Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have come under increasing criticism in recent years due to a lack of regulation and transparency, but students at Trinity College Dublin believe a bitcoin credit-check database could solve the problem.
The students are hoping to develop such a database, in which potential business partners could scope each other out, reducing the risk of fraud while allowing people to maintain sufficient anonymity.
The virtual currency, which can be used to pay for goods and services, is attractive because it is not regulated by governments or banks.
However, the TCD team believe a certain degree of regulation might be a good thing, if only to reduce the risk of fraudulent business practices or money laundering taking place behind bitcoin’s closed doors.
“We wanted to develop systems that would give a ‘regulator’ a degree of visibility on the flows of bitcoin in the same way that central banks have this visibility over normal currencies,” TCD professor of computer science Donal O’Mahony said.
He said bitcoin basically acts like cash, for the internet.
“Just as an ounce of gold or a gram of salt has value across all countries, so too does the electronic bitcoin. The ‘coins’ are created using computer algorithms that are complex – it takes an ever-increasing amount of computer power to create each new one, and there is an overall cap set that no more than 21 million coins can ever be created.”
Mr O’Mahony said people who want privacy migrate to using cash, but this can be inconvenient in many ways – particularly in a world in which many transactions take place at a rapid pace and on a global scale at the mere click of a mouse button.
The research-led Trinity team of staff and students looked “under the bitcoin bonnet” and found bitcoin’s system is much like that used by Swiss numbered bank accounts. The difference is that every time someone makes a transfer from one numbered bitcoin account to another, it gets written into a giant ledger that is open for the world to see.
Using this giant ledger, called the Bitcoin Blockchain, the students were able to trawl through every bitcoin transaction to date to look for patterns.
There are millions of accounts but probably far fewer owners, as any one person can hold several bitcoin accounts.
Using a variety of helper websites and by auto-trawling the blockchain for 24 hours a day, TCD student Cian Burns built a database of all accounts before he set about linking them together to try to understand how some were connected.
“The big benefit of such a picture is that if an address is involved in fraudulent activity, tracing related addresses could protect other users from further fraud.
“Our trawl gave us a unique insight into some very high-profile Bitcoin fraud cases that were being conducted across the world. Regulation is further down the line, but a database of accounts could certainly protect people and raise the appeal of bitcoin for legitimate businesses,” he said.
