Mint Centrality: A Centrality Measure for the Bitcoin Transaction Graph

Abstract

In this work, we consider the graph of confirmed transactions in bitcoin. Understanding this graph is essential to discern the different economic activities conducted by the pseudonymous actors. In addition to traditional graph analysis methods, new metrics need to be engineered specifically for the bitcoin transaction graph. Hence, we propose a new centrality measure named mint centrality. The measure uses the inherent tree structure of transactions in bitcoin and their relation to the corresponding set of coinbase transactions, and can be evaluated with linear complexity. We present preliminary results of the mint centrality on the first 200,000 blocks of the public bitcoin blockchain.