Hi there, I'm one of the study authors.

Quote from: bitrebel on July 25, 2011, 08:14:34 PM

Quote from: YoYa on July 25, 2011, 08:10:54 PM

http://gizmodo.com/5824503/anonymous-bitcoin-purchases-arent-actually-anonymous

I know people are going to zone in on the attack on anonymity, but ignoring that, given that most of us had knew this anyway, have a look at the white paper, some awesome graphics of the network.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.4524v1.pdf

Much of that was figured out in the forum in the days afterwards.

I think you'll find that's really not true; if you read through the (very long) allinvain thread, and note the addresses found, you'll see that they only managed to follow the Bitcoins a couple of hops out from the original theft.

With network analysis tools such as we used, we could follow the Bitcoins much further (many hops out).
We think the fact that the supposedly seperate streams re-converge shows the addresses used were still controlled by a single party, for quite a while after the theft.
None of this was uncovered on the initial thread.

Quote from: bitrebel on July 25, 2011, 08:14:34 PM

They did not do much to expose the theft or anonymity. They only showed it can be graphed and analyzed a little better this way.

We aren't in the business of exposing thefts, so we didn't go down that road as far as we could.
We think that the graphing, and analysis, that we did, shows its substantially easier to trace these things than we'd have a priori thought possible.

Happy to take any follow up questions.