The service will allow to analyse and map the information related to incoming and outgoing transactions on bitcoin wallets, thus driving the cryptocurrency users out of the “pseudonymous” field.

Transactions in the bitcoin network were not fully anonymous before: transactions could be easily traced through the blockchain. Finding the way to associate bitcoin wallets with particular users is the next step.

BitCluster was developed using the Python language. To display bitcoin transactions, its developers created a 200 GB database, which can be downloaded via a torrent. The database code is available at GitHub. The instrument can be useful in particular for cyber security companies and for law enforcement agencies involved in digital crime prevention.

The platform was presented by its lead developers Mathieu Lavoie and David Decarty-Hetu at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in New-York.

“Our goal was to see, how much data can you gather on people who are using the bitcoin network, and can you aggregate the bitcoin wallets which seem to be anonymous and isolated from one another,” Decarty-Hetu explains.

BitCluster service is already available. The developers plan to continue improving it adding automated database update and nodes labelling, as well as creating visual graphs.

However, it is possible for the bitcoin system users to avoid indexing by BitCluster platform. To do this they must keep their bitcoin addresses private and use separate wallets for different transactions. This will create separate clusters that the program will not be able to associate with other deals on the blockchain.

Elena Platonova