wallet de-anonymization

mrcoins commented at 2:20 am on June 19, 2015: none

Walletexplorer.com is able de-anonymize any wallets, your personal wallet to big known services. The accuracy is average/good. Elliptic just released a service that does the same but i guess it has very high accuracy.

I may say it is a bug? Individual addresses were not supposed to be linked to any wallet or entity. Privacy was Satoshi’s priority.

laanwj commented at 6:16 am on June 19, 2015: member

I am not sure what that specific site uses, but there are various ways in which wallets reveal themselves directly:

Sending change back to a known address
Having the change output at a fixed position, ie first or last.

Bitcoin Core wallets suffers from neither of these, but many other wallets do.

But also more subtle ways, which affect users of all wallets:

The assumption that there is only one change output
Revealing the change output as it is not a ‘round’ number
Address reuse by end-users

Privacy in Bitcoin is an ongoing process.

laanwj added the label Brainstorming on Jun 19, 2015

jgarzik commented at 6:19 am on June 19, 2015: contributor

See also Confidential Transactions from Blockstream, which hide amounts: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085273.0

laanwj commented at 6:25 am on June 19, 2015: member

Or, CoinJoin which merges people’s transaction to make it harder to determine who sent to who. (Athough amounts can still give it away, which brings us back to @jgarzik’s link)

(There’s an issue open to support CoinJoin in Bitcoin Core’s wallet, #3226, but no one picked it up yet)

chris-belcher commented at 5:22 pm on June 19, 2015: contributor

Walletexplorer.com works by using combined inputs as evidence of common ownership. I assume Elliptic is doing something similar. Specifically it can usually tell change addresses by the fact that they’re combined again. I have been in contact with the developer Aleš Janda who believes CoinJoin would render his website blind.

I’m working on a CoinJoin implementation called JoinMarket, which is working today and producing mainnet CoinJoin transactions with up to about 14 participants and amounts up to 25btc. I believe it has the correct incentive structure that it would eventually see wide adoption. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=919116.msg10096489

ABISprotocol commented at 1:43 am on July 12, 2015: none

It’s never been a great mystery that bitcoin is transparent. To me this has always been something that has needed more priority, although the last time I spent much time attempting to address this in detail, I recall that it seemed (at the time) that unit testing seemed to be identified as a higher priority which is something that came up in discussions of the subject of privacy issues. Additionally, funding is there but it’s not known to me when these funds will be released for a proposal. The latest privacy proposal I’ve seen that looks like it would merit funds being released for it, would be @gmaxwell’s Confidential Transactions, I think.

ABISprotocol commented at 0:51 am on July 13, 2015: none

Something else which I had earlier forgot to mention here, which was mentioned in #3226 and which seems important to bring up, is that there are other parties which have already made a claim on the funding source I mentioned in my previous comment. The reference to this matter is here.

chris-belcher commented at 8:30 pm on July 17, 2015: contributor

@ABISprotocol I’ve also made a claim on the coinjoin bountry for the work on JoinMarket.

ABISprotocol commented at 9:26 pm on July 17, 2015: none

@chris-belcher How is this to be resolved? I suppose all the parties (e.g., all the persons who are co-signers on the multisignature account from which the funds would be disbursed) and also the people mentioned in the e-mail I linked to above, should be contacted in one single e-mail, so that they are contacted together on the matter?

laanwj added the label Privacy on Aug 18, 2015

meshcollider commented at 6:15 pm on March 7, 2018: contributor

Privacy in bitcoin is more of a meta-issue rather than a specific issue with Core, so this doesn’t need to remain open here

meshcollider closed this on Mar 7, 2018

tonio12345 commented at 3:16 pm on February 20, 2019: none

Unfortunately, even the most popular blockchain explorers (think of walletexplorer.com, ethplorer.io etc.) cannot give that info, if not for some publicly known addresses such as crypto exchanges. :-\ Even more advanced blockchain investigation tools such as c-hound.ai do not have public address labeling. In most cases, you need to google it, and then create your own label.

DrahtBot locked this on Dec 16, 2021

wallet de-anonymization #6304