Bitcoin has gained widespread interest for anonymous payments in recent times, driving the prices for a bitcoin through the roof.
Those prices are generally rising correlated with waves of ransomware, as bitcoin is the most common way of paying those ransoms.
After all, it's an anonymous currency, perfect for anonymous payments, isn't it?
In this talk, we will challenge the assumption of anonymity of the bitcoin network and see what conclusions can be drawn from the publicly available Bitcoin blockchain.
We will discuss options to track bitcoins, evaluate the possibilities to attribute addresses and transactions to users and their interactions with one another.
We will also take a look at how to characterize payments in the blockchain and what conclusions we can draw from that about the usage of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency.
No previous knowledge about Bitcoin is necessary, a brief review of the properties of the bitcoin blockchain will be included in the talk to set the necessary starting point for everyone interested in the topic.
