Health is Wealth: Evaluating the Health of the Bitcoin Ecosystem in GitHub

Abstract

Bitcoin is a virtual and decentralized cryptocurrency that operates in a peer-to-peer network providing a private payment mechanism. It is a multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency, and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies are created based on it. Bitcoin is based on open source software (OSS) development. This paper presents the first comprehensive study of the Bitcoin ecosystem in GitHub organized around 481 most popular and actively developed Bitcoin related projects over eight years (2010-2018). Our work includes manual categorization of the projects, defining software health metrics, classification of projects according to these health metrics, and evaluation of the health trends of the ecosystem. The main findings suggest that the Bitcoin ecosystem in GitHub is represented by nine categories of projects. Moreover, the health of the majority of the projects is assessed as “Low Risk”.