Bitcoin is an open peer-to-peer network that allows for a variety of behaviors among network participants. I’ve been monitoring the Bitcoin network for a few years now and started documenting my observations. The goal is to educate and inform about some of the weird activity happening in the Bitcoin network.
Different mining pools sending out the same or a similar block template to miners is an indicator for proxy pooling. Knowing about proxy pools is important when discussing mining pool centralization. To find similarities between mining pool block templates, I compare the Merkle branches pools sent …
I noticed multiple ERROR: AcceptBlock: bad-witness-nonce-size errors in the debug log of my Bitcoin Core node. These indicate that a block my node received is invalid and not accepted. It turned out that these are ViaBTC’s blocks, broadcast by their mining pool software, where transaction …
My project, miningpool-observer, aims to detect when Bitcoin mining pools are not mining transactions they could have been mining. Over the past few weeks, it detected six missing transactions spending from OFAC-sanctioned addresses. This post examines whether these transactions were intentionally …
This post describes and discusses the behavior of an entity I call LinkingLion. The entity opens connections to many Bitcoin nodes using four IP address ranges and listens to transaction announcements. This might allow the entity to link newly broadcast transactions to node IP addresses. The entity …
My miningpool-observer project aims to detect when mining pools don’t mine transactions they could have mined. Right after taproot activation, it caught that F2Pool and AntPool didn’t mine P2TR (Pay-to-Taproot) spending transactions. This post is a write-up of this observation.
Transactions sent with Blockchain.com wallets make up for about a third of all Bitcoin transactions. A methodology to identify these transactions is described and used. Insights about the wallet-usage are derived from the resulting dataset. The privacy implications and possible improvements are …
At around 13:00 UTC every day, BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange and derivative trading platform, broadcasts multiple megabytes of large transactions into the Bitcoin network. This affects the transaction fees paid during European afternoons and US business hours. The transaction size could be …
Some of the regularly used Bitcoin wallets, for example, the Bitcoin Core wallet and the Electrum Bitcoin Wallet, set the locktime of newly constructed transactions to the current block height. This is as an anti-fee-sniping measure and visible as a stair-like pattern when plotting time-locked …
