Inspired by my conversation with Aleš Janda (who is very knowledgeable in blockchain analysis and runs walletexplorer.com and chainalysis.com), there is a new rule for microtransaction-proven bitcoin addresses:
- if the address had more than 50 transactions in the last 3 days, it is rejected. Linking by signature is still possible.
Such frequent transactions are common for exchanges and other shared wallets, and the rule prevents its customers from linking the shared address by doing a withdrawal.
This adds to the other two rules that serve the same purpose:
- if the microtransaction has more than 2 outputs, it is rejected (with the exception of Electrum 2fa transactions that have 3 outputs), because exchanges often aggregate several withdrawals into a single transaction
- if the same address was already linked before by another user, the new link is rejected and the old link is canceled. This applies only to tx-proven addresses, and the reason for this rule is that for sufficiently popular exchanges, there will likely be more than one user who tries to cheat.
The two old rules were good enough at filtering large well known exchanges but a small number of addresses of smaller exchanges were still linked. The new rule is to filter them too.
great to see that being done, strenghtens the community
reading through the whitepaper I never saw a mention of hubs and relays, maybe overseen, could you elaborate their function?