Abstract
Bitcoin is the first and most widely used cryptocurrency in the world. It provides a pseudonym identity to its users that is established using the user’s public key, which leads to preserving the user’s privacy. Each transfer of bitcoin cryptocurrency among the users makes a transaction. The pseudonym identities are considered as transaction end-points. These transactions are recorded on an immutable public ledger called Blockchain which is an append-only data structure. The popularity of Bitcoin has increased unreasonably. The general trend shows a positive response from the common masses indicating an increase in trust and privacy concerns which makes an interesting use case from the analysis point of view. Moreover, since the blockchain is publicly available and up-to-date, any analysis would provide a live insight into the usage patterns which ultimately would be useful for making a number of inferences by law-enforcement agencies, economists, tech-enthusiasts, etc. In this paper, we study various applications and techniques of performing data analytics over Bitcoin blockchain from a graph theoretic perspective. We also propose a framework for performing such data analytics and explored a couple of use cases using the proposed framework.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1KP72fBmh3XBRfuJDMn53APaqM6iMRspCh CryptoLocker Virus.
References
Blockchains: the great chain of being sure about things. https://www.economist.com/briefing/2015/10/31/the-great-chain-of-being-sure-about-things
Number of Blockchain wallet users worldwide from 1st quarter 2016 to 1st quarter 2019. https://www.statista.com/statistics/647374/worldwide-blockchain-wallet-users/
Economics of Bitcoin: is bitcoin an alternative to fiat currencies and gold? https://nakamotoinstitute.org/research/economics-of-bitcoin/. Accessed 20 Feb 2021
Bouri, E., Shahzad, S.J.H., Roubaud, D., Kristoufek, L., Lucey, B.: Bitcoin, gold, and commodities as safe havens for stocks: new insight through wavelet analysis. Q. Rev. Econ. Finance 77, 156–164 (2020)
Kleineberg, K.-K., Helbing, D.: A “social bitcoin’’ could sustain a democratic digital world. In: Dapp, M.M., Helbing, D., Klauser, S. (eds.) Finance 4.0 - Towards a Socio-Ecological Finance System. SAST, pp. 39–51. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71400-0_3
Prasanthi, P., Kumar, G., Kumar, S., Yalawar, M.S.: 10 Privacy and Challenges. Cyber Defense Mechanisms: Security, Privacy, and Challenges, p. 157 (2020)
Chaum, D.: Blind signatures for untraceable payments. In: Chaum, D., Rivest, R.L., Sherman, A.T. (eds.) Advances in Cryptology, pp. 199–203. Springer, Boston, MA (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0602-4_18
Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. www.bitcoin.org
(Alan) Wu, Z.: Analyzing blockchain and bitcoin transaction data as graph. https://download.oracle.com/otndocs/products/spatial/pdf/. Accessed 25 Feb 2021
Goldsmith, D., Grauer, K., Shmalo, Y.: Analyzing hack subnetworks in the bitcoin transaction graph. Appl. Netw. Sci. 5(1), 1–20 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-020-00261-7
Sabidussi, G.: The centrality index of a graph. Psychometrika 31, 581–603 (1966). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02289527
Freeman, L.: A set of measures of centrality based upon betweenness. Sociometry 40(1), 35–41 (1977). https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3033543.pdf. Accessed 25 Apr 2021
Negre, C.F.A., et al.: Eigenvector centrality for characterization of protein allosteric pathways. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 115(52): E12201–E12208 (2018)
Sullivan, D.: What is Google PageRank? A Guide for Searchers & Webmasters (2007). https://searchengineland.com/what-is-google-pagerank-a-guide-for-searchers-webmasters-11068. Accessed 25 June 2021
Ron, D., Shamir, A.: Quantitative analysis of the full bitcoin transaction graph. In: Sadeghi, A.-R. (ed.) FC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7859, pp. 6–24. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39884-1_2
Here’s how criminals use Bitcoin to launder dirty money. https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/11/26/bitcoin-money-laundering-2/. Accessed 26 June 2021
Kalodner, H., et al.: BlockSci: design and applications of a blockchain analysis platform. In: 29th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 20), pp. 2721–2738 (2020)
Meiklejohn, S., et al.: A fistful of Bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. Commun. ACM 59(4), 86–93 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1145/2896384
Fleder, M., Kester, M.S., Pillai, S.: Bitcoin transaction graph analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.01657 (2015)
Haslhofer, B., Karl, R., Filtz, E.: O Bitcoin Where Art Thou? Insight into Large-Scale Transaction Graphs. In: SEMANTiCS (Posters, Demos, SuCCESS), September 2016
Meiklejohn, S., et al.: A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 127–140, October 2013
Goldfeder, S., Kalodner, H., Reisman, D., Narayanan, A.: When the cookie meets the blockchain: privacy risks of web payments via cryptocurrencies. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.04748 (2017)
Symantec Security Response “What you need to know about the WannaCry Ransomware”. https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/wannacry-ransomware-attack. Accessed 5 July 2021
Liao, K., Zhao, Z., Doupé, A., Ahn, G.J.: Behind closed doors: measurement and analysis of CryptoLocker ransoms in Bitcoin. In: 2016 APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime), pp. 1–13. IEEE, June 2016
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sharma, A., Agrawal, A., Bhatia, A., Tiwari, K. (2022). Bitcoin’s Blockchain Data Analytics: A Graph Theoretic Perspective. In: Barolli, L., Hussain, F., Enokido, T. (eds) Advanced Information Networking and Applications. AINA 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 449. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99584-3_40
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99584-3_40
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-99583-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-99584-3
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)