This blog is written by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan. We are researchers with the Clique Research Cluster at University College Dublin. The results in this blog are based on a paper we wrote that considers anonymity in the Bitcoin system. A preprint of the paper is available on arXiv.

Update (January 1, 2013): We received many requests for an up to date, human-readable copy of the block chain, which can be difficult to extract using existing tools. One of the authors, Martin Harrigan, has released QuantaBytes to this end. It provides up to date copies of the block chain along with tools for analysis and visualization. Check it out!