ABSTRACT
Bitcoin is a decentralised virtual currency whose usage has skyrocketed since its introduction in January 2009. Bitcoin is a form of electronic cash that was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and deployed on 3 January 2009. To understand how peers in the Bitcoin network can collectively generate a transaction ledger, we must first understand what a Bitcoin transaction looks like. The Bitcoin protocol allows for the generation of bitcoins and the basic transfer of bitcoins from one participant to another, but one might naturally wonder where to spend bitcoins, or if there is any way to obtain them besides mining them oneself. In theory, the use of pseudonyms within Bitcoin provides a property called unlinkability, which says that users’ transactions using one set of pseudonyms should not be linked to their transactions using a different set of pseudonyms.
