Towards Deanonymization of Mixing Services in Bitcoin

Abstract

Bitcoin transactions are pseudonymous, which means that even when addresses or addresses can be connected one to another, it is really hard to connect them with outside entities. On top of that there have been a proliferation of bitcoins mixing sites in recent years. These sites operate mostly on the dark web and their main mission is launder bitcoins by making vast amounts of complex transactions with them and to make their association with a single owner even harder. Our mission is to make that distinction easier. In this paper we plan to introduce two novel heuristics. Our OI heuristic is designed to parse blockchain data in a way where we only receive information we deem is of interest. We introduce HOLO which aims to taint bitcoin addresses in reference to a fixed output. We also visualize the blockchain and our heuristic in an easily digestible manner.