Extracting Insights From Bitcoin Transactions

Abstract

Bitcoin is the most well-known cryptocurrency. It was first released in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin serves as a decentralized medium of digital exchange, with transactions verified and recorded in the blockchain. The latter is a public immutable distributed ledger that operates without the need of a trusted record keeping authority or a central intermediary. It provides OLTP capabilities with both atomic transactions and data durability guarantees for blockchain transactions. Blockchain ledgers were not designed to perform analytics questions. The availability of the entire bitcoin transaction history, stored in its public blockchain, offers interesting opportunities for analyzing the transactions to obtain insights on users/entities patterns and transactions patterns. For these purposes, the authors need to store and analyze cryptocurrency transactions in a data warehouse. In this chapter, they investigate public blockchain datasets, and they overview different data models for setting up a data warehouse appliance of cryptocurrencies.