I finished a project that developed statistical measures of the bitcoin blockchain. The method determines the marginal utility of bitcoin, the amount of network activity, an estimate of the number of network participants, and how these all interrelate. It also lays the initial foundation for analyzing the growth of the network.

http://statisticaleconomics.org/2014/03/13/quantifying-the-value-of-bitcoin-2/


Cal Abel

I am data mining the block chain to develop network metrics and need to understand the fee protocol. Any help is greatly appreciated.

When I pay a fee, where does it go, is there a specific address or does that portion of the block chain cease to exist and be rediscovered?

What is the fingerprint in the block chain that uniquely identifies the fees paid to the miners for each particular block?

Thanks!

I am developing metrics and macro analytics for bitcoin. As a result I need to access the information contained in the blockchain. This resulted in some interesting findings. I use Abe and checked one point on blockchain explorer.

1. The block chain time stamp is non sequential.  I did not think this was possible. I found this when trying to compute the network hashrate using the (t_stamp_i - t_stamp_(i-1))/600*difficulty*4295032833 to find the network hash rate. When I plotted this I had negative numbers, which if the timestamp monotonically increases is not possible.

As an example, blocks 139793 (time stamp 1312599459) and 139792 (time stamp 1312599808) are not monotonically increasing.

How does one determine the appropriate time stamp? And then, estimate the hash rate for each block?

2. I tried to find an explicit function for finding the difficulty (needed in finding the hash rate) Here I used a ratio of the difference in timestamps for blocks 0 to 2015, 2016 to 4031, etc to the 1209600 seconds that it "should" take to find the 2016 blocks. This gives a multiplier for each time step. I then multiplied every previous multiplier to obtain the difficulty for any particular block.  The result is close to the difficulty reported everywhere (1,180,941,214.99 from Abe for current) ( 1,233,468,670.05 by my method). Intuitively the method I used makes sense (I couldn't find a description online that did not involve hexadecimal (sorry I am a base 10 kinda cat) or written in C (I don't program outside of Matlab). Basically every method I found was unintelligible.  My method relies upon accurate timestamps and any accumulated small error will give an erroneous number, and goes back to my first problem.

Any help/explanation here will be appreciated.