Blockchain / DLT

Data Science on BTC: a Primer 2

Key concepts needed for data scientists and economists to perform analysis on the Bitcoin Ledger.

Foreword: This is not an article on how to analyse the market value of BTC wrt other cryptos or fiat currencies. Any effect on your desire to invest is purely coincidental.

I believe that the BTC ledger is an absolute goldmine of information that is vastly underused. To change this, I am bringing to Medium articles I published on Kaggle in 2018. We pick up from where Part 1 ended. If you have an account on Kaggle, you can fork the second notebook of the series to run the queries yourself. If you do, please show the results you get in the comments so that everyone can see how the BTC landscape has changed in 4 years.

I wish you a good read!

NOTE- for reasons that will appear clear in part 3, I will limit all analysis to transactions dating from before June 18th 2018, or timestamp 1529363632000.

In Part 1, we pulled a sample of the BTC ledger to learn a little about its structure, what the data meant and learn some about blockchains in general. We found that contrary to standard banking practices, most addresses/accounts were used disposably. With just a tiny sample analysed, we could not draw definitive conclusions but got some hints on the usage of the cryptocurrency. There is much left to investigate, and we’ll dive into it right away by…