New technology 'BitCluster' will soon be able to track bitcoin usage !
New technology 'BitCluster' will soon be able to track bitcoin usage !
A new open source pyhton based tool called BitCluster may soon make it much harder for bitcoin users to stay anonymous.
Bitcluster cannot identify a persons name and addreess . However Bitcluster groups nitcoin addresses together in a way that determines if certain transactions came from the same source. These sources could be a exchange , marketplace, business or an individual user.
This new tool will be shown off during the coming HOPE hacking event, held in new york this july.
The platform analyses transactions between specific addresses and enables those using the tool to log connected address into a downloadable spreadsheet which can be useful for tracking ransomware authors payments.
The project is tauted as bing open source and supposedly the creators wont be setting any specific goal with the new tool.The platform requires alot of computational resources and those wanting to apply the new tech will have to do so on their own behalf.
It is also possible to cluster transactions made in escrow towards an individual market . The developers have acquired data from places such as nucleus and alpha bay.They also have cluster information trthered to the origional silk road. This includes average transactions data going in and out of the market and how much the vendors are making in total.
It goes without saying that law enforcment could well take advantage of this new tool and probably will but the designers insist it is mainly designed to motivate researchers and academic professionals.
For users looking to stay under the radar of these monitoring tools , coin shuffler works very well, but they can track the money if all funds end up in the same wallet. Another tip would be to stay away from from using the same address multiple times and to avoid sharing address online.
weather this tool was designed for academic professionals and not law enforcement , its not hard to imagine who will actually find this to be the more usefull tool in the longrun.