Bitcoin is built on a blockchain, an immutable decentralised ledger that allows entities (users) to exchange Bitcoins in a pseudonymous manner. Bitcoins are associated with alpha-numeric addresses and are transferred via transactions. Each transaction is composed of a sets of input addresses (associated with unspent outputs received from previous transactions) and a set of output addresses (to which Bitcoins are transferred). While built with anonymity in mind, different heuristic approaches exist to detect which addresses in a specific transaction belong to the same entity. The successive application of these heuristics allow us to build an Address Correspondence Network: in this representation, addresses are nodes and edges are drawn between addresses detected as belonging to the same entity by at least one heuristic. In this network, connected components represent sets of addresses controlled by the same entity. In this paper, we analyse for the first time the Address Correspondence Network, and show it to have a complex topology, signalled by a broad, skewed degree distribution and a power-law component size distribution. Using a large-scale dataset of addresses for which the controlling entities are known, we show that a combination of external data coupled with standard community detection algorithms can be reliably used to identify entities. The complex nature of the Address Correspondence Network reveals that usage patterns of individual entities create statistical regularities; and that these regularities can be leveraged to more accurately identify entities and gain a deeper understanding of the Bitcoin economy as a whole.

中文翻译：

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比特币地址通信网络的复杂社区结构

比特币建立在区块链上，这是一个不可变的去中心化账本，允许实体（用户）以匿名方式交换比特币。比特币与字母数字地址相关联，并通过交易进行转移。每笔交易都由一组输入地址（与从先前交易中收到的未花费输出相关联）和一组输出地址（比特币转移到的地址）组成。虽然在构建时考虑了匿名性，但存在不同的启发式方法来检测特定交易中的哪些地址属于同一实体。这些启发式的连续应用使我们能够构建一个地址对应网络：在这种表示中，地址是节点，并且在至少一个启发式检测为属于同一实体的地址之间绘制边。在这个网络中，连接的组件表示由同一实体控制的地址集。在本文中，我们首次分析了地址通信网络，并表明它具有复杂的拓扑结构，由广泛的偏斜度分布和幂律分量大小分布表示。使用控制实体已知的大规模地址数据集，我们表明可以可靠地使用外部数据与标准社区检测算法相结合来识别实体。地址通信网络的复杂性表明，单个实体的使用模式会产生统计规律；并且可以利用这些规律来更准确地识别实体并更深入地了解整个比特币经济。