BlockSci

The Bitcoin blockchain — currently 170 GB and growing — contains a massive amount of data that can give us insights into the Bitcoin ecosystem, including how users, businesses, and miners operate. BlockSci enables fast and expressive analysis of Bitcoin’s and many other blockchains.

Current tools for blockchain analysis depend on general-purpose databases that provide "ACID" guarantees. But that’s unnecessary for blockchain analysis where the data structures are append-only. We take advantage of this observation in the design of our custom in-memory blockchain database as well as an analysis library. BlockSci’s core infrastructure is written in C++ and optimized for speed. To make analysis more convenient, we provide Python bindings and a Jupyter notebook interface.

Local setup

To run BlockSci locally, you must be running a full node (such as bitcoind or an altcoin node) since BlockSci requires the full serialized blockchain data structure which full nodes produce.

Parser

The next step is parsing the blockchain downloaded by the full node. The blockchain_parser binary which is built from this repo performs the transformation of this blockchain data into our customized BlockSci database format. It has two modes.

Disk mode is optimized for parsing Bitcoin's data files. It reads blockchain data directly from disk in a rapid manner. However this means that it does not work on many other blockchains which have different serialization formats than Bitcoin.

blocksci_parser --output-directory bitcoin-data update disk --coin-directory .bitcoin

RPC mode uses the RPC interface of a cryptocurrency to extract data regarding the blockchain. It works with a variety of cryptocurrencies which have the same general model as Bitcoin, but with minor changes to the serialization format which break the parser in disk mode. Examples of this are Zcash and Namecoin. To use the parser in RPC mode, you're full node must be running with txindex enabled.

blocksci_parser --output-directory bitcoin-data update rpc --username [user] --password [pass] --address [ip] --port [port]

BlockSci can be kept up to date with the blockchain by setting up a cronjob to periodically run the parser command. Updates to the parser should not noticeably impact usage of the analysis library. It is recommended that the Blockchain be kept approximately 6 blocks back from the head of the chain in order to avoid imperfect reorg handling in BlockSci.

For example you can set BlockSci to update hourly and stay 6 blocks behind the head of the chain via adding

@hourly /usr/local/bin/blocksci_parser --output-directory /home/ubuntu/bitcoin-data update --max-block -6 disk --coin-directory /home/ubuntu/.bitcoin

to your system crontab.

Using the analysis library

After the parser has been run, the analysis library is ready for use. This can again be used through two different interfaces

C++

In order to use the C++ library, you must compile your code against the BlockSci dynamic library and add its headers to your include path. The Blockchain can then be constructed given the path to the output of the parser.

#include <blocksci/blocksci.hpp>

int main(int argc, const char * argv[]) {
        blocksci::Blockchain chain{"file_path_to_output-directory"};
}

Python

To use the BlockSci in python, you only need to import the BlockSci library. By default the library is installed into BlockSci/Notebooks. To use the library first open the Python interpreter in that folder:

cd BlockSci/Notebooks
python3

With the python interpreter open, the following code will load a Blockchain object created from the data output by the parser:

import blocksci
chain = blocksci.Blockchain("file_path_to_parser_output-directory")

If you would like to use BlockSci through a web interface, we recommend the use of Jupyter Notebook. Once Jupyter is installed, simply navigate into BlockSci/Notebooks and run:

jupyter notebook

which will open a window in your browser to the Jupyter server.

Supported Compilers

BlockSci require GCC 6.3 or above or Clang 5 or above.

BlockSci compilation instructions

Here are the steps for compiling BlockSci on Ubuntu 16.04.

Note that BlockSci only actively supports python 3.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install build-essential cmake libssl-dev libboost-all-dev libsqlite3-dev autogen \
autoconf libcurl4-openssl-dev libjsoncpp-dev libjsonrpccpp-dev libjsonrpccpp-tools \
python3-dev python3-pip liblmdb-dev libsparsehash-dev libargtable2-dev libmicrohttpd-dev \
libhiredis-dev libjsoncpp-dev catch gcc-7 g++-7 libgflags-dev libsnappy-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev \
liblz4-dev libzstd-dev
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-7 60 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-7

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1
cd secp256k1
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-module-recovery
make
sudo make install

cd ~
wget https://cmake.org/files/v3.10/cmake-3.10.0.tar.gz
tar xzf cmake-3.10.0.tar.gz
cd cmake-3.10.0/
cmake .
make
sudo make install
exec bash

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb --branch v5.10.4
cd rocksdb
make static_lib
make shared_lib
sudo make install

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/citp/BlockSci.git
cd BlockSci
git submodule init
git submodule update --recursive
sudo cp -r libs/range-v3/include/meta /usr/local/include
sudo cp -r libs/range-v3/include/range /usr/local/include

cd libs/bitcoin-api-cpp
mkdir release
cd release
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make
sudo make install

cd ../../..
mkdir release
cd release
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make
sudo make install

sudo -H pip3 install --upgrade pip
sudo -H pip3 install --upgrade multiprocess psutil jupyter pycrypto matplotlib pandas dateparser

scorelab/BlockSci