Seeking Archived Bitcoin Network Dataset from 2012

[nathmaroal]

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for any archived Bitcoin network-level datasets from around 2012, ideally containing information about transaction propagation or node activity. I’ve read the early work by Dan Kaminsky and others on Bitcoin network monitoring, and I understand this is a long shot - but I figured it’s worth asking here.
Back in the day, Blockchain.info used to internally log the IP addresses of nodes that relayed transactions. I’m wondering if any researchers, institutions, or enthusiasts from the early Bitcoin days might have collected similar data and are willing to share it - even partially or informally.

If you know of: any datasets from 2012 that include network-level metadata (e.g., relay info, timestamps, node behavior), old monitoring scripts or tools used to observe the Bitcoin P2P network, academic or personal archives from early Bitcoin research … I’d be very grateful for any pointers. Feel free to share this with anyone who was active in Bitcoin security or network research back then - it might just reach the right person.

[ABCbits]

I would be surprised if you could get data from back then.

The earliest research data about Bitcoin network that i know is https://www.dsn.kastel.kit.edu/bitcoin/. They begin data collection since July 2015, although it's partially anonymized. https://bitnodes.io/ exist since 2013, but i have no idea whether you can get such old data using their API.

[nathmaroal]

The earliest research data about Bitcoin network that i know is https://www.dsn.kastel.kit.edu/bitcoin/. They begin data collection since July 2015, although it's partially anonymized. https://bitnodes.io/ exist since 2013, but i have no idea whether you can get such old data using their API.

Yeah I've been around that. Question is really about finding something else than open source data already available... like private backups, academical works and datasets that haven't been released.. Any lead will be welcome. I know that Blockchain.info had such records, are they willing to share it ? Is there a backup of these data somewhere ?

[Accardo]

If you're good with standard SQL querying you can check out Google Bigquery, it has the oldest historical Blockchain data ranging down to the btc Pizza transaction .

There are two datasets on Bitcoin to query to find blocks, transactions, timestamps, etc... Bigquery-public-data:Bitcoin-Blockchain and Bigquery-public-data:crypto-bitcoin Google Process 1TB of query per month free, afterwards you're required to pay to access the database.

I tried this query I found on Google that traces back to transaction that took place in 2012

Code:

SELECT
      *
    FROM
      bigquery-public-data.crypto_bitcoin.transactions
    WHERE
      DATE(block_timestamp) BETWEEN '2012-01-01' AND '2012-12-31'
    LIMIT 1000;

But unfortunately it exceeds the free Quota of 1TB, it needed about 2.15TB to process which requires that I pay to access the data.

[Donneski]

Seeing this your topic, I had to do a little research to find out about the best possible answers to your question and from my findings, 2012 network-level Bitcoin data is really rare. However, there are a few leads I saw that you can try.  

University College London (UCL)’s “A Fistful of Bitcoins” project (Meiklejohn et al.) –They gathered some network data around 2012–2013, If you can, reach out to them directly. Click here for the university's official website

Early crawlers / Bitnodes – From my findings, similar projects existed before Bitnodes went public so you can click here

Archived repos – Try search for old network monitors like bitcoin-seeder or bitcoin-network-crawler using either of Internet Archive by clicking here or GitHub Archive by clicking here

BitcoinTalk archives – Use the search bar of the Bitcointalk here to check the technical board for 2011–2013 discussions on “transaction propagation” or “relay IP”


The truth is that finding raw datasets will be be tough for you but some old community technical members could still have fragments of those logs. This thread here titled Bitcoin block data (1013 GB): inputs, outputs and transactions by LoyceV could also be of a great help to you.  I wish you good luck

[LoyceV]

This thread here titled Bitcoin block data (1013 GB): inputs, outputs and transactions by LoyceV could also be of a great help to you.

This isn't what OP is looking for. Immutable data will always be easy to find on-chain.

[ABCbits]

University College London (UCL)’s “A Fistful of Bitcoins” project (Meiklejohn et al.) –They gathered some network data around 2012–2013, If you can, reach out to them directly. Click here for the university's official website

I found what you're talking about on https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1490261/. But looking at the PDF section "3. DATA COLLECTION", it seems they collect address/transaction data rather than node data. CMIIW.