Bitcoin Forum

Hello guys, is there any way to locate someone by his bitcoin address?

no unless they posted it or are using service address and are not using tor/vpn/anonymous proxy.

Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous, which means that you don't know who it is behind any address but can figure out which coins are going somewhere. Also you can figure it if its a specific user-  if the user has posted the address once.

In short, no you can't

If you only have a bitcoin address you can't. You need more information.

Maybe, with a bit of social engineering you could do it. But it's not a bullet proof method.

With only an addressyou can't do most of time nothing. Sometimes you can find some more info when you google the specific address.

Anything is possible but I'd imagine it be very difficult, if it was easy then the ransomware assholes would have been caught by now.

you can google the address and see if someone posted it online before or not and with collecting some data about the poster , you might be able to know the address owner. you can also use walletexplorer.com to check if this address is in wallet with other addresses or not and it may help you in your searching

It's a common misconception that if you buy something with your coins, it's immediately possible for everyone to see it's you behind the address.

Say you buy something from Overstock, put your address in your account and pay to the address on file. Now say that you also buy something illegal with the change that is left from this purchase. The police sees the bitcoin address in the drug dealers smartphone after busting him. Say you used a fake name and a burner phone to be in contact with him. Now how do the police find you are actually the owner behind the address the coins were sent from?

First they would need to see what bitcoin addresses you also sent to. One of those will be the Overstock order that has your address in it. But in order to know that it was an address controlled by Bitpay, they would need to search the database of Bitpay. They would probably not subpoena all the possible bitcoin payment processors and companies that handles bitcoin payments by themselves. But only if they have an up to date database of addresses to check, they could associate it with a sale.

If they actually have a subpoena or already have access to an up to date database of bitpay, they could match the address and information from Bitpay would reveal that you or someone closely related to you have paid to Overstock and they get the order number.

Now they have to send a subpoena to Overstock that is forced to give them your order details. If you were using default behavior of a Blockchain.info wallet, they could be pretty sure it was you. If you use the satoshi client, they would get a mess of change addresses to look up, but it could still in theory be possible to find out who made the payment to the drug dealer.

If you used a tumbler like Shared Coin, your coins would have been mixed with other unrelated drug trades so it would not be close to impossible to find a connection between your Overstock and ddrug orders.

In general, no.

You can try googling the address, to see if they posted in on the internet.

Another method is to try tracing the funds

Googling the address is your best bet, if they have posted it anywhere else you may have a lead to work with.

All they can give you is a Bitcoin address, with that, you can only find out their transactions that have occurred with that Bitcoin address.

nope, you can't. bitcoin address is not enough to get that information. it's random. maybe see the IP is the best way to know someone's location

What happens if the only transaction afterwards it a transfer to a bank account, does it just disappear?

You might have to hire a BTC bounty hunter ::)

Bitcoins not disappear. To withdraw to a bank account you will need to send your bitcoins to an exchange, the exchange will keep the bitcoins and sent you the money by bank transference. After that, the exchange will sell the bitcoins to another user.

Ask Ross Ulbricht that question.

you can also check out his transactions on Blockchain.info to see what is the IP of the node that is broadcasting them. although it won't work 99% of the time but if he is using his own node and sends the tx himself you can find his IP and work from there.

Finding through search engine is a better option to locate users. The link might direct towards transactions history. From that you may have some options to find the location.

The BTC address alone, if used for a single payment... would be near impossible to trace, and even more difficult if the person used Tor/ VPN's / Mixers etc. The node that relayed the tx would give you

a geographical area, but it is as useful as a wooden tit. If it points to say New York, you will never get any closer to finding that person. This is why we always advice people to only use Bitcoin addresses

once for more sensitive goods and services. {Like those kinky lingerie for your lover}  ::)

There is no way to locate someone just with their Bitcoin address. But you can find out what kind of transactions they have made.

no and this is the reason why bitcoin is anonymous if you don't dump for fiat or anything for that matter

using bitcoin only without a shipping address attached is 100% anon

if it's used a new btc address (never posted never linked to anyone) is quite impossible locate some one (100%).
there are too many possibilities, "casual" possibilities... to get a clear link between a payment (address) and a "physical" person.

