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You do realize that governments are already doing that on a massive scale with tools like Chainalysis, TRM Labs or Elliptic for example?
We are making it available to the public similar as OXT.me did so bitcoiners have access to the same tooling and can see for themselves what is possible and how they can improve their privacy.
Very true, if you follow the unknown outputs on every outgoing tx over here for example you can see that they pretend to "buy" 1 BTC everyday, when in fact they are just moving it around. :P
https://bithypha.com/cluster/address/3EMXXYYEMQvmbVfk18FMoHgry1FWKi3dkX?explorerTab=txs
That's definitely true, but we are still thinking about making it open-source. The problem we have with making it open-source is that we spent a lot of time to build a highly efficient backend written in Rust that can do very complex tasks with (for blockchain analysis standards) minimum hardware requirements. Which we think might also be very interesting for companies like Chainalysis that suffer from technical debt.
Chainalysis or other companies claiming some parts of the code, would be acceptable to us if making Bithypha open-source would still help the bitcoin community. But even though we made the backend very efficient and fast, in order to achieve that, it needs a lot of RAM. So much that to run the backend you need more RAM than the 192GB limit that most consumer hardware can handle. So we are a bit afraid that if we make it open-source, it would help those companies, while it wouldn't be useful for the bitcoin community.
For now we decided to keep it closed source, that might change in the future once we have a version that can run on an NVMe SSD for example but we can't make any promises sadly.
For the time being if you want to use Bithypha you need to either trust us or not look up your own addresses (or use vpn/tor), just like with other block explorers.
For what it's worth Bithypha is at-least not owned by an analysis company. Contrary to walletexplorer.com for example, which is used by Chainalysis to scrape users IP-addresses: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/09/21/leaked-slides-show-how-chainalysis-flags-crypto-suspects-for-cops
New and exciting features for Bithypha. :)
At the moment working on showing all transaction links between specific taint (for example an exchange) and the cluster or address a user is viewing.
It's not meant to dox individuals of-course. It's the same functionality that OXT had which allows users to add notes to addresses to share information about bitcoin exchanges, other entities or scams for example. This way users can share information and together build out a set of information that is similar to the information that is usually only visible if you use Chainalysis.
Each time a user adds a note to an address it's also visible on the cluster, so if a user adds one note it can give information about millions of addresses.
Bithypha is free to use, but not free for us to host of-course. At the moment it's just a hobby project, but we hope to eventually run on donations (or sponsors maybe) similar to mempool.space.
I assume you would like to know the link between this attributed address and the original attributed address? I don't think OXT had that, since there can be hundreds of transactions between those. We would like to eventually build something like that though.
But like @optimism wrote, we cluster addresses together based on common spend heuristics just like Chainalysis does. This way if we add an attribution to 1 address and that address is spend together with another address the second address gets the attribution as well. And if that second address is spend with a third address the third address also gets the same attribution and so on...
This way you can group millions of addresses together.
Thank you for the kind words. I think you will also like our next update. We are working on a node graph. Allowing you to manually plot graphs, or auto plot them with the auto analysis feature when combined with this taint path update. :)