Do you Hear the Whispers of Ripple?
In this talk, we will first describe one of our novel heuristics to link wallets based on the patterns observed in the Ripple network as the result of two wallet owners settling a Bitcoin exchange over their Ripple credit link. This heuristic facilitates the linking of Bitcoin and Ripple wallets owned by the two involved users, therefore allowing for the first time to perform clustering of wallets across two different payment networks. In fact, it is not restricted to Bitcoin, and enables the clustering of Ripple wallets with other cryptocurrencies wallets (i.e., altcoins), thereby enlarging the set of clustered wallets. Second, we will discuss the analysis of our findings. In particular, to analyze the efficacy of our heuristics, we crawl the Ripple network (as of December 2015) obtaining a total of 174, 738 wallets, 115, 996 credit links, and 17, 645, 343 transactions using them. We deploy our heuristics over this dataset, resulting in the clustering of 959 Ripple wallets, 3, 113 Bitcoin wallets and 1, 130 Altcoin wallets, which are involved in 934, 484 transactions in total. The set of clustered wallets has allowed us to reconstruct the complete set of transactions of the most widely deployed gateways1, and showed that is indeed bigger than the set of transactions associated to their publicly announced Ripple wallets, as shown in Fig. 1. Finally, we will also discuss the privacy implications of setting a Ripple validator server on the Ripple network. These servers collects transactions from the Ripple users and can significantly increase the deanonymization rate from the observed
Blockchain Basics: A Primer
Blockchain, the technology underlying the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, is poised to revolutionize how all commercial transactions are conducted.
National Security Implications of Virtual Currency: Examining the Potential for Non-state Actor Deployment
This report examines the feasibility for non-state actors, including terrorist and insurgent groups, to increase their political and/or economic power by deploying a virtual currency (VC) for use in regular economic transactions.
About digital currencies and using Blockchain in the financial industry
The financial industry has followed the development and debate on digital currencies for a long time. BSK wants to put the theme of digital currencies on the agenda, and the theme was treated as a subject discussion on one Internal meeting 7 September. The focus of the discussion was not the digital currencies themselves, but how the underlying technology behind Bitcoin and other digital "assets" can be used in transaction activity in the financial industry.
Bitcoin: Technical Background and Data Analysis
This paper presents the micro-structure of the Bitcoin transaction process and highlights the use of cryptography for the purposes of transaction security and distributed maintenance of a ledger. The empirical analysis is based on publicly available transaction-level data.
