Forensics
Use our smart tools to cluster Bitcoin (BTC) addresses and to see what others can find out about your crypto assets. Do you want to know if two Bitcoin addresses belong to the same person or to which Bitcoin exchange a thief sent the stolen coins for cashing out?
Follow stolen coins
Hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins have been stolen from users since the beginning of the virtual currency, we can see all these thefts in real time in the blockchain. We know to which addresses the stolen coins are sent and from which they are stolen. We can follow the life of a Bitcoin over the network.
This is where our privacy engine can provide valuable services. The more BTC addresses you can assign to an address containing stolen Bitcoins, the higher the chance that the new owner can be found (e.g. if cashing out at an exchange). Every day about 300,000 new Bitcoin addresses are used in the blockchain, each of which could lead you to ‘your’ thief.
Millions of addresses are known to us as belonging to Bitcoin exchanges, if the thiefs cashes out there and we can trace the addresses until that point, you have a chance to catch them.
Bitcoin address tracing
Bitcoin address monitoring
What knows the tax office about my Bitcoins?
From the beginning, Bitcoin has been synonymous with privacy and anonymity because users do not need to provide any personal identifying information to send or receive this digital currency. Instead of being connected to a person, transactions are linked to unique addresses and stored in a blockchain where the building blocks are actually tamper-proof digital records. Although Bitcoin may offer a higher level of privacy protection to savvy web users, absolute anonymity is not guaranteed and transaction records are not impenetrable. In fact, more and more Bitcoin owners around the world are receiving letters from their tax authorities with not always pleasant questions.
Where do the tax authorities get the names of potential tax debtors from?
Since the blockchain is openly visible, there are analytical companies evaluating the transactions, clustering Bitcoin addresses and additionally scanning the Internet for Bitcoin addresses. If some of these coins are then exchanged for national currencies at an exchange, then tax authorities can assign all clustered addresses with a certain likelihood (usually not with certainty) to a tax subject. Therefore, it is not advisable to ignore the crypto currency tax rules of your country. The blockchain data can still be analyzed years from now.
In some countries the transfer of Bitcoins was as tax relevant as the exchange of football stickers years ago. It was only afterwards that the tax relevance of the transactions was determined. What should you do if you are no longer sure which Bitcoin addresses belong to you?
Our privacy engine can help here by searching the blockchain tree in both directions for related Bitcoin addresses after specifying known addresses.
Bitcoin address forensics
Bitcoin privacy check
The privacy of Bitcoin addresses can be measured. If the Bitcoin privacy score is close to 100% then the coins weren’t moved yet or the person controlling the coins knows what he is doing. The lower the score, the more the privacy can be revealed. This is the case if the address was re-used, was used in transactions together with other addresses, if there are deposit or withdrawal links to exchanges and so on. It’s not easy to keep your bitcoin untraceable.
Bitcoin Privacy Score