What services let you trace the history of Bitcoins? For instance, if the goal is to trace all transactions associated with Bitcoins owned by a certain individual or company, what's the best way to accomplish this?
1 Answer
WalletExplorer.com can associate addresses and Txs with ~100 services, including:
- LocalBitcoins
- Silk Road, Agora, other DNMs
- Defunct services like Vaultofsatoshi, Bitcoinica, Inputs.io, Mt. Gox etc
- Strongcoin, other wallet providers
- Lending platforms like BTCJam
- BTC-E, Coinbase, Bitstamp and other popular exchanges
- Gambling sites like Just-Dice, SealsWithClubs Poker
- Mixers/tumblers like BTCFog
I'm extremely curious how this is done, to be honest. I suppose it's just tracking UTXOs of known addresses and identifying associated Txs, but it's quite fascinating how accurate the data is.
The service doesn't identify newer addresses, of course, since fresh addresses need x blocks / UTXOs to deduce the associated account/marketplace/exchange.
answered Feb 15, 2015 at 10:06
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walletexplorer is monitoring co-spends. So if e.g. address 1abc... is today knwon to belong to kraken and tomorrow there is a new transaction with input addresses 1abc... and 1def... then 1def... is most likely as welll belonging to kraken.com. This is the process but how to start it? This is done by trading with the exchanges. And helpful for analytics is that many exchanges re-use addresses many times.– tempoDec 5, 2020 at 17:54