cryptocurrenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Privacy studies on Bitcoin [45,46,63,64,75,77,81] have shown privacy issues on the Bitcoin system. However, the Ripple network and its Ripple ledger have not been thoroughly studied yet.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to Whispers of Ripple: Linking Wallets and Deanonymizing Transactions in the Ripple Network

Moreno-Sanchez

Zafar

Kate

2016

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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Abstract:The decentralized I owe you (IOU) transaction network Ripple is gaining prominence as a fast, lowcost and efficient method for performing same and crosscurrency payments. Ripple keeps track of IOU credit its users have granted to their business partners or friends, and settles transactions between two connected Ripple wallets by appropriately changing credit values on the connecting paths. Similar to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, while the ownership of the wallets is implicitly pseudonymous in Ripple, IOU credit links and transaction flows between wallets are publicly available in an online ledger. In this paper, we present the first thorough study that analyzes this globally visible log and characterizes the privacy issues with the current Ripple network. In particular, we define two novel heuristics and perform heuristic clustering to group wallets based on observations on the Ripple network graph. We then propose reidentification mechanisms to deanonymize the operators of those clusters and show how to reconstruct the financial activities of deanonymized Ripple wallets. Our analysis motivates the need for better privacypreserving payment mechanisms for Ripple and characterizes the privacy challenges faced by the emerging credit networks.

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“…They are shown how each transaction is broadcast as a message to the network, which is then propagated to each and every node for validation. The main part of the lecture focuses on the construction of these messages, and how transactions consist of a number of input and output addresses [9]. These all form a chain of transactions that is important in terms of tracing the source and destination of funds.…”

Section: Tutorialmentioning

confidence: 99%