Bitcoin Monitoring

An Empirical Analysis of Blockchain Forks in Bitcoin

This page provides the dataset used in our paper: Short Paper: An Empirical Analysis of Blockchain Forks in Bitcoin

Above figure (Fig. 1 from the paper) shows the time differences between the first announcement of forking blocks. A green cross (positive Diff) indicates that the block that was announced first became part of the main chain, a red cross (negative Diff) indicates that the later announced block became part of the main chain. Boxes around blocks indicate that the subsequent block has been mined by the same miner; additional circles around blocks indicate that the subsequent block has been mined by the same miner within less than 100 seconds. Finally, the average 50% block propagation percentile is shown.

The data shown in the figure is contained in these files: forks and block proagation


Above figure (Fig. 2 from the paper) shows the probability (moving average, binsize = 50ms) of a forking block becoming part of the main chain depending on the headstart over the competing block.

The data shown in the figure is contained in this file (and can be extracted from above forks file): delay2probsingle


Histogram of the interval to the next block after the fork. Post Fork Intervals - Same miner: only intervals where the subsequent block has been mined by the same miner as the previous block. Post Fork Intervals - Different block: only intervals where the subsequent block has been mined by a different miner as the previous block. All Intervals: All block intervals since block 350,000. Exponential Distribution: Idealized block interval.

The data shown in the figure is contained in these files: Post Fork Intervals