Mapping of the Peercoin world - I need your help to identify some addresses!

General
1

Dear Peercoiners,

I would like to talk to you about a side project I am currently working on. Within a few weeks I will make public several studies which are directly linked to Peercoin and, as I will show, to all of you - my fellow Peercoiners.

The reason why I’m posting here, teasing you a little about it is because I wanted to test the waters, as they say, get a sense of how some of the disclosures will be appreciated among our community. And also, to ask if some of you here would like to contribute to my work.

So, what is this side project about?

With some of the tools I have developed for my main and more important project, I realised that I was actually able to map the entire Peercoin world, and by that I mean all transactions that have ever occurred within Peercoin. This network mapping allowed me to identify entities such as exchanges, mining pools, people, but also hot and cold wallets. The map also allows us to understand interactions between entities, identify miners, people who trade, people who hold their coins, and of course how much is being sent and collected by everyone.

Enough talk. This PDF file will hopefully give you a little glimpse into this work: http://pchain.info/THIREUS_PEERCOIN_ALL_BLOCKS.pdf

This isn’t much, as this is a filter that I have applied around my name, which allows me to see some of my public interactions. Each node on this map represents a Peercoin address or a wallet (several addresses belonging to the same entity or person). The bigger a node, the bigger the associated wallet balance. Links between nodes represent all transactions (IN and OUT) between entities.

I was able to map all Peercoin addresses (I won’t disclose this map now as I still have some work to do on it). So far, I have identified more than 1500 individuals including the main exchanges and mining pools (their names are displayed on the graph). The main exchange BTC-E was identified, its cold wallet address was identified as well. Other exchanges have also been identified (their cold wallets too) but not their actual names. It is on this last part that I would require your help.

[center]
The Peercoin World - Just a small piece of it[/center]

How can you contribute?

It’s fairly simple. Every transaction that you have ever made or received with your Peercoin wallet can help me a lot (even those made in the past years ago with entities such as mining pools). If you can put a name on an address to which you sent or received coins from in the past, and if you are willing to disclose it to me, this would be a huge contribution. A single name can disclose a wallet of several thousands of addresses.

What’s the point of doing this?

As many of you know, I am a strong Peercoin believer and supporter. I hope that the conclusions behind all of these studies will contribute to improving our Peercoin ecosystem and development. I strongly believe that these studies will be a major step forward in having a better understanding of the current status of Peercoin and will hopefully give a big push in taking the appropriate measures to move things forward.

As a small reward, I can provide (on demand) individual mappings of the contributors who will help me disclosing major PPC addresses (such as exchanges or mining pools).
Thank you everyone.

How to contact me?

There are several options to contact me:

Edit 1: Fixed the download link.
Edit 2: Few corrections.
Edit 3: Added methods to contact me.

2

Nice, it’s something that some of us need. Some of us don’t.
You know, privacy concern.

3

[quote=“redlee, post:2, topic:3556”]Nice, it’s something that some of us need. Some of us don’t.
You know, privacy concern.[/quote]

Yes. Some people will argue that Peercoin is an anonymous coin (which it is clearly not), some others will argue that my work is based on publicly available information. I’m waiting for people’s input on this topic and will take the appropriate measures to avoid cataclysmic reactions when studies will be published :).

4

Hey Thierus! So what you’re looking for is us giving you addresses to which we received and sent coins, and associate our username to them? Or are you looking for us to identify the entity that sent coins and the entity to which we sent out? I’m in! I trust you implicitly and want to contribute, so I just want to make sure I am providing what you need.
My wallet is very modest, with only a handful of tranzactions.
But I can call out Peer4commit, Shapeshift and the Ecoining pool.

5

[quote=“fishb0ne, post:4, topic:3556”]Hey Thierus! So what you’re looking for is us giving you addresses to which we received and sent coins, and associate our username to them? I’m in! I trust you implicitly and want to contribute, so I just want to make sure I am providing what you need.
My wallet is very modest, with only a handful of tranzactions.[/quote]

Hi fishb0ne, thank you. Any addresses for which you know for sure who is the owner is good to take. The most valuable ones are exchanges or mining platforms as they appear to be the ones that hold or move coins a lot.

Please respect the privacy of people you exchanged coins with. Ask them first if they agree that you disclose their addresses if these ones are not already public. If they are already public somewhere (you can google the address) it will be perfectly fine.

For entities such as exchanges or mining platforms, there will be zero privacy issue so you can go ahead.

Thank you.

6

Since I am still learning here … if I received coins from an exchange, what I would be providing to you is the address or addresses from which the coins originated, right?

7

Transactions IN are the most valuable ones. When an exchange sends you coins it usually bulks several transactions into a single one. For example, let’s say this exchange needs to pay User1 and User2, then it will be reflected in one single big transaction. Transactions (TX) have two parts: IN (INPUT) and OUT (OUTPUT). TX IN contains the list of addresses that are used to pay. TX OUT contains the list of addresses to which coins need to be sent to (i.e. User1 PPC address and User2 PPC address).

In short. If you know which exchange paid you, and if you can get the Transaction ID, you will be able to see the list of addresses contained in TX IN that this exchange controls. This list of addresses is what I will use tag the exchange name on.

You can provide me with the transaction ID and with the name of the exchange/entity. And I will collect the PPC addresses myself.

For a practical example:

This is my address: PThireusGvcB3npn7Zf2LrRtEV2FFkvUMj, you can see all my transactions here. If you click on one, for example the very last one in the list: 2cbe0d18e22bbe5b9cbb602ae4d086ee0f64f227a25202a60ed9b8e9ff06f1ea (this number is the Transaction ID) you will see two fields “Inputs” and “Outputs”.

Inputs contains the list of addresses that the person who paid me controls. So if I know that this transaction came from BTC-E for example, I will be able to say that both ‘PGjQ7o1E7qmMfQJvBCL6DASF8P4CM4X6CQ’ and ‘P9wM6fpr4GPKYKSwNHnDtmatAf9QeLnupK’ belong to BTC-E (which is not the case here, that was just an example).

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That makes sense. Thank you! I’ll provide what you need.

9

Quick update:

Some people asked how to contact me anonymously or privately. I’ve added the following notes to the initial post on this thread:

Thank you all for your contribution. So far I’m still looking for some Chinese exchange addresses such as BTC38 or Jubi. I would also require more addresses for Cryptsy as they appear to be using an elaborated system to hide their hot wallet addresses.

10

BTC38 cold wallet http://bkchain.org/ppc/address/PA8nHYU28Z7YY1R4BaX1E5GtpYbAq9AvCk

according to http://www.btc38.com/trade/reserves_en.html

BTER cold wallet https://bkchain.org/ppc/address/P95bDCeCsZUtJgwNTeNqNAPV8BTNmPSXrs

according to https://bter.com/article/968

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BTC38 cold wallet http://bkchain.org/ppc/address/PA8nHYU28Z7YY1R4BaX1E5GtpYbAq9AvCk

according to http://www.btc38.com/trade/reserves_en.html

BTER cold wallet https://bkchain.org/ppc/address/P95bDCeCsZUtJgwNTeNqNAPV8BTNmPSXrs

according to https://bter.com/article/968[/quote]

Awesome! Thank you Gin that’s really helpful!