Abstract | ||
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Bitcoin system (or Bitcoin) is a peer-to-peer and decentralized payment system that uses cryptocurrency named bitcoins (BTCs) and was released as open-source software in 2009. Unlike fiat currencies, there is no centralized authority or any statutory recognition, backing, or regulation for Bitcoin. All transactions are confirmed for validity by a network of volunteer nodes (miners) and after collective agreement is subsequently recorded into a distributed ledger “Blockchain”. Bitcoin platform has attracted both social and anti-social elements. On the one hand, it is social as it ensures the exchange of value, maintaining trust in a cooperative, community-driven manner without the need for a trusted third party. At the same time, it is anti-social as it creates hurdles for law enforcement to trace suspicious transactions due to anonymity and privacy. To understand how the social and anti-social tendencies in the user base of Bitcoin affect its evolution, there is a need to analyze the Bitcoin system as a network. The current paper aims to explore the local topology and geometry of the Bitcoin network during its first decade of existence. Bitcoin transaction data from 03 Jan 2009 12:45:05 GMT to 08 May 2020 13:21:33 GMT was processed for this purpose to build a Bitcoin user graph. The characteristics, local and global network properties of the user's graph were analyzed at ten intervals between 2009 and 2020 with a gap of one year. Small diameter, skewed distribution of transactions, power-law distributed in and out degrees, disconnected graph, and presence of large connected components were the observations from network analysis. Thus, it could be inferred that despite anti-social tendencies, Bitcoin network shared similarities with other complex networks. Network analysis also uncovered twenty types of legal and anti-social entities operating on Bitcoin and provided a path for uncovering these anti-social entities. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
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2021 | 10.1016/j.jnca.2020.102940 | Journal of Network and Computer Applications |
Keywords | DocType | Volume |
Bitcoin,Network science,Graph algorithms,Exploratory data analysis | Journal | 177 |
ISSN | Citations | PageRank |
1084-8045 | 4 | 0.66 |
References | Authors | |
0 | 6 |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
---|---|---|---|
Pranav Nerurkar | 1 | 5 | 2.02 |
Dhiren R. Patel | 2 | 4 | 0.66 |
Yann Busnel | 3 | 158 | 19.96 |
Romaric Ludinard | 4 | 19 | 6.51 |
Saru Kumari | 5 | 1747 | 98.86 |
Muhammad Khurram Khan | 6 | 3538 | 204.81 |