The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) published a report refuting the information that 46% of the volume of transactions in bitcoin are associated with illegal activities.
The NBER posted a report stating that the share of illegal transactions in BTC is no more than 3%. On the other hand, researchers argue that the volume of bitcoins used in exchange trading, which is mostly speculative, accounts for about 80% of the total volume of cryptocurrencies.
The authors of the report, Igor Makarov of the London School of Economics and Antoinette Schoar of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in their study refute a report published in 2019, according to which more than 46% of BTC transactions are associated with illegal detail.
“Analysts who used the Foley method in 2019 focused only on payments for goods and services, and deliberately excluded data from cryptocurrency exchanges from their calculations. In the course of our research, we found out that the bulk of BTC transactions are related to exchange trading, and this seriously changes the denominator. ”
The Fowley score is based on the fact that any cluster is considered illegal if the majority of its transactions are with previously identified illegal clusters, the researchers note. This method “does not distinguish between real users and short-lived transit clusters that exist solely to hide the trace.”
Unlike the method used in the 2019 study, Makarov and Shoar incorporate data from exchanges, over-the-counter (OTC) platforms, and exchange sites when calculating actual bitcoin transaction volumes. Analysts have concluded that the BTC transaction volume associated with exchange trading accounts for about 80% of the total cryptocurrency transaction volume. The remaining 20% is accounted for by the purchase of goods and services for bitcoin.
Makarov and Shoar agreed with the global public concern about the anonymous nature of Bitcoin transactions. But they insist that “it is important to correctly assess the scale of transactional activity in order to understand what are the main driving forces that form the value of bitcoin.
According to the January data of the analytical company Chainalysis, last year the share of cryptocurrency transactions associated with illegal activities decreased markedly – from 2.1% in 2019 to 0.34% in 2020.
