Probably the most important academic research in the crypto world to date was published today. A study that reviews Bitcoin’s origins and clarifies one of its main conclusions: Bitcoin’s decentralization was more of a philosophy than a real thing. At least in its early years.

We learned through the New York Times about this study led by Alyssa Blackburn, a data scientist at Rice University. For years, researchers and another group of scientists from six universities around the world have been collecting and analyzing Bitcoin blockchains until the first transactions arrived in January 2009.

A gentleman’s agreement. According to the research, Bitcoin’s early years were sustained as a small group decided not to attack the network when they could easily do so. According to the document, this group of anonymous owners cooperated in some way not to interfere, even though “anonymity is generally believed to reduce cooperation.”

In those years, a group of 64 agents was found to have mined most of Bitcoin. A much lower number than previously thought, given that the weight of the net is calculated to be at least a thousand people. Although these 64 parties did not know each other technically, they acted in the interests of Bitcoin.

Back then, it was very easy to perform 51% attacks. If there are fewer miners, a smaller group has a better chance of coming together to dominate the network. In the early years, it is estimated that a group of about five people had enough strength to achieve this. This is called “51% attacks”.

As the study explains, in October 2010, there were five six-hour periods during which a miner, one of the first to use a GPU for mining, could single-handedly carry out this attack. “Surprisingly, we found that potential attackers always chose to cooperate instead,” they say.

Group of 64 agents who managed Bitcoin for two years. From January 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin, until February 9, 2011, when the price reached one dollar, the network was in the hands of 64 agents represented on the map in this article. The so-called anonymity is not so much, as it is possible to find out the address and size of their portfolio. The study concludes that organizations like the US NSA could have this information for a long time if they were able to trace the trail there.

Your identity has not been compromised. The researchers explained that they did not detect the names of any of the 64 miners, but they warn that if one does, the privacy of many users will be compromised, as “it would be easy to identify short transaction paths linking any destination addresses.”

But setting routes is “easy”. The study explains that as of 2017, 99% of Bitcoin addresses can be traced with a maximum of six transactions from one of these top 64 brokers. Six degrees of separation according to these 64 middlemen, which shows the lack of decentralization in Bitcoin’s early years.

The researchers issue a caveat: If a government agency identifies these 64 intermediaries, it can anonymize nearly any Bitcoin address by tracking up to six transactions.

on Xataka | Cryptocurrencies: what they are, how they work, and what else is there besides Bitcoin?