Tracking the circulation routes of fresh coins in Bitcoin: A way of identifying coin miners with transaction network structural properties

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Bitcoin's fresh coin circulation networks to identify coin miners and understand mining pool profit schemes, revealing trends in miner numbers over recent years.

Contribution

It introduces a heuristic algorithm for identifying coin miners through transaction network analysis and compares circulation networks across mining pools.

Findings

Identified coin miners using circulation network properties

Revealed profit distribution schemes of mining pools

Documented increasing trend of Bitcoin miners in recent years

Abstract

Bitcoin draws the highest degree of attention among cryptocurrencies, while coin mining is one of the most important fashion of profiting in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This paper constructs fresh coin circulation networks by tracking the fresh coin transfer routes with transaction referencing in Bitcoin blockchain. This paper proposes a heuristic algorithm to identifying coin miners by comparing coin circulation networks from different mining pools and thereby inferring the common profit distribution schemes of Bitcoin mining pools. Furthermore, this paper characterizes the increasing trend of Bitcoin miner numbers during recent years.