Bitcoin block propagation dataset

About this project

This open dataset contains the arrival time of approximately 14810 blocks on the Bitcoin network between November 2018 and March 2019. The data was collected from 9 locations (AWS EC2 instances), each connected to approximately 700 nodes at a time. Each of these locations ran custom Python code which you can download here.

This is part of my masters thesis at the University of Melbourne, supervised by Prof. Peter Taylor.

Data

The data consists of two tables. The first table contains the block arrival data: one row for each... The second table contains covariates extracted from the Bitcoin blockchain corresponding to the blocks in the first table.

Fitting code

Download our improved code for fitting phase-type distributions to data via the EM-algorithm.

This uses Julia's shared-memory parallelism capabilities through the experimental multi-threading features to run the intensive interpolation and matrix computations in parallel.

Data collection code

This repository contains code for collecting data on the propagation patterns of Bitcoin blocks. Read Chapter 3 of the thesis for an overview, and the Git repository for more information.

Phase-type fits

These archives contain the phase-type fits as discussed in Chapter 7. Each file contains the phase-type generator matrix as a tab separated table.