Today I saw Adi Shamir (you know, the S in RSA) and managed to talk with him a bit about Bitcoin.
Thank you! Must have been an interesting little chat you had.
Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/584
Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction GraphDorit Ron and Adi Shamir
Abstract: The Bitcoin scheme is a rare example of a large scale global payment system in which all the transactions are publicly accessible (but in an anonymous way). We downloaded the full history of this scheme, and analyzed many statistical properties of its associated transaction graph. In this paper we answer for the first time a variety of interesting questions about the typical behavior of account owners, how they acquire and how they spend their Bitcoins, the balance of Bitcoins they keep in their accounts, and how they move Bitcoins between their various accounts in order to better protect their privacy. In addition, we isolated all the large transactions in the system, and discovered that almost all of them are closely related to a single large transaction that took place in November 2010, even though the associated users apparently tried to hide this fact with many strange looking long chains and fork-merge structures in the transaction graph.
Category Keywords: Bitcoin, digital coins, electronic cash, payment systems, transaction graphs, quantitative analysis
Date: received 14 Oct 2012
http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584 
A fitting quote for the occasion:
Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Marythe whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.
It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trim Tab.
Buckminster Fuller
