ORBITAAL: cOmpRehensive BItcoin daTaset for temorAl grAph anaLysis

Dataset Construction

This dataset captures the temporal network of Bitcoin (BTC) flow exchanged between entities at the finest time resolution in UNIX timestamp. Its construction is based on the blockchain covering the period from January, 3rd  of 2009 to January the 25th of 2021. The blockchain extraction has been made using bitcoin-etl  (https://github.com/blockchain-etl/bitcoin-etl) Python package. The entity-entity network is built by aggregating Bitcoin addresses using the common-input heuristic [1] as well as popular Bitcoin users' addresses provided by https://www.walletexplorer.com/

[1] M. Harrigan and C. Fretter, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Address Clustering," 2016 Intl IEEE Conferences on Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing, Advanced and Trusted Computing, Scalable Computing and Communications, Cloud and Big Data Computing, Internet of People, and Smart World Congress (UIC/ATC/ScalCom/CBDCom/IoP/SmartWorld), Toulouse, France, 2016, pp. 368-373, doi: 10.1109/UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP-SmartWorld.2016.0071.keywords: {Online banking;Merging;Protocols;Upper bound;Bipartite graph;Electronic mail;Size measurement;bitcoin;cryptocurrency;blockchain},

Dataset Description

Bitcoin Activity Temporal Coverage: From 03 January 2009 to 25 January 2021

Overview:

This dataset provides a comprehensive representation of Bitcoin exchanges between entities over a significant temporal span, spanning from the inception of Bitcoin to recent years. It encompasses various temporal resolutions and representations to facilitate nuanced analyses of Bitcoin transactions and network dynamics.

Contents:

The dataset is distributed across three compressed archives:

orbitaal-stream_graph.tar.gz:

The root directory is STREAM_GRAPH/

Contains a graph stream representation of Bitcoin exchanges at the finest temporal scale, corresponding to the validation time of each block (averaging approximately 10 minutes).

Organized into yearly subdirectories (formatted as year=YYYY/), each containing a .parquet file for the respective year.

orbitaal-snapshots.tar.gz:

The root directory is SNAPSHOT/

Contains snapshot network representations constructed with varying temporal windows: yearly, monthly, daily, and hourly.

Each related date subdirectory (formatted as year=YYYY/month=MM/day=DD/hour=HH/) has a corresponding .parquet file representing the Bitcoin exchange network at that specific time.

orbitaal-nodetable.tar.gz:

The root directory is NODE_TABLE/

Contains a single .parquet file representing entity details.

Includes attributes such as the first and last timestamp of activity, Bitcoin balance (received - sent), and entity names if corresponding address sets are sourced from the WalletExplorer website.

Data Format:

All data are stored in the Apache Parquet file format, a columnar storage format optimized for analytical queries. It can be used with pyspark Python package.