Evolutionary Structural Analysis of the Bitcoin Network

We model the Bitcoin transaction graph in small time slices using several different models, including one of our own. In order to gauge the effectiveness of each model, we compare some of the attributes of the generated graphs, like diameter, clustering, etc. While our model captures some features of the Bitcoin graph, none of the models fully capture its complexity. We also present a possible algorithm for detection of money laundering, and show that it does detect abnormalities present in Bitcoin but not present in our models.