The first six months of 2018 have seen cryptocurrency thefts of $761 million, and the technology is also the latest and greatest tool for money laundering. This increase in crime has caused both researchers and law enforcement to look for ways to trace criminal proceeds. Although tracing algorithms have improved recently, they still yield an enormous amount of data of which very few datapoints are relevant or interesting to investigators, let alone ordinary bitcoin owners interested in provenance. In this work we describe efforts to visualize relevant data on a blockchain. To accomplish this we come up with a graphical model to represent the stolen coins and then implement this using a variety of visualization techniques.
Abstract This work presents a systemic top-down visualization of Bitcoin transaction activity to explore dynamically generated patterns of algorithmic behavior. Bitcoin dominates the cryptocurrency markets and presents researchers with a rich source of real-time transactional data. The pseudonymous yet public nature of the data presents opportunities for the discovery of human and algorithmic behavioral patterns of interest to many parties such as financial regulators, protocol designers, and security analysts. However, retaining visual fidelity to the underlying data to retain a fuller understanding of activity within the network remains challenging, particularly in real time. We expose an effective force-directed graph visualization employed in our large-scale data observation facility to accelerate this data exploration and derive useful insight among domain experts and the general public alike. The high-fidelity visualizations demonstrated in this article allowed for collaborative discovery of unexpec... Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted HighlightsBetter graph-sensemaking through fuzzy queries and large-scale visualisation.Fuzzy logic to identify interesting nodes.Illustrative examples of such data exploration provided. This work presents three case-studies of how fuzzy logic can be combined with large-scale immersive visualisation to enhance the process of graph sensemaking, enabling interactive fuzzy filtering of large global views of graphs. The aim is to provide users a mechanism to quickly identify interesting nodes for further analysis. Fuzzy logic allows a flexible framework to ask human-like curiosity-driven questions over the data, and visualisation allows its communication and understanding. Together, these two technologies successfully empower novices and experts to a faster and deeper understanding of the underlying patterns in big datasets compared to traditional means in a desktop screen with crisp queries. Among other examples, we provide evidence of how these two technologies successfully enable the identification of relevant transaction patterns in the Bitcoin network.