There are two authors. We made a decision not to reveal names (or forum names, etc), because we are doing academic research here. Our motivation is to let peop

There are two authors. We made a decision not to reveal names (or forum names, etc), because we are doing academic research here. Our motivation is to let people know they aren't inherently anonymous when they use Bitcoin, rather than to publicly compromise the privacy of as many individuals as we can. We could have published a mapping between information we had (typically bitcoin forum usernames, twitter handles, lists of names of organisations) and sets of bitcoin addresses. This would probably have made our point in a harder-to-argue-with way, but probably wouldn't be a good thing to do. Of course we don't typically have names and addresses of the people using Bitcoin. We weren't interested in arguing that its often possible to go from, say, forum IDs, or twitter accounts, to names and addresses. I suspect everyone knows that. What we were trying to show is that Bitcoin doesn't automatically hide your identity, and that a lot of activity on Bitcoin, that seems superficially hard to analyse, can actually be analysed. Our point was that a lot of people might think the Bitcoin system is making them anonymous, because they are often using different Bitcoin addresses, but that people had better be careful (say, if they are using Bitcoin while living in a repressive regime) because its much easier to link your different addresses than you might think.