How do they do it? i thought the markets would keep this secret. for nucleus it has 32,000 wallets.
Why does walletexplorer only have the wallets of some markets and not others ?
thanks just curious
How does walletexplorer find the market's wallet address?
How do they do it? i thought the markets would keep this secret. for nucleus it has 32,000 wallets.
Why does walletexplorer only have the wallets of some markets and not others ?
thanks just curious
[2 Points] Axaq:
[1 Points] alfabi:
Here is u/jstolfi explanation.
Aleš's algorithm is very simple: if two addresses appear as inputs to the same transaction, it assumes that they belong to the same wallet. That is because normally one needs to have both private keys to sign the transaction.
His "wallets" are clusters of addresses,such that all addresses in a cluster are connected by a path of one or more of these links, and there is no connection between any two addresses in different clusters. (In mathematicall language, they are the equivalence classes of the reflexive,symmetric, and transitive closure of the "appear together" relation; or the connected components of the "appear together" graph.)
Some of those "wallets" can be identified with famous entities by addresses that were published somewhere, or by experiment (send a few satoshis to Bitstamp, and wait for that receiving address get merged into some big wallet).
The algorithm can fail in two ways. If BitPay (for example) has some receiving addresses that were never merged with the others, those addresses will appear as an separate wallet with a nondescript numeric "name". (For that reason, in fact, each time the database is rebuilt some wallets may gain "new" transactions that happened arbitrarily far in the past.)
The other possible failure is that one can issue a transaction where the inputs belong to two different people, each signing his part of the transaction. The CoinJoin service does that all the time. For that reason, most of the addresses that were used with CoinJoin ended up in one humongous wallet, which Aleš called "MtGOXandOthers" before he knew what it actually was.
You can quite easily find the hot wallet of a market by following the Bitcoin trail from the deposit addresses - usually they are simple enough to be found by an automated system. I haven't actually used Wallet explorer, never needed to so unsure on their methods but they probably have contributors who add the wallets to their directory and they will be labelled by market name, hence why you can simply enter the markets name into the URL for most of them.