Tracking the circulation routes of fresh coins in Bitcoin: A way of identifying coin miners with transaction network structural properties
This work addresses the challenge of tracking and profiling miners in the Bitcoin ecosystem, which is incremental as it applies network analysis to existing blockchain data.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying Bitcoin coin miners by constructing fresh coin circulation networks from blockchain transaction data, and proposed a heuristic algorithm to infer common profit distribution schemes among mining pools, revealing an increasing trend in miner numbers over recent years.
Bitcoin draws the highest degree of attention among cryptocurrencies, while coin mining is one of the most important fashion of profiting in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This paper constructs fresh coin circulation networks by tracking the fresh coin transfer routes with transaction referencing in Bitcoin blockchain. This paper proposes a heuristic algorithm to identifying coin miners by comparing coin circulation networks from different mining pools and thereby inferring the common profit distribution schemes of Bitcoin mining pools. Furthermore, this paper characterizes the increasing trend of Bitcoin miner numbers during recent years.