BitFury Fights Anonymity on the Bitcoin Blockchain in the Name of Security

Bitcoin mining giant and transaction processing company BitFury Group has issued a white paper about tackling anonymity on the Bitcoin Blockchain . It focuses on the popular transaction tangling techniques of 'shared send' and presents an approach to detect usage of 'mixing' schemes.

Acknowledging that these anonymization techniques could be utilized innocuously, nevertheless BitFury explains: "They are frequently used by bad actors, such as ransomware developers and hackers targeting Blockchain services, in an attempt to obfuscate their activity."

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Calling the white paper a breakthrough analysis, BitFury's researchers say it demonstrates that a substantial part of shared send transactions could be untangled. They propose a number of practical modifications to this challenge and present the results of computational experiments on shared send untangling. The white paper also establishes a theoretical approach to shared send transaction analysis and describes several modifications to the untangling problem - it is a well-known partition problem.

The researchers write: "Our computational experiments show that detection and analysis of shared send mixers is possible in real time for the majority of Bitcoin transactions. We experimentally determine that about 2.5% of all Bitcoin transactions possess the traits of shared send transactions, and that about half of these transactions could be untangled with moderate computational resources."

The firm's co-founder and CEO Valery Vavilov commented: “The Bitfury Group is proud to be on the forefront of the Blockchain industry. We are on the cutting-edge of Blockchain innovation and we regularly put out white papers that address some of the most important topics of our time. The Bitfury Group is deeply committed to securing the Blockchain and expanding opportunities through the Bitcoin Blockchain for individuals, businesses, governments, organizations, NGOs and other institutions.”