Quote from: bluedev1 on July 31, 2013, 10:37 amThese accounts arent visible on the bitcoin network though, so the only thing we can even hope to see by looking at the public transactions is when money goes into and comes out of the set of addresses that represent the collective account balances of all silk road users, Meiklejohn wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity. By manually tagging a handful of silk road addresses (via direct interaction) and then bootstrapping using the heuristic I described to label many more (around 250,000 in total), we are able to achieve this second goal by identifying addresses in the network that are owned by silk road.This is not actually a very compelling argument. If a new wallet got created every time a deposit was made, then you still can't prove that it's an SR wallet (unless you made the deposit yourself, as they did in this research, uh-DUH).Look at it like this: say you're one of the first people to use SR (smaller numbers make it easier to see). So there's 3 bitcoin addresses owned by SR so far. You come along and generate another, a 4th. You send money to this 4th address. Part of SR is it's tumbler, so when you send to that 4th address it in turn sends to one (or more) of the other 3 addresses. But if any of those addresses can be linked to SR, then so can your 4th address.... as can the 5th, and the 6th, as well as the 2 millionth all the way up the chain. Is it guaranteed or easy? No, of course not. That's what makes it research. Really it all hinges on just how good their algorithm is. But you can see how it's at least possible, if not assured.