Quote from: fergalr on August 30, 2011, 11:24:18 PM

Quote from: evoorhees on July 25, 2011, 09:09:59 PM

That paper was good evidence that Bitcoin is, in fact, actually pretty darn anonymous.

This is a personal opinion, but I think it is really really not.

Like, there's an issue by what we mean by 'anonymous' - but I certainly wouldn't go about casually using Bitcoin for anything I wanted to not be associated with, and assume that my transactions would get lost in the network.

If I was a casual user using the normal Bitcoin clients, over an extended period of time, to buy goods, and sell things, such that I transacted with some other parties, who knew my identity (e.g. they posted me something, or took a credit card payment from me), I would definitely assume that any further bitcoin transactions I did, using a standard client, would be associated with my identity.
Unless I really really took pains to make sure they weren't.

In that sense, its really not anonymous.

While there's a lot of complexity to the exact question of how anonymous it is, for casual users, the message really must be 'this does not hide your actions!' There are so many pitfalls to walk into.

Quote from: evoorhees on July 25, 2011, 09:09:59 PM

After all their analysis, they didn't provide a single piece of personal identifying information about the thief. Not even an IP address!

We didn't set out to.

We also didn't reveal all the different activity we saw among addresses we could identify by their forum names, from this forum, (and the addresses we could definitively link to them) or the addresses of public organisations. It really is possible to link a lot of different public key addresses, just using the network traffic and transaction histories from the block chain.

There are definitely transactions going on, that are linked, in ways that the users don't think are linked. No question about that.

Quote from: evoorhees on July 25, 2011, 09:09:59 PM

It's almost like the whole paper was written to prove the counter-point to the paper's title... hmm.

Well, it wasn't!
We tried to give an even-handed analysis, highlighting the bits that were and weren't anonymous, and dealing with this subtlety, in the paper.

We had to find a balance in what we released, too - we didn't want to just ship tools allowing various identities to be resolved and tracked, with no warning, because there are some people who probably are counting on the anonymity that they don't really have. This makes it harder to prove our point; that's ok.

Look at the SVG of the theft that we posted though, on the blog post:
https://sites.google.com/site/btcanalysis/AllegedTheftBlogVersion.svg?attredirects=0&d=1

We've removed the names of any user accounts in there, but it is clearly showing a lot more detail than you'd expect to easily come out of the block chain.
The blockexplorer addresses show up on mouseover.

I'll take any questions on this, if there are any (am presuming this forum does e-mail notification <--newbie ; but I'll check back anyway)

Great to have you here fergalr, I will be reading your paper.