Two Israeli computer scientists who over the weekend published a paper describing a financial connection between the Bitcoin peer-to-peer transaction system and the operator of Silk Road, an Internet black market, have backed away from the claim after an independent security researcher took responsibility for the puzzling account that generated the transfer.

In a public statement distributed Wednesday, Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir, computer scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said that after Dustin D. Trammell, a security consultant at Breakingpoint Systems Inc., in Austin, Tex., stated that he was the owner of a Bitcoin account that had been indirectly linked to a transaction on the Silk Road, they no longer believed that the designer of the Bitcoin system, an anonymous individual who identified himself as Satoshi Nakamoto, generated the transaction.

In October, The F.B.I. arrested a 29-year-old San Francisco man, Ross William Ulbricht, and charged him with operating the the market for illicit goods and a murder-for-hire scheme under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.” Mr. Ulbricht has both denied that he was the operator of the service and that he is the individual who used the moniker according to his attorney, Joshua L. Dratel.

Bitcoin, which is designed to allow individuals to make transactions directly without financial intermediaries, has attracted significant attention recently because of the challenges of regulating the system.

In a posting on his website, Mr. Trammell noted that he was neither Satoshi Nakamoto nor was he the individual who had conducted a transaction using the Silk Road service.

In their statement, Dr. Ron and Dr. Shamir said that drawing a link between the designer of Bitcoin service and the operator of the Silk Road had not been the main intent of their research.

They wrote: “When we noticed the existence of this very short path (which apparently was not previously known to the bitcoin community), we decided to include it in our paper and predicted that “We are sure that analyzing this figure will start a very vigorous debate in the bitcoin community.”

They noted that their prediction had turned out to be an understatement.

The two researchers defended their methodology, known as “flow analysis,” stating: “If political leaders are found to have many common friends with Mafia dons, this is worth reporting even though it may have completely innocent interpretations. One should be careful not to present such connections as proofs of guilt, but this is often the only way to discover interesting things in large and complex data collections.”

The discussion within the Bitcoin community since the publication of the paper has only deepened the puzzle of the transaction.

A member of the Bitcoin community said it may have a variety of explanations. According to Meni Rosenfeld, a mathematician who is chairman of the Israeli Bitcoin Association, one possibility is that the Silk Road service might have been run by a group, rather than an individual. This might explain why the F.B.I. has not been able to easily recover the additional Bitcoins.