Bitconeview: visualization of flows in the bitcoin transaction graph

Abstract

Bitcoin is a digital currency whose transactions are stored into a public ledger, called blockchain, that can be viewed as a directed graph with more than 70 million nodes, where each node represents a transaction and each edge represents Bitcoins flowing from one transaction to another one. We describe a system for the visual analysis of how and when a flow of Bitcoins mixes with other flows in the transaction graph. Such a system relies on high-level metaphors for the representation of the graph and the size and characteristics of transactions, allowing for high level analysis of big portions of it.