Learn, hack!

URL

http://ftp.ccc.de/congress/28C3/mp4-h264-HQ/28c3-4746-en-bitcoin_an_analysis_h264.mp4

File name

28c3-4746-en-bitcoin_an_analysis_h264.mp4

File size

308.4 MB

MD5

51792c63d51e25f8018329423ff830cb

SHA1

a11fe1ded68e4a6bd7fb9377977e4b41515e7b62

Bitcoin is the first distributed, digital currency. It received a lot of attention recently as it questions the state monopoly to issue legal tender. It relies on distributed proof-of-work concepts to ensure money-like characteristics. The existence and potential widespread use of such a distributed, non-centralized, non-regulated currency questions the ability of governments to control money supply, issue debt, and tax its populace. Transactions in bitcoin form a publicly accessible network of economic relations, which can be extracted from the transaction history available to all users in the P2P-network of bitcoin. Using re-identification algorithms it is possible to attack the proposed anonymity of users. While this is already an interesting security issue, the insight into a real-world economic experiment allows for the first time the empirical test of community structures in such social networks, which is definitely more substantial than the "I-like"-network in facebook and the like. In this presentation, we show results on network analysis of the money flow, the behavior of individuals, and the overall scalability of P2P-currencies. At the same time we will discuss advanced "financial instruments" that one might find in the transactions.