I need to trace a bitcoin transaction to find out roughly where in the world the wallet is located. Is it possible to use a program, or manual-method, to trace/track a bitcoin transaction to find the recipients IP address or which area in in world they are in? If so, roughly how accurate is it?
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3 Answers
The Bitcoin blockchain does not have any concept of location, nor could such a thing be added to it.
There is no such thing as "tracing a transaction" in a corporeal sense.
If you had a comprehensive global surveillance network, you could attempt to connect to every Bitcoin node in the network (including all the nodes located in Tor) and use timing analysis to attempt to guess the originating node of any given transaction.
If you had that surveillance capability, it would only tell about the specific outputs which were being spent and nothing about outputs which the user of that wallet might possess which have not yet been spent.
Basically, Bitcoin was designed to make what you're trying to do impossible.
I think there is no such thing as a defined location for a wallet. Two main reasons:
- You can create an offline wallet, and the web doesn't even know about it.
- You can have multiple wallets (back-up, multiple computers, whatever)
answered Jul 14, 2014 at 8:04
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1Please note that the IP address shown on blockchain.info and similar sites is the IP address that broadcasted the transaction in question. This is usually not the same machine as the one that originated the transaction (i.e., the sender). There is no reliable way to determine where in the world the sender of a transaction is/was located.– Eric SJul 14, 2014 at 8:17
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Ahh, so there is no information AT ALL where the transaction came from? Jul 14, 2014 at 8:17
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What I need is the IP address of the recipient of the transaction. Jul 15, 2014 at 3:09
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Well, that is impossible I guess. Like Justus said, the whole Bitcoin thingy was made to be anonymous, and sharing your IP with every transaction is not going to help with that Jul 15, 2014 at 3:12
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@TheLazyCoffeGuy Since the recipient doesn't do anything and doesn't even have to have an IP address, you are looking for something that does not exist. (What is the IP address of the recipient of a cash transaction?) Jul 16, 2014 at 18:43
You can indeed do that and even find the IP of the sender. This is called blockchain network analysis. There are now companies like Chainalysis and Elliptic that offer such tools that can trace Bitcoin transactions back to their users. A lot of people wrongly assume that Bitcoin transactions are anonymous. They are not. And what is more every transaction is permanently recorded, searchable and traceable using blockchain analysis tools.