On November 6, 2014 the FBI, working with the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, shut down Silk Road 2.0.

An illicit marketplace, Silk Road 2.0 operated in a similar fashion as the original Silk Road, which was seized by the FBI in October 2013. Both these sites utilized the onion routing browser Tor for anonymity. Illegal goods were for only for sale in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

According to a published complaint from the US Attorney’s Office, Silk Road 2.0 was conducting $8m in business per month.

After an analysis post following the trail of MintPal funds was posted on this blog, an originating point to look at Silk Road 2.0 transactions was tweeted to @Coinalytics:

@coinalytics interesting mintpal post, please to be looking at http://t.co/orXsB2Rjjt and see if you can connect other dots?

— cazalla (@cazalla662) November 11, 2014

The link tweeted...

After the previous blog post investigating where the Moolah bitcoin trail headed, there was some great community feedback. Most of it was positive, and there were even people willing to lend a hand.

Sometimes, the bitcoin community provides Coinalytics with shortcuts. Given an address, and its contextual meaning, it is easier to explain relationships.

This is the case with MintPal, an exchange involved with the now-insolvent Moolah.

@coinalytics check out 1NjBaY8fKg85TfCvP1AoQGUSXjifD5Nw2G, address Ryan received all MintPal funds at

— Ben Doernberg (@BenDoernberg) October 27, 2014

Coinalytics can take addresses provided by the community and relate them to other addresses and entities.

Taking two addresses, 1NjBaY8fKg85TfCvP1AoQGUSXjifD5Nw2G, an address where MintPal received funds from, and 12ERwg1AA7dE9njaitaqLmdbcj2jh543GW, an additional address provided, Coinalytics was...

In a recent blog post, the digital currency platform Moolah announced its closure, with plans to file for bankruptcy.

The announcement cited Moolah was experiencing financial problems, stating, “money came in, far more money went out.”

Moolah and MintPal operator Moopay LTD has announced that it will seek bankruptcy protection http://t.co/8O05h5RAXD

— CoinDesk (@coindesk) October 15, 2014

Moolah has publicly stated their intention to return all customer-owned funds.

The community, by using the public blockchain ledger, is able to track where all Bitcoin-related balances are located.

Thanks to all who notified us of the mintpal coins. https://t.co/nH85upTbMW We are vigilant on not let them pass through Bitstamp

— Bitstamp (@Bitstamp) October 20, 2014

Members of the Bitcoin community have a responsibility to make sure that fraud is kept to a minimum. Value exchanged on the...

Bitcoin has three major properties: It is a store of value, public ledger and a payment mechanism.

Right now, Bitcoin’s ability to be a payment mechanism lacks a degree of assurance. This is because of problems with the network’s ability to securely facilitate fast transactions.

A fast transaction is where the exchange of goods or services for Bitcoin is not yet confirmed on the blockchain. Reliable blockchain confirmation is generally considered confirmed 6 to 10 times, which does not complete in less than an hour.

Consider Bitcoin brick and mortar or e-commerce merchants. In these instances, a transaction must complete in a much smaller timeframe – often under a minute.

This interval of time is nothing close to the 6 confirmations for complete confirmation on the blockchain.

Depending on hash rate, it can take 6 block confirmations to obtain 99% likelihood a transaction in a...

The blockchain’s role in bitcoin helps understand what is happening within the network. Right now, however, it is difficult to obtain context into the blockchain when looking at its data alone.

This is the reason why we believe clusters are an important step to unlock useful information that exists within the blockchain. Clusters are defined by Coinalytics as a set of addresses controlled by the same private cryptographic key.

The starting point for this context begins with a bitcoin address – an originating source for data.

Since bitcoin allows the use of many addresses, it is important to build out the relations between them to gain knowledge about network activity. This is why Coinalytics takes blockchain data and build clusters to show how bitcoin addresses relate to one another.

A group of clusters and corresponding relationships.

Another entry point to clustering besides...