“BECAUSE OF ITS PSEUDONYM MODEL, BITCOIN LACKS RETROACTIVE OPERATIONAL SECURITY, WHICH MEANS THAT HISTORICAL INFORMATION IS USED TO IDENTIFY A CERTAIN USER.”

Institute of Computer Research of Hamad Bin Khalifa University published on January 23, 2018, in which they commented on the analysis of Bitcoin transactions being used to disallow Tor users. In more than 100 cases, they were used to measure someone’s shady blockchain transactions to those people’s public accounts. In addition, analysts have been associated with 20 of these public accounts with payments on Tor’s hidden services, including the Silk Road and Pirate Bay.

Here’s a statement from the report that says a lot about the scale of the problem:
There is a certain degree of duality in Bitcoin’s nature regarding confidentiality. On the other hand, this cryptocurrency is not monitored directly by any financial institution or government
Once you’ve found an individual’s Bitcoin address, you have to know how to bid or receive money. What this type of OSINT (open-source intelligence) is the user’s effort to break these transactions using intermediate addresses, or the use of client services.

Unfortunately, there is little academic research on exploiting these characteristics of the Bitcoin architecture to identify payment transactions on the black web. To their credit, Qatar researchers have made a real breakthrough in this direction by collecting data that reads slightly to the surface. First, they collected dozens of bitcoin addresses that were used for donations and other daily transactions. These services include WikiLeaks, Snowden Defense Fund, Pirate Bay, ProtonMail, Silk Road, and Agora, ongoing. They obtained a list of thousands of Bitcoin addresses by traversing people’s public accounts, such as Twitter and Bitcoin Talk forum.

Law enforcement agencies are all likely to investigate crimes by probing the blockchain.
However, the results of Qatari researchers have been reduced to a particular problem. The blockchain stores everything and cannot be edited. Deletion of Bitcoin addresses from public profiles may not be the subject or be retrieved later.

The author, David Balaban, is a computer security researcher with over 15 years of experience in malware analysis and antivirus software evaluation.