Topic: Reverse-engineer bitcoin transactions - page 2. (Read 2469 times)

I want to stay anonymous with my money.I don't want some govt guy to start snooping around. Thats what drew me to bitcoins. Take away the anonymity and you lose some of the client base for bitcoin unless the protocol becomes more anonymous. Is this a community that values anonymity or one that wants to give it up?

So, of course 1 man-month will give us something that works, and it will have many loose ends.  We will have to add more sources with time. As the graph database becomes more and more complete, more relationships will surface. 

It is true that if someone doesn't publish their wallet, identifying them is a lot harder.  But it is still possible because the receving address is always the sending address.  You can read more about that on the pages that discuss anonimity of Bitcoin.  In a nutshell, if A, Bi are different people:

B1 -> A
B2 -> A
A  -> B3
A  -> B4

It is possible to identify A if either of B's will slip up and expose the identity of A. 

Another example is that many people who have a donation address A, will have to somehow transfer bitcoin to the address from which they indend to spend it.  This transfer is recorded and can be followed. Even if it is another account in their wallet.

The only way to really hide the link is to exchange your bitcoin to someone elses bitcoin (through OTC or bitcoin laundry). However, matching this info with account info of people can link two two bitcoins and continue following the path.

Perhaps our service will prompt changes to bitcoin protocol to make it more anonymous.

Still looking for a partner.  If you can post this thread in a non-newbie forum, please do it, cause I don't have access.

Boris

I support building it.  Some people will change their behavior, and some will not.  It is inevitable, and I think its smart to try to get there first.  Will be watching.

This might work for those who use a static address.   So maybe this will work for those who accept donations or for those who share their data.

But for others who use Bitcoin in the manner it was architected (i.e., new address for each incoming payment), do you think you'll have any clue who they might be?

if it can be built in 1 man month, the IRS can build their own version in 14.4 minutes.

The idea

Project to recover identity of bitcoin users. Scanning web pages for bitcoin addresses, identifying them with people, and also scanning bitcoin transactions to try to reverse engineer which bitcoin address belongs to which person.


Why do it?

The IRS and CRA are gonna develop this inhouse sooner or later. If we do it first, we make money by getting IRS and CRA to pay us for the service, as well as, we will provide a way for Bitcoin users to check how clean are their bitcoins. We will charge BTC to use this service, so we will force CRA and IRS to buy bitcoin as well.


Programming:

I propose to implement the scanning and analyzing in Ruby or Perl.


You are:

Someone who is a good programmer, with time on your hands. Looking to do this in 1 man-month.

Open-Source:
The code will not be open-source, and will be hosted on our server.

What do you think?
Boris