Blockchain data mining

A wave of investors looking to establish cryptocurrency mining facilities is expected to hit the commercial real estate market in , but industry commentators say the property sector must be prepared in order to seize the opportunity. Interest in cryptocurrency mining facilities has been building during the past six months, with China banning on-shore operations in June and a Senate committee chaired by Andrew Bragg reporting on the sector in October. Investors looking to dip their toes in the alternative asset class will be competing with data centre providers with a specific shopping list of requirements including a large footprint and access to cheap or renewable energy. In the US, old industrial infrastructure has been repurposed for data mining operations.

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Content:

• The Basics of Cryptocurrency Mining, Explained in Plain English
• Crypto Mining: Definition and Function Explained
• Kazakhstan's deadly protests hit bitcoin, as the world's second-biggest mining hub shuts down
• VBit Technologies Acquired by Advanced Mining Group in a Huge $105M Deal
• The debate about cryptocurrency and energy consumption
• How To Mint A Cryptocurrency
• Why cryptocurrency mining is a challenge in India
• What is crypto mining?

WATCH RELATED VIDEO: What is Bitcoin Mining for Beginners - Short and Simple

The Basics of Cryptocurrency Mining, Explained in Plain English

Get the latest on industry trends and join customer-led sessions. In the past year, as part of the BigQuery Public Datasets program, Google Cloud released datasets consisting of the blockchain transaction history for Bitcoin and Ethereum , to help you better understand cryptocurrency. Today, we're releasing an additional six cryptocurrency blockchains.

We are also including a set of queries and views that map all blockchain datasets to a double-entry book data structure that enables multi-chain meta-analyses, as well as integration with conventional financial record processing systems. Five of these datasets, along with the previously published Bitcoin dataset now follow a common schema that enables comparative analyses.

We are releasing this group of Bitcoin-like datasets Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Dogecoin, Litecoin and Zcash together because they all have similar implementations, i. All datasets update every 24 hours via a common codebase, the Blockchain ETL ingestion framework built with Cloud Composer , previously described here , to accommodate a variety of Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies.

While this means higher latency for loading Bitcoin blocks into BigQuery, it also means that:. Some of these changes address performance and convenience concerns, yielding faster and lower cost queries commonly accessed nested data are denormalized; each table is partitioned by time. Having these scripts available for Bitcoin-like datasets enables more advanced analyses similar to this smart contract analyzer that Tomasz Kolinko recently built on top of the BigQuery Ethereum dataset.

For example, we can now identify and report on patterns of activity involving multi-signature wallets. This is particularly important for analyzing privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies like Zcash.

For analytics interoperability, we designed a unified schema that allows all Bitcoin-like datasets to share queries. To further interoperate with Ethereum and ERC token transactions, we also created some views that abstract the blockchain ledger to be presented as a double-entry accounting ledger. This comparison is the simplest way to verify that a cryptocurrency is operating as intended, and at least operationally, is a mathematically correct store of value.

Since they emerged in , cryptocurrencies have experienced their share of volatility—and are a continual source of fascination. Note that the only difference between them is the name of the data location.

The BigQuery dataset makes it possible to analyze how miners are allocating space in the blocks they mine. This query shows that transaction fees on the bitcoin network follows a Poisson distribution, confirming that there are zero-fee transactions being included in mined blocks.

Given that miners are incentivized to profit from transaction fees, it begs the question: why are they including zero-fee transactions? Possible reasons include:. Creating a new Bitcoin address for each inbound payment is a suggested best practice for users seeking to protect their privacy.

This query can be plotted to show the relationship between addresses and the number of transacting partners:. Beyond quality control and auditing applications, presenting cryptocurrency in a traditional format enables integration with other financial data management systems.

In the field of macroeconomics, the Gini Coefficient is a member of a family of econometric measures of wealth inequality. Values range between 0. For crypto-economies, we have complete transparency of the data at the highest possible resolution.

In addition to data transparency, one of the purported benefits of cryptocurrencies is that they allow the implementation of money to more closely resemble the implementation of digital information. It follows that a fully digitized money network will come to resemble the internet, with reduced transactional friction and fewer barriers that impede capital flow.

Frequently, implicit in this narrative is that capital will distribute more equally. You can read more about using the Gini coefficient to reason about crypto-economic network performance in Quantifying Decentralization. To set a baseline to interpret our findings, consider how resources are distributed in traditional, non-crypto economies.

According to a World Bank analysis in , recent Gini coefficients for world economies have a mean value of We plot a histogram of the reported data below. Some recent Gini measures include:. We use the double-entry book pattern to compare the equality of cryptocurrency distribution of the Bitcoin-like datasets being released today along with Ethereum and a few Ethereum-based ERC tokens. In the figure below, the Gini coefficient is rendered for the top 10, address balances within each dataset, tabulated daily and across the entire history.

The Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies are rendered in ochre tones while the Ethereum chains and ERC Maker token are rendered in blue tones. Note that Bitcoin Cash is rendered as a dotted line, diverging from Bitcoin in mid Similarly, Ethereum classic diverges as a dotted line away from Ethereum.

Also find a visualization of the distribution event below, with addresses as circles and lines between circles as value transfers. The original holding address is at the center. Sizes are determined by the post-event distribution of value, with peripheral circle areas proportional to the final balance and edge weights are proportional to the logarithm of the amount of Ether transferred.

Studies in the domains of ecology and network science tell us that biodiversity is positively correlated to ecological stability and increases ecosystem productivity by supporting more complex community structures. The downward trend of Gini i. The Gini coefficient is but one of a number of econometric indicators of wealth inequality, and other indicators may give contradictory results.

Blockchain transaction history can be aggregated by address and used to analyze user behavior. To motivate further exploration, we present a simple classifier that can detect Bitcoin mining pools. As a brief historical note, mining pools were created when the difficulty of mining Bitcoin reached such a level that rewards could be expected only once every few years.

Miners began to pool their resources to earn a smaller share of rewards more consistently and in proportion to their contribution to the pool in which they were mining. First, we constructed 26 feature vectors to characterize incoming and outgoing transaction flows to each address.

Next, we trained the model using labels derived from transaction signatures. Many large mining pools identify themselves in the signature of blocks' Coinbase transactions. Parsing these signatures, we labelled 10, addresses as belonging to known mining pools. We used a random forest classification model for its strong out-of-the-box effectiveness at building a good classifier and ability to model nonlinear effects.

Because known mining pools are a very small percentage of our data, we are interested in correctly identifying as many of them as possible. In other words, we focused on maximizing recall. To ensure the minority class is adequately represented, we weighted classes in inverse proportion to how frequently they appear in the data. The confusion matrix below summarizes the performance of the classification model on a subset of addresses reserved for model testing.

False positives in the upper right quadrant merit closer inspection. Because our dataset is imbalanced, as you can see in the matrix above, it is useful to examine the relationship between precision and recall. The model threshold can be adjusted to increase recall less false negatives , but at the expense of decreased precision more false positives.

We can examine relative feature importance to determine which features are the strongest predictors in our model. Unsurprisingly, given that mining pools are making many small payments to the cooperating members, the following features have the most predictive power for a mining pool address:.

For a deeper understanding of query performance on the blockchain, check out a comparison of transaction throughputs for blockchains in BigQuery.. Or, if you run your own enterprise-focused blockchain, these datasets and sample queries can guide you as you form your own blockchain analytics.

This post describes applications for making internet-hosted data available inside an immutable public blockchain by placing BigQuery data available on-chain using a Chainlink oracle smart contract.

Get started Contact Sales. Allen Day. Evgeny Medvedev. Nirmal AK. Will Price. A unified data ingest architecture All datasets update every 24 hours via a common codebase, the Blockchain ETL ingestion framework built with Cloud Composer , previously described here , to accommodate a variety of Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies.

While this means higher latency for loading Bitcoin blocks into BigQuery, it also means that: We are able to ingest additional BigQuery datasets with less effort, meaning additional datasets can be onboarded more quickly in the future. We can implement a low-latency loading solution once that can be used to enable real-time streaming transactions for all blockchains.

Balance queries demonstrating preservation of value Heres are some equivalent balance queries for the Bitcoin and Dogecoin datasets:. Understanding miner economics on Bitcoin The BigQuery dataset makes it possible to analyze how miners are allocating space in the blocks they mine. Possible reasons include: Miners are including their own transactions for zero fees. Miners run transaction accelerators , i. Multi-chain crypto-econometrics Beyond quality control and auditing applications, presenting cryptocurrency in a traditional format enables integration with other financial data management systems.

This biases the Gini coefficient toward accumulation. Gini is known to be sensitive to including small balances in the analysis and is usually done on large addresses only. Removing small balances, as we did here, biases the Gini coefficient toward distribution. In our analysis all addresses are treated as individual holders. In reality, multiple addresses can belong to the same individual. This can bias the Gini either toward accumulation or distribution. And when examining the chart to compare specific cryptocurrencies: Zcash in particular is difficult to measure because it has many so-called shielded transactions that produce addresses for which the balance cannot be accurately tabulated.

However we do speculate that there is asymmetric interest in using shielded transactions: larger holders are more likely to want to keep their holdings private and it follows that Gini for Zcash is probably biased toward distribution. Dash has a system property whereby interest payments may be earned from the network by address balances that hold a minimum DASH. Large asset holders are incentivized to split holdings amongst multiple addresses, which biases Gini toward distribution.

