Full Bitcoin Blockchain Data Made Easy

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple, reliable, and lossless method for collecting and processing the full Bitcoin blockchain data, with added indexing for easier analysis and practical large-scale applications.

Contribution

It introduces a reproducible, lossless procedure with indexing for full blockchain data collection, demonstrated on large-scale use cases like address clustering.

Findings

Reliable, reproducible data collection method

Lossless preservation of blockchain data

Enhanced data processing with indexing

Abstract

Despite the fact that it is publicly available, collecting and processing the full bitcoin blockchain data is not trivial. Its mere size, history, and other features indeed raise quite specific challenges, that we address in this paper. The strengths of our approach are the following: it relies on very basic and standard tools, which makes the procedure reliable and easily reproducible; it is a purely lossless procedure ensuring that we catch and preserve all existing data; it provides additional indexing that makes it easy to further process the whole data and select appropriate subsets of it. We present our procedure in details and illustrate its added value on large-scale use cases, like address clustering. We provide an implementation online, as well as the obtained dataset.