Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that features a distributed, decentralized and trustworthy mechanism, which has made Bitcoin a popular global transaction platform. The transaction efficiency among nations and the privacy benefiting from address anonymity of the Bitcoin network have attracted many activities such as payments, investments, gambling, and even money laundering in the past decade. Unfortunately, some criminal behaviors which took advantage of this platform were not identified. This has discouraged many governments to support cryptocurrency. Thus, the capability to identify criminal addresses becomes an important issue in the cryptocurrency network. In this paper, we propose new features in addition to those commonly used in the literature to build a classification model for detecting abnormality of Bitcoin network addresses. These features include various high orders of moments of transaction time (represented by block height) which summarizes the transaction history in an efficient way. The extracted features are trained by supervised machine learning methods on a labeling category data set. The experimental evaluation shows that these features have improved the performance of Bitcoin address classification significantly. We evaluate the results under eight classifiers and achieve the highest Micro-Fl Macro-F1 of 87 86 with LightGBM.
Soon after its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been adopted by cyber-criminals, which rely on its pseudonymity to implement virtually untraceable scams. One of the typical scams that operate on Bitcoin are the so-called Ponzi schemes. These are fraudulent investments which repay users with the funds invested by new users that join the scheme, and implode when it is no longer possible to find new investments. Despite being illegal in many countries, Ponzi schemes are now proliferating on Bitcoin, and they keep alluring new victims, who are plundered of millions of dollars. We apply data mining techniques to detect Bitcoin addresses related to Ponzi schemes. Our starting point is a dataset of features of real-world Ponzi schemes, that we construct by analysing, on the Bitcoin blockchain, the transactions used to perform the scams. We use this dataset to experiment with various machine learning algorithms, and we assess their effectiveness through standard validation protocols and performance metrics. The best of the classifiers we have experimented can identify most of the Ponzi schemes in the dataset, with a low number of false positives. An approach to the construction of classifiers from imbalanced datasets is described. A dataset is imbalanced if the classification categories are not approximately equally represented. Often real-world data sets are predominately composed of "normal" examples with only a small percentage of "abnormal" or "interesting" examples. It is also the case that the cost of misclassifying an abnormal (interesting) example as a normal example is often much higher than the cost of the reverse error. Under-sampling of the majority (normal) class has been proposed as a good means of increasing the sensitivity of a classifier to the minority class. This paper shows that a combination of our method of oversampling the minority (abnormal)cla ss and under-sampling the majority (normal) class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space)tha n only under-sampling the majority class. This paper also shows that a combination of our method of over-sampling the minority class and under-sampling the majority class can achieve better classifier performance (in ROC space)t han varying the loss ratios in Ripper or class priors in Naive Bayes. Our method of over-sampling the minority class involves creating synthetic minority class examples. Experiments are performed using C4.5, Ripper and a Naive Bayes classifier. The method is evaluated using the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC)and the ROC convex hull strategy. Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer payment system and digital currency, is often involved in illicit activities such as scamming, ransomware attacks, illegal goods trading, and thievery. At the time of writing, the Bitcoin ecosystem has not yet been mapped and as such there is no estimate of the share of illicit activities. This paper provides the first estimation of the portion of cyber-criminal entities in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Our dataset consists of 854 observations categorised into 12 classes (out of which 5 are cybercrime-related) and a total of 100,000 uncategorised observations. The dataset was obtained from the data provider who applied three types of clustering of Bitcoin transactions to categorise entities: co-spend, intelligence-based, and behaviour-based. Thirteen supervised learning classifiers were then tested, of which four prevailed with a cross-validation accuracy of 77.38 , 76.47 , 78.46 , 80.76 respectively. From the top four classifiers, Bagging and Gradient Boosting classifiers were selected based on their weighted average and per class precision on the cybercrime-related categories. Both models were used to classify 100,000 uncategorised entities, showing that the share of cybercrime-related is 29.81 according to Bagging, and 10.95 according to Gradient Boosting with number of entities as the metric. With regard to the number of addresses and current coins held by this type of entities, the results are: 5.79 and 10.02 according to Bagging; and 3.16 and 1.45 according to Gradient Boosting. 