Even so, Dash is remarkably well distributed relative to all other cryptocurrencies examined here. Bitcoin Cash was purportedly created to increase transfer-of-value use cases through lower transaction fees, which should ultimately lead to a lower Gini coefficient of address balances. Similarly, the Ethereum Classic currency was rapidly accumulated post-divergence and remains so. The ERC token Maker a stablecoin has a distribution that is decoupled from its parent chain, Ethereum.

In early December , Bitcoin , Ethereum , and Litecoin had a major distribution event, while Bitcoin Cash had a major accumulation event. This was the largest redistribution of large Bitcoin balances since December, The Bitcoin redistribution appears to be related to an announced Coinbase reorganization of funds storage. Given the synchronization of movements, it is likely that the Ethereum redistribution was also Coinbase activity.

However, we see that the opposite is true—Bitcoin Cash holdings have actually accumulated since Bitcoin Cash forked from Bitcoin.

Crypto Mining: Definition and Function Explained

One of the most interesting challenges for IR is building out the equity story in an emerging sector. The company, which is traded over the counter, provides data centers for high-performance computing HPC , in which computer power is aggregated to solve complex tasks. The site, which is already operational, is mainly being used by clients for Bitcoin mining. Northern Data also operates locations in Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and Scandinavia where it provides HPC services for other purposes such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics, blockchain and image rendering.

Kazakhstan's deadly protests hit bitcoin, as the world's second-biggest mining hub shuts down

Bitcoin mining is a process that verifies transactions on the blockchain ledger, while also bringing new bitcoins into circulation. To be successful at this, cryptominers require vast amounts of computing power, meaning electricity becomes one of their most significant costs. This pushes them to locate wherever electricity is cheapest. For years, China was the optimal location—the country has an abundance of cheap, coal-powered electricity. However, in September , the Chinese government issued a blanket ban on all crypto activities. The University of Cambridge maintains various datasets on the Bitcoin blockchain, including power consumption and hash rate. Global hash rate measures the total computational power that is dedicated to mining.

VBit Technologies Acquired by Advanced Mining Group in a Huge $105M Deal

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The debate about cryptocurrency and energy consumption

Whether in a criminal proceeding a Caveat Application is legally permissible to be filed as pro Toggle navigation. Home Explore. By Koushikchittella Views Cryptocurrency Cryptocurrency is any currency that virtually exists.

How To Mint A Cryptocurrency

As Bitcoin approaches mainstream adoption and recognition, its fundamental security model, characterized as mining, is being put under the spotlight and scrutinized more and more everyday. People are increasingly concerned about and interested in the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, the security and degree of decentralization of the underlying model, and even the potential impact of a quantum computing breakthrough on the future of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In order to truly understand these questions and any possible answers , you need to have a fundamental understanding Bitcoin mining itself and its evolution. This article will explore all the technical components and moving parts of proof-of-work, and how they seamlessly synchronize with one another to allow Bitcoin to be the decentralized platform it is today. The Bitcoin blockchain is often described as a database that is cryptographically secure and, subsequently, immutable. The underlying technology that powers this immutability and security is cryptographic hashing.

Why cryptocurrency mining is a challenge in India

Meanwhile, with several countries across the world, including China and Kazakhstan, banning or limiting crypto mining, Texas has acted aggressively to turn the state into a crypto hub, with dozens of large and small mining companies active in the state, lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council noted. The state also became one of the few in the US last year to make it easier for businesses to hold crypto assets and use them as collateral for loans. While the bitcoin mining industry in Texas currently consumes around to 1, megawatt MW of power, the report predicts that the demand could increase as much as fivefold by with an additional 3, to 5, MW.

What is crypto mining?

RELATED VIDEO: Inside The Cryptocurrency Revolution

By Lisa Smith February 2, February 2, More than 17, cryptocurrencies are jostling for the attention of investors — but besides the odd few like bitcoin and ethereum, most have failed to make the grade. Investors who want to create a cryptocurrency have a few technical options and legal pitfalls to avoid. Anyone can mint crypto if they are ready to commit time, money and some techy knowledge to the process.

The cryptocurrency market was absolutely on fire in , delivering what might be the best year for any asset class on record. Yet most people don't understand much about virtual currencies. Sure, more people than ever have probably heard about bitcoin, and they may have heard about some of its closest rivals by market cap, such as Ethereum and Ripple, but they don't have the faintest idea what purpose they serve or how they really work. Back in January, we covered some of these basics by examining what cryptocurrencies are , and why they were developed, then proceeded to examine the advantages and disadvantages of the blockchain technology that underpins most digital currencies. Today, we're going to tackle another common head-scratching issue: cryptocurrency mining. Cryptocurrency mining is one of the most commonly used methods of validating transactions that have been executed over a blockchain network. Not only does blockchain work to protect transaction data through encryption, as well as store this data in a decentralized manner i.

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