Its impossible to locate someone btc address, you can only trace where the coin goes from one wallet to another wallet,

and because its very easy to generate new wallet address, so i think it will be near to impossible to trace the owner of the wallet

as i know that seemed unable to. almost bitcoin users are anonymous
maybe others know how to track it  ;D

Is it possible to locate the last whereabouts of a person when he exchanged his bitcoins for fiat? Not tracing his transactions but like pinpoint his GPS coordinates in the world?

I have noticed some times, Xapo to Xapo payments reveals the receiver name while paying with email or with bitcoin address transactions. Still I believe locating geography locations are not possible.

If bitcoin were with an adress connected to it you may be sure that the current price and value of it would be 20 dollars maybe,people inside bitcoin because anonymous ,even know that isnt 100% but lets say that is hard to keep control all the wallets and see where the money are going and returning.

It is not possible to locate someone from his bitcoin address and that is one reason people fear that criminals can run their business with btc.

Well most times, people who do illegal stuff do not post their bitcoin address in the public. They try to be discreet with their trade.

No we cannot track .

Yes.

Suppose someone posts their address in their signature. And then use the same username on other social media sites. With careful trawling of other sites, you can glean clues to who they are. Some people's Facebook profiles list the school they went to, the university they went to, where they live. Plus they post pictures of themselves, so you can pinpoint them with facial recognition technology. You can even entice them into an email correspondence - and most people have their real name on their email profile. For example with yahoo, even though your email will say cutepseudonym@yahoo.com, when you actually receive an email from the person, their name is at the top...

Put all that together, and you have matched the identity to the email address and their bitcoin address.

If he have listed his bitcoin address in the bitcointalk profile or in any other forum than i think we can atleast get his email and can track him down through that. You can check history about how police arrested silkroad marketplace owner via searching his first post here in bitcointalk.

Other than that no its impossible to track through address as no email is needed to generate address.

Other way is to trace transactions and wait until 'wanted' person purchases some physical goods involving shipping. Then you could ask/bribe/trick/harrass merchant (especially smaller one) to provide you the person's details.

Not possible. I always look at blockchain. info website and it always points too somewhere near Cameroon, which I know is not true.
Even with bitcoin mixers involved you won't know where the bitcoins came from originally in the first place if it were even possible.

it could be work, so the point is the address that he's posted on his any post, well but if only through the single bitcoin address, moreover if he using vpn or tor i think it's very unpredictable
that's why bitcoin created to be pseudoanonymous

If we are talking about situation when all information you have is bitcoin address alone - then you can't trace it - there is no way.
You can however try to be a detective and associate this address with personal info of the user: something like profile name, facebook account, twitter - other social media.
And/or you can track some transaction on blockchain and see where it will lead - maybe owner of that address will send bitcoin to known address of an exchange or something like that etc.

Hypothetically, yes, you can find someone's address.

Realistically, no, you will not be able to find out where someone lives.

Unless they posted where they live (or someone did for them) and also have their address posted somewhere, you can't track someone down.

If you have all the resources required, yes you will be able to find out from which IP address the transaction was initiated. With that IP address, you might be able to track down to the person who initiated the tx.

However, in reality, it is really difficult and we do not have all the resources needed.

It is possible provided there are some output transactions involving the address- ie. people used the private key to transfer the coins out of the address. Otherwise, there is no way to know where the owner of the address is.

For example, there is no way you can track the owner of 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE. Clearly someone created it but no one has the private key to it and you will not know the location of the creator.

Its possible my friend said that he can track someone by his bitcoin address but i dont know if he can, or he just trolling to me, but of you want to know my friends name i can pm to you i want to try his skill in this thread, but i dont promise to you that  he can track bitcoin address but i promise to you that he said to me he can..

I'm things you can found how this work then another method is to try tracing the funds.   :P

Yes. I believe this is how they trapped the Silk Road bunch.