arXiv subjects

Joshua Levett

Publications and source records attributed to Joshua Levett.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

No Country for Old Privacy: The Evolving Challenges of Anonymity in Bitcoin

We present a longitudinal measurement study on the adoption of detectable, second-generation anonymisation protocols in the Bitcoin network, including CoinJoin, CoinSwap, CoinShuffle and Stealth Addresses. By implementing and refining a suite of heuristic filters, we identify over 5.94 million CoinJoin and 23.3 million CoinSwap transactions. Besides, the use of CoinShuffle was unexpectedly found to be closely aligned with the Wasabi wallet operation period. Our analysis reveals consistently low adoption rates, with these protocols constituting less than 1% of network transactions, and a sharp decline in detectable usage following key regulatory events. Furthermore, we find no evidence of standardised Stealth Address adoption, indicating a failure to converge on a common privacy standard. This study provides a comprehensive picture of a niche ecosystem whose on-chain visibility has been largely suppressed, strongly suggesting the migration of privacy-seeking users to less transparent and less detectable methods.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Unveiling Internet Censorship: Analysing the Impact of Nation States' Content Control Efforts on Internet Architecture and Routing Patterns

Heightened interest from nation states to perform content censorship make it evermore critical to identify the impact of censorship efforts on the Internet. We undertake a study of Internet architecture, capturing the state of Internet topology with greater completeness than existing state-of-the-art. We describe our methodology for this, including the tooling we create to collect and process data from a wide range of sources. We analyse this data to find key patterns in nation states with higher censorship, discovering a funnelling effect wherein higher Internet censorship effort is reflected in a constraining effect on a state's Internet routing architecture. However, there are a small number of nation states that do not follow this trend, for which we provide an analysis and explanation, demonstrating a relationship between geographical factors in addition to geopolitics. In summary, our work provides a deeper understanding of how these censorship measures impact the overall functioning and dynamics of the Internet.

cs.NI↗