[Cryptography] How ‘Trustless’ Is Bitcoin, Really?

[John Young]

NY Times, June 6, 2022
 
How ‘Trustless’ Is Bitcoin, Really?
 
In myth, the cryptocurrency is egalitarian, decentralized and all but anonymous. The reality is very different, scientists have found.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/science/bitcoin-nakamoto-blackburn-crypto.html
 
"Aggregating multiple leakages, Ms. Blackburn consolidated many Bitcoin addresses, which might have seemed to represent many miners, into few. She pieced together a catalog of agents and concluded that, in those first two years, 64 key players — some of whom were the community’s “founders,” as the researchers called them — mined most of the Bitcoin that existed at the time."
 
Related paper:
 
https://aidenlab.org/bitcoin.pdf