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Bitcoin is a digital currency designed to rely on a decentralized, trustlessnetwork of anonymous agents. Using a pseudonymous-address-linking procedurethat achieves >99% sensitivity and >99% specificity, we reveal that betweenlaunch (January 3rd, 2009), and when the price reached $1 (February 9th, 2011),most bitcoin was mined by only sixty-four agents. This was due to the rapidemergence of Pareto distributions in bitcoin income, producing such extensiveresource centralization that almost all contemporary bitcoin addresses can beconnected to these top agents by a chain of six transactions. Centralizationcreated a social dilemma. Attackers could routinely exploit bitcoin via a "51%attack", making it possible for them to repeatedly spend the same bitcoins. Yetdoing so would harm the community. Strikingly, we find that potential attackersalways chose to cooperate instead. We model this dilemma using an N-playerCentipede game in which anonymous players can choose to exploit, and therebyundermine, an appreciating good. Combining theory and economic experiments, weshow that, even when individual payoffs are unchanged, cooperation is morefrequent when the game is played by an anonymous group. Although bitcoin wasdesigned to rely on a decentralized, trustless network of anonymous agents, itsearly success rested instead on cooperation among a small group of altruisticfounders.

Cooperation among an anonymous group protected Bitcoin during failures of decentralization