Old Bitcoin transactions can come back to haunt you
A group of researchers from Qatar University and Hamad Bin Khalifa University have demonstrated how years-old Bitcoin transactions can be used to retroactively deanonymize users of Tor hidden services. It seems that Bitcoin users’ past transactions – and especially if they used the cryptocurrency for illegal deals on the dark web and didn’t think to launder their payments – may come back to haunt them. Researchers’ findings “We crawled 1.5K hidden service pages and created a dataset of 88 Bitcoin addresses operated by those hidden services, including two ransomware addresses. We also crawled online social networks for public Bitcoin addresses, namely, Twitter and the BitcoinTalk forum. Out of 5B tweets and 1M forum pages, we created two datasets of 4.1K and 41K Bitcoin addresses, respectively. Each address in these user datasets is associated with an online identity and its corresponding public profile information,” the researchers explained .