Detecting Bitcoin Nodes by the Cyberspace Search Engines

Ruiguang Li, Jiawei Zhu, Jiaqi Gao, Fudong Wu, Dawei Xu, Liehuang Zhu

Abstract: Nowadays, the cyberspace search engines have showed great power to find entities and services in the network, which provide new ideas and methods to detect the Bitcoin nodes. This paper introduces the Bitcoin’s P2P network and nodes including the reachable nodes and the unreachable nodes. Then, the results of detecting reachable nodes by the cyberspace search engines are showed. Next, the author proposes a new approach to find and verify the unreachable nodes by the cyberspace search engines. Finally, this paper illustrates the de-anonymization of some Bitcoin nodes by the cyberspace search engines, which map some node’s IP addresses to real Bitcoin entities, such as Zeblockchain (a browser website), Microwallet (a wallet website) and Laurentia Pool (a non-profit pool website).