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BITCOIN TRANSACTION PRIVACY

How much of Bitcoin can anyone read?

Bitcoin is public by design. This is how much of it is plain to follow, and how much is deliberately hidden.

Usually daily
  • Plainly readable87%
  • Shared control8.4%
  • Deliberately mixed0.9%
  • Could not tell3.8%

  1. How much of Bitcoin can anyone actually read?

    Almost all of it is readable

    Of the 231.9 million transactions we can judge, 86.9% are one payer paying someone, and the trail is plain to follow. 0.93% were mixed on purpose to break that trail.

    Bitcoin is often called anonymous. It is not. Every payment sits in public forever, and only a small slice of it is deliberately obscured.

  2. What are the four kinds of transaction?

    86.9%
    Plainly readable
    One payer, paying someone. Anyone reading the chain can follow who paid whom.
    8.4%
    Shared control
    Coins that needed more than one signature to move, so the chain shows a group rather than a person.
    0.93%
    Deliberately mixed
    People pooling a payment together on purpose, which breaks the trail between sender and receiver.
    3.8%
    Could not tell
    Transactions our reading could not place with confidence. Counted honestly rather than folded into the rest.

  3. Why are there two different totals?

    Two counts, two meanings

    Bitcoin has carried 1.41 billion transactions in total. We only classify the 231.9 million of them that spend more than one coin at once, because those are the ones whose shape tells you anything about who controlled what. The percentages above are shares of that smaller group, not of every transaction ever made.

    1,414,975,622 transactions in all · 231,916,245 we can read

  4. How many real owners are behind all those addresses?

    425.8 million
    addresses seen
    Every address that has ever appeared in a transaction we can read.
    88.9 million
    separate owners
    Addresses grouped together when the chain shows one wallet controlling them.
    4.8x
    addresses per owner
    Counting addresses instead of owners overstates the crowd by roughly this much.

  5. What does this mean for you?

    Treat address counts with suspicion

    Any chart that counts Bitcoin addresses is counting something closer to bank account numbers than to people. The single largest group we can identify holds 13.8% of all the addresses we have ever seen, which is what happens when exchanges and custodians shuffle coins between their own wallets. That is one reason a rising address count does not, by itself, mean more people own Bitcoin.

    It also cuts the other way. Because so little is deliberately mixed, most of what happens on Bitcoin stays legible to anyone patient enough to read it.

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Understanding Transaction Privacy

Public, not anonymous. Every Bitcoin payment ever made sits in a ledger anyone can download, and it stays there forever. Names are not attached, but the payments are, and a payment you can see is a payment you can follow. That is the trade Bitcoin makes: no bank decides who may transact, and in exchange the record is open to everybody.

Why some transactions are harder to read. Most payments have one payer sending coins to someone, and the shape of that is easy to follow. Some do not. A few people pool a payment together on purpose so the trail between sender and receiver breaks. Others need several signatures before coins can move, which is normal for a company or a shared account, and it shows the chain a group instead of a person. A small number we simply cannot place with confidence, and we count those honestly rather than folding them in with the rest.

Addresses are not people. A single owner can make a new address for every payment they receive, and large companies make millions of them. That is why the number of addresses on Bitcoin is far larger than the number of owners, and why any chart counting addresses is closer to counting bank account numbers than customers. Grouping addresses back into their owners is what makes the difference between the two numbers visible.

What we will not claim. Grouping addresses tells you that one wallet controlled several of them. It does not tell you whose wallet it is. We name organisations only where a public source already published the connection, and we do not attempt to identify individuals. Where the evidence runs out, the honest answer is a number without a name.