Bitcoin is a decentralized, pseudonymous cryptocurrency that is one of the
most used digital assets to date. Its unregulated nature and inherent anonymity
of users have led to a dramatic increase in its use for illicit activities.
This calls for the development of novel methods capable of characterizing
different entities in the Bitcoin network. In this paper, a method to attack
Bitcoin anonymity is presented, leveraging a novel cascading machine learning
approach that requires only a few features directly extracted from Bitcoin
blockchain data. Cascading, used to enrich entities information with data from
previous classifications, led to considerably improved multi-class
classification performance with excellent values of Precision close to 1.0 for
each considered class. Final models were implemented and compared using
different machine learning models and showed significantly higher accuracy
compared to their baseline implementation. Our approach can contribute to the
development of effective tools for Bitcoin entity characterization, which may
assist in uncovering illegal activities.