Taint analysis of the Bitcoin network

Abstract: Determining the trust of an individual Bitcoin wallet is a difficult problem. There are no ratings, that offer vendors or exchanges meaningful information about the level of the taint of Bitcoins they are receiving. Lack of such information places exchanges liable in an event when the received Bitcoins are stolen or ill-gotten. In this paper, we try to solve this problem by introducing a Bitcoin address taint score called TaintRank. It provides insight into a specific wallet by taking the addresses it interacted with throughout history into consideration. This ranking method provides such Bitcoin exchange companies insight with whom they are trading.