A Network Analyst's View of the Block Chain
Martin Harrigan is a computer scientist and software developer. He is the founder of QuantaBytes, an Irish startup developing a suite of tools for analyzing and visualising bitcoin's block chain. He is also the co-author of one of the earliest academic papers to study the network properties of the block chain and its implications for anonymity. The block chain is a decentralised, consensus-driven ledger of every successful bitcoin transaction to date. As of the 300,000th block, the ledger includes over 38 million transactions. Aside from being a monumental technical achievement, the block....
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Bitcoin was designed to be a decentralized and trustless payment network - with the power to do this provided by the block chain and its ability to publicly confirm the digital currency's digital transactions. Rather contentiously, however, as the bitcoin economy expands, more and more transactions are being carried out off the block chain. Such transactions are tracked on private databases instead of the block chain, and cannot be publicly tracked. There are pros and cons to both systems. So, which are better? Off-block chain or on-block chain transactions? Visible payments. Legitimate....
A Block Parser reads the Bitcoin block chain. There is no encryption of the data stored in the block chain. Bitcoin is a pseudonymous system. Meaning, ECDSA key pairs are used to abstract the identity of users. However, the binary data in the block chain can be read. The block chain is a transaction database. Every full node participating in the Bitcoin network has the same copy. The Bitcoin protocol dictates its structure and is the means through which each node maintains a duplicate copy. Overall, the block chain is just a data structure for storing blocks. The block chain stores blocks....
What could be called a partial alternative to Blockchain.info has launched this weekend dubbed Blockr.io, a 'block reader' which offers an appealing interface for examining the bitcoin block chain, addresses, and more. It does not, however, offer wallet services. It's what you would expect, and carries a pretty intuitive interface. You can check address balances, view charts, and even view network facts (referred to as trivia) on the site. There's even an alternate side of the website dedicated to litecoin, in which you can do the same as noted above. It goes without saying that it appears....
The BIP66 update was meant to align miners on stricter cryptographic signatures through a form of block chain Democracy. As part of the BIP rules, once 950 of the past 1,000 blocks upgraded to the newer version all miners would older version blocks. This morning the network met that goal and a small, non-upgraded miner mined an older version block. Instead of rejecting the block roughly half the network accepted it and the Bitcoin block chain forked between software versions. The bogus chain began when the BTCNuggets mining pool mined an out of date block. Though the main chain orphaned....
The adoption of block chain technology will revolutionize capital markets as early as next year, according to a report by TABB research carried by CNBC TV. The report noted that the adoption is not a matter of if, but when. The TABB Group is a New York City-based company that provides insight on securities and investment management. The block chain, the report noted, serves as a big, decentralized ledger that records transaction information and stores it on a global network that can't be tampered with. It noted that R3, a fintech company, leads a 20-bank consortium that is developing a....