A Network Analyst's View of the Block Chain. Martin Harrigan is a computer scientist and software developer. He is the founder of QuantaBytes, an Irish startup developing a suite of tools for analyzing and visualising bitcoin’s block chain. He is also the co-author of one of the earliest academic papers to study the network properties of the block chain and its implications for anonymity. The block chain is a decentralised, consensus-driven ledger of every successful bitcoin transaction to date. As of the 300,000th block, the ledger includes over 38 million transactions.
Aside from being a monumental technical achievement, the block chain is a fascinating dataset. In this network, every node represents a transaction, and every (directed) edge represents a flow of bitcoins from an output of one transaction to an input of another. Network science Network science is the study of complex networks. The network as a whole is too large and complex for most network visualisation tools. Giant connected component Fourteen degrees of separation. Bitcoin's Development Visualized (up to v0.9)
Fiatleak - watch the world's currencies flow into BTC in realtime. Bitcoin-Infographic.jpg (JPEG Image, 1871 × 1420 pixels) - Scaled (54%) The United Nations of Bitcoin. This is a map of every Bitcoin download (that was able to be traced to a country), by operating system. Each dot is an individual Bitcoin download. The yellow dots are a general reference of all Bitcoin downloads ever while the red ones call out a specific OS used in the download. Bitcoin downloads by country, by operating system. At least, when the specific country was known. What is Bitcoin? Closer Look I look for three things in the geographic dispersion. Reluctant Companion Map And, since Bitcoin downloads are intrinsically correlated with the population size, I made this lame choropleth map to illustrate the proportional variability in Bitcoin "popularity" by country.
About Those Dots...