How BlockShield builds an exchange's Bitcoin address set by common-input clustering, why confidence is published, and why an all-failed sweep is refused.
The Bitcoin balance held across the address set an exchange controls, and how that balance changed over a window — the difference between 'a whale moved 500 BTC' and 'this exchange's reserve fell by 9,000 BTC over a month'.
Those are different questions. Per-transaction monitoring cannot answer the second one: it needs the SET of addresses an entity controls and a balance series over that set.
The address set is built by common-input-ownership clustering. When a transaction spends outputs from several addresses at once, whoever signed it held the keys to all of them, so starting from curated exchange labels the walk collects co-spent addresses outward.
That is the standard heuristic and it IS a heuristic. Transactions that deliberately combine inputs from unrelated parties break it; the obvious cases are skipped, the residual risk is that a cluster over-collects, and a confidence figure is published for that reason. The curated seed set stays authoritative.
NULL is not zero at the write layer. During a two-host provider outage an empty sum was once stored as three exchanges' reserves: a completeness flag recorded the failure, but the VALUE beside it was a lie no later reader could tell from a real zero, and a downstream exclusion figure collapsed from hundreds of thousands of BTC to a fraction of one. An all-failed sweep is now refused outright — stale and saying so beats wrong and silent.
Consumers count negligible clusters OUT by name rather than summing them, because 'minus 0 BTC' is an exclusion caption that excludes nothing.
A reserve is a balance, not an intention. Coins leaving an exchange are as consistent with a custody migration as with accumulation.
Cluster coverage differs per exchange, so comparing two exchanges' reserves compares two different degrees of completeness. The tracked-cluster count travels with the figure.
This platform tracks a small number of clusters. Subtracting them from a chain-wide aggregate is captioned as exactly that, and never as excluding every exchange.
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