Topic: What is cluster? (Read 191 times)

A cluster can be from a personal wallet or from a centralized exchange hot wallet that is used to proceed withdrawals for many users. Centralized exchanges proceed withdrawals for many users in batch transactions so your receiving address can be marked as one of many addresses in a cluster related to that exchange.

If it is a personal cluster wallet, your account is under investigation like you are cheating their casino with multi accounts and they just detected something through on-chain analysis.

A cluster crypto address is a group of crypto addresses that are likely owned by the same person or entity. You can think of it like a group of friends who all have their own bank accounts, but they often send and receive money from each other.
There are a few ways to see cluster crypto addresses. One way is to use a blockchain explorer. Blockchain explorers are websites that allow you to view all of the transactions that have happened on a particular blockchain. To see cluster crypto addresses, you can look at the transaction history of an address and see if it has sent or received money from other addresses that are known to be owned by the same person or entity.

Another way to see cluster crypto addresses is to use a crypto analysis tool. Crypto analysis tools are websites or software programs that can help you to identify groups of crypto addresses that are likely owned by the same person or entity. These tools work by analyzing the transaction history of multiple crypto addresses simultaneously.

Overall, cluster crypto address analysis is a useful tool for identifying groups of addresses that are likely owned by the same person or entity. However, it is important to remember that cluster crypto address analysis is not perfect and should not be used in isolation.

DYOR 

Clusters like the name implies simply means the deanonymizing of your Blockchain data like your addresses. With the clustering, you can link up together all your wallet addresses together in one cluster especially as they belong to you all. Now, my question will be that why is he asking of your cluster? Does he have the intention to share resources to all your addresses in the cluster or does he wants to investigate your addresses?

I don't know exactly why he is requesting for it but since he is a stranger you can go ahead to ask him what he intends doing with your cluster then wait patiently for his response. You can as well relate back to the platform whatever the responses are or how the whole thing later went. It could be aknowledge we would be interested in.

Now that the information required about cluster has been given, don't you think anything about the message you received as PM, why is he contacting you even if your address is belonging to a cluster, what relationship had he got to do with your own address, you need to be very careful and be at alert by not creating further scenes than this with the newbie contacting you, because to me it makes no benefits informing you about that, why does he has to know which cluster you belong.

Based on the question the newbie asked, I assume it's about identifying BTC addresses that belong to the same wallet or service. They probably noticed that the address you use or have made public is connected to a cluster of other addresses, possibly through sharing inputs. For some reason, he is interested in identifying the service connected to that cluster of addresses. Since you have already replied to him that this is the address generated for you by the Stake system, he can now identify other addresses that belong to the same service.

There's actually a bunch of websites and services that'll let you see what BTC addresses belong to the same wallet.  Walletexplorer.com is one I tried that's free to use.  You just put in an address and it shows you other addresses linked to it, along with all the transactions going in and out.

I think your question is well answered already. Chain analytic companies are the ones mainly using address clustering to trace bitcoin through transaction to know if certain addresses belong to the same person or group or not. But probably, hackers in one way or the other may try to use it to link some addresses to a single person and also even to know the person's identity.

That is why it is important to know about privacy which is very important for bitcoin users. With anonymity, the addresses may still be traced but to know the person's identity can be hard. Some people go for more privacy way by making sure many of their addresses are not linked together.

The way this is done is by tracing the addresses that has been used in multiple transactions, reusing of the same addresses, and the change addresses to link many of the addresses together.

There are different sources where you can get about clustering and what is cluster. Clustering is about grouping different addresses that are believed to belong or owned by the same person, group or an entity and cluster is what you call those data (in this case addresses) ae called clusters. I don't know if this will help but let me make it easy for you.

Cluster = group of addresses or data
Clustering = gathering of addresses or data to group each of the addresses.
E,g. Addresses 1,2,3,4,5 - red group
Addresses 6,7,8,9,10 - blue group and so on.

Data clustering[1] is the term used to describe the process of placing data objects into same groups or "clusters" usually for analysis. In Bitcoin world, cluster algorithms is one of the methods used by blockchain analysis services where they place transactions they think are related into a group or "cluster" trying to find a link between them hence deanonymizing the addresses/coins on the chain.

Having received your payments in an address that belongs to a centralized exchange means the transactions linked to your address share a lot of characteristics with a lot of other transactions from the same CEX wallet of other users, hence it can place it into one of those "clusters".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis

The ChainAnalysis company has a free service called https://www.walletexplorer.com/ that shows them.

A cluster address is simply the grouping of addresses together believed to belonging to a particular person or entity this is based on the type of transactions you involved in. For example if your and some members regularly share coins together then this addresses can be clustered together and perceived to be owned by one person. Another example is a the sending of funds from your different addresses regularly.

The Pm from the newbie should be disregarded as he might be a scammer and you can as well change such address to at least protect your privacy if it is not from an exchange but there is nothing to worry about

Yesterday a user (newbie) pmed me asked about my wallet provider.
Newbie="let me just know who the wallet provider is.  I see the cluster has grown to over 16000, so more interested now as it looks to be a good service."
"We just do not have this cluster identified we found that your address is in the cluster.  We only need who the service is, no other information..."

I replied= "I don't use any service or anything. This address is auto generated by the stake.com's system. like most of the exchanges generate addresses for their users."

My question is what is a cluster and how can we see it and where?