The article was lightweight, tin-foil hat stuff but it was good for the links therein, I thank you for that.
From the study below you can see how using a specialized piece of software, you can track IP addresses with bitcoin send/receives. Note also the author can figure out how much each person has by tracking 'unusual' requests (which is somebody sending money to themselves). The other link shows how to construct a poisoned node that will listen to and intercept your bitcoin traffic, even if you are trying to use Tor.
TonyT
Good link:
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-tor-may-good-idea/ (your neighboring listening node may be a poisoned node)
https://www.getbitcoin.com.au/bitcoin-news/investigation-white-paper-anonymous-bitcoin (bitcoin not anonymous)
Although numerous Bitcoin clients exist, none of them are specialized for data collection. Available clients often need to balance receiving and spending bitcoins, vetting and rejecting invalid transactions, maintaining a user's wallet, mining bitcoins, and, perhaps most detrimental to our study, disconnecting from \poorly-behaving" peers; these were precisely the peers we were interested in. Because existing software had integrated functionality that interfered with our goals,
we decided to build our own Bitcoin client called CoinSeer, which was a lean tool designed exclusively for data collection. For 5 months, between July 24, 2012 and January 2, 2013,
CoinSeer created an outbound connection to every listening peer whose IP address was advertised on the Bitcoin network. We maintained that connection until either the remote peer hung up or timed out. In any given hour, we were connected to a median of 2,678 peers; for the duration of our collection period, we consistently maintained more connections than the only other Bitcoin superclient we know of - blockchain.info. This data collection effort required storing 60 GB of data per week
Discovering Anomalous Relay Patterns
When we began analyzing our collected data, we manually looked for interesting
behavior. The following are speci c cases that led us to believe that transaction
relay behavior may be used to map Bitcoin addresses to IPs.
Case 1:
On August 31, 2012, we received a transaction from a single IP that
was never relayed again. This \single-relayer" transaction is highly unusual for
a P2P system using a gossip protocol; we would expect to have received it from
the majority of the approximately 2,500 peers we were connected to at the time.
6
On September 3, 2012, a new transaction with the same inputs and outputs was
relayed network-wide and accepted into the blockchain. Given this information,
can we assume the sole relayer of the rst transaction was its creator and thus
owns the Bitcoin addresses inside?
Case 2:
On August 22, 2012, a single IP sent us 11,730 unique transactions
within a 74-second window. The median rate we received transactions was
only
43 per minute. Because these transactions were already in the block chain, they
were not relayed by anyone else, making them \single-relayer" transactions. Us-
ing connection metadata, we saw that this large transaction dump corresponded
with this user upgrading to a newer version of the Bitcoin client he was using.
Could all of these belong to the single relayer?
Case 3:
For 52 days, beginning on July 24, 2012, we received the
same
transac-tion from a single IP approximately once every hour; no one else on the network
relayed it. The peer then disconnected, only for a new IP to connect and exhibit
the same behavior for the next 23 hours. This occurred again with the appear-
ance of a third IP, nally going silent a day later. Why would a transaction be
continually rerelayed, and what connection does it have to its rerelayers
