International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The Bitcoin scheme is a rare example of a large scale global

payment system in which all the transactions are publicly

accessible (but in an anonymous way). We downloaded the full history

of this scheme, and analyzed many statistical properties of its

associated transaction graph. In this paper we answer for the

first time a variety of interesting questions about the typical

behavior of account owners, how they acquire and how they spend

their Bitcoins, the balance of Bitcoins they keep in their

accounts, and how they move Bitcoins between their various

accounts in order to better protect their privacy. In addition, we

isolated all the large transactions in the system, and discovered

that almost all of them are closely related to a single large

transaction that took place in November 2010, even though the

associated users apparently tried to hide this fact with many

strange looking long chains and fork-merge structures in the

transaction graph.