Characterizing Bitcoin Use For Illicit Activities

Sammanfattning: Bitcoin's decentralized nature enables reasonably anonymous exchange of money outside of the authorities' control. This has led to Bitcoin being popular for various illegal activities, including scams, ransomware attacks, money laundering, black markets, etc.  In this thesis, we characterize this landscape, providing insights into similarities and differences in the use of Bitcoin for such activities.  Our analysis and the derived insights contributes to the understanding of Bitcoin transactions associated with illegal activities through three main aspects. First, it offers a comprehensive characterization of money flows to and from Bitcoin addresses linked to different abuse categories, revealing variations in flow patterns and success rates. Second, a temporal analysis captures long-term trends and weekly patterns across categories. Finally, an analysis of outflow from reported addresses uncovers differences in graph properties and flow patterns among illicit addresses and between abuse categories. These findings provide valuable insights into the distribution, temporal dynamics, and interconnections within various categories of Bitcoin transactions related to illicit activities.