Long Transaction Chains and the Bitcoin Heartbeat 🗓 🗺
Speaker
Valentino Di Donato Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer Science and Automation Roma Tre University http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~compunet/www/view/person.php?id=didonato
When
Friday, July 28th at 2:00 PM
Where
Department of Engineering
Section of Computer Science and Automation
Via della Vasca Navale, 79
Meeting room (1.10) on 1st floor
Abstract
Over the past few years a persistent growth of the number of daily Bitcoin transactions has been observed. This trend however, is known to be influenced
by a number of phenomena that generate long transaction chains that are not related to real purchases (e.g. wallets shuffling and coin mixing). For a transaction chain we call transaction chain frequency the number of transactions of the chain divided by the time interval of the chain. In this paper, we first analyze to which extent Bitcoin transactions are involved in high frequency transaction chains, in the short and in the long term. Based on this analysis, we then argue that a large fraction of transactions do not refer to explicit human activity, namely to transactions between users that trade goods or services. Finally, we show that most of the transactions are involved into chains whose frequency is roughly stable over time and that we call Bitcoin Heartbeat.
Joint work G. Di Battista and M. Pizzonia
The paper will be presented at the forthcoming LSDVE Workshop
(http://pages.di.unipi.it/ricci/LSDVE17/LSDVE17.html)