Toward Open Data Blockchain Analytics: A Bitcoin Perspective.

Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'publicpermissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformitythrough its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoreticeconomic incentives, it permits censorship resistant public read-write accessto its append-only blockchain database without the need for any mediatingcentral authority. Not until its advent has such a trusted, transparent,comprehensive and granular data set of digital economic behaviours beenavailable for public network analysis. In this article, by translating thecumbersome binary data structure of the Bitcoin blockchain into a high fidelitygraph model, we demonstrate through various analyses the often overlookedsocial and econometric benefits of employing such a novel open dataarchitecture. Specifically we show (a) how repeated patterns of transactionbehaviours can be revealed to link user activity across the blockchain; (b) hownewly mined bitcoin can be associated to demonstrate individual accumulationsof wealth; (c) through application of the na\"ive quantity theory of money thatBitcoin's disinflationary properties can be revealed and measured; and (d) howthe user community can develop coordinated defences against repeated denial ofservice attacks on the network. All of the aforementioned being exemplarybenefits that would be lost with the closed data models of the 'privatepermissioned' distributed ledger architectures that are dominating enterpriselevel development due to existing blockchain issues of governance, scalabilityand confidentiality.