BitCoin’s Popularity Is Undermining Promises of Anonymity

The article summarizes academic research showing that Bitcoin's theoretical anonymity is weakened in practice: researchers used public blockchain data, exchange and forum disclosures, and heuristics (input clustering and change-address analysis) to reduce millions of public keys into a few million clusters and positively identify hundreds of institutional clusters, demonstrating that a significant fraction of Bitcoin activity can be linked to real-world actors and undermining claims of complete anonymity.