Towards open data blockchain analytics: a Bitcoin perspective

Bitcoin is the first implementation of a technology that has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Such systems allow public read/write access to an append-only blockchain database without the need for any mediating central authority. Instead they guarantee access, security and protocol conformity through an elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic incentives. Not until the advent of the Bitcoin blockchain has such a trusted, transparent, comprehensive and granular data set of digital economic behaviours been available for public network analysis. In this article, by translating the cumbersome binary data structure of the Bitcoin blockchain into a high fidelity graph model, we demonstrate through various analyses the often overlooked social and econometric benefits of employing such a novel open data architecture. Specifically we show (a) how repeated patterns of transaction behaviours can be revealed to link user activity across t...