BitAnalysis: A Visual Analytical System for Bitcoin Wallet Investigation
PI: Dr. Yujing Sun, HKU
Co-I: Prof. S.M. Yiu, HKU
Project Abstract:
Bitcoin is gaining ever increasing popularity. Meanwhile, due to the unique characteristics, e.g., decentralization, and pseudo-anonymity, bitcoin has also attracted the attention of criminals as safe means of settlement. Therefore, governments still treat bitcoin in a cautious attitude for the stark lack of effective regulation technologies and start to realize that it is necessary to monitor and analyze suspicious bitcoin transactions and wallets. Hence, intuitive software tools for bitcoin wallet investigation are important for regulators.
Nevertheless, for the best of our knowledge, there are few existing works can well tackle the problem. Therefore, we propose a visual analytical system to offer such help. Note that this proposal is an extension of our previous proposal “A visualization assisted abnormal trading detection system for multi-crypto currencies”. Comparing to the previous proposal, this proposal presents a system that provides a much richer set of functions and intuitive visual interfaces for regulators to effectively visualize and analyze the transactions of a bitcoin wallet, to track bitcoins flow, and to identify wallet correlation. Besides, we design new visual techniques for presenting bitcoin transactions information and introduce the novel connection diagram and bitcoin flow map as new ways of analyzing, tracking, and monitoring the trading activities of bitcoin wallets.