Address clustering tries to construct the one-to-many mapping from entities to addresses in the Bitcoin system. Simple heuristics based on the micro-structure of transactions have proved very effective in practice. In this paper we describe the primary reasons behind this effectiveness: address reuse, avoidable merging, super-clusters with high centrality, and the incremental growth of address clusters. We quantify their impact during Bitcoin's first seven years of existence.
@article{arxiv.1605.06369,
title = {The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Address Clustering},
author = {Martin Harrigan and Christoph Fretter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.06369},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
14 pages, 6 figures, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Address Clustering, Harrigan, M. and Fretter, C., The 13th IEEE International Conference on Advanced and Trusted Computing (ATC'16), 2016