Related papers: Investigating MMM Ponzi scheme on Bitcoin
Hacks are one of the most damaging types of cryptocurrency related crime, accounting for billions of dollars in stolen funds since 2009. Professional investigators at Chainalysis have traced these stolen funds from the initial breach on an…
Anti-money laundering (AML) regulations play a critical role in safeguarding financial systems, but bear high costs for institutions and drive financial exclusion for those on the socioeconomic and international margins. The advent of…
Dark markets are commercial websites that use Bitcoin to sell or broker transactions involving drugs, weapons, and other illicit goods. Being illegal, they do not offer any user protection, and several police raids and scams have caused…
Blockchain technology has been successfully exploited for deploying new economic applications. However, it has started arousing the interest of malicious actors who deliver scams to deceive honest users and to gain economic advantages.…
Bitcoin is firmly becoming a mainstream asset in our global society. Its highly volatile nature has traders and speculators flooding into the market to take advantage of its significant price swings in the hope of making money. This work…
One reason for the popularity of Bitcoin is due to its anonymity. Although several heuristics have been used to break the anonymity, new approaches are proposed to enhance its anonymity at the same time. One of them is the mixing service.…
Scams -- fraudulent schemes designed to swindle money from victims -- have existed for as long as recorded history. However, the Internet's combination of low communication cost, global reach, and functional anonymity has allowed scam…
Since Bitcoin's inception in 2008, it has became attractive investments for both trading and mining. To mine Bitcoins, a miner has to invest in computing power and pay for electricity to solve cryptographic puzzles for rewards, if it…
The first six months of 2018 saw cryptocurrency thefts of $761 million, and the technology is also the latest and greatest tool for money laundering. This increase in crime has caused both researchers and law enforcement to look for ways to…
The digital currency Bitcoin has had remarkable growth since it was first proposed in 2008. Its distributed nature allows currency transactions without a central authority by using cryptographic methods and a data structure called the…
Bitcoin cryptocurrency system enables users to transact securely and pseudo-anonymously by using an arbitrary number of aliases (Bitcoin addresses). Cybercriminals exploit these characteristics to commit immutable and presumably untraceable…
Mining pools, the main components of the Bitcoin network, dominate the computing resources and play essential roles in network security and performance aspects. Although many existing measurements of the Bitcoin network are available,…
The mining of bitcoin is modeled using system dynamics, showing that the past evolution of the network hash rate can be explained to a large extent by an efficient market hypothesis applied to the mining of blocks. The possibility of a…
Online marketplaces are the main engines of legal and illegal e-commerce, yet their empirical properties are poorly understood due to the absence of large-scale data. We analyze two comprehensive datasets containing 245M transactions (16B…
Dark web marketplaces (DWMs) are online platforms that facilitate illicit trade among millions of users generating billions of dollars in annual revenue. Recently, two interview-based studies have suggested that DWMs may also promote the…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
In Bitcoin, transaction malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of bitcoins being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves. This allows an…
The functioning of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin relies on the open availability of the entire history of its transactions. This makes it a particularly interesting socio-economic system to analyse from the point of view of network science.…
In the Bitcoin system, miners are incentivized to join the system and validate transactions through fees paid by the users. A simple "pay your bid" auction has been employed to determine the transaction fees. Recently, Lavi, Sattath and…
Bitcoin is a popular digital currency for online payments, realized as a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin keeps a ledger of all transactions; the majority of the participants decides on the correct ledger. Since…