25 Nov 2013 / Washington Post – One of the unique things about Bitcoin is that every transaction on its network is publicly available for anyone to examine. Any time a user sends a payment to another user, that transaction is reflected in the “blockchain,” a global, permanent ledger of Bitcoin transactions.
You can examine every Bitcoin transaction that has ever occurred at a site called blockchain.info. And that site says that a truly massive Bitcoin transaction occurred yesterday:
Those long strings of seemingly random letters and numbers are Bitcoin addresses. Each is associated with a secret encryption key that allows the owner of that address to transmit the bitcoins to another address. In this particular transaction, bitcoins from 15 different Bitcoin addresses were consolidated and sent to address “12sENwECeRSmTeDwyLNqwh47JistZqFmW8.” The size of the transaction? 194,993 bitcoins. Given that one bitcoin is worth around $800 right now, the transaction is valued at more than $150 million.
Who was responsible for the transaction? I asked Sarah Meiklejohn, a computer scientist at the University of California, San Diego, for her thoughts. She’s the author of a recent paper demonstrating that sophisticated analysis can reveal a lot of information about who is responsible for Bitcoin transactions. She has compiled a large database of Bitcoin addresses tagged with their likely owners.
While she says she can’t be sure, Meiklejohn says that that 194,993-bitcoin transaction was probably done by Bitstamp, the world’s second-largest exchange for trading dollars for bitcoins:…… Read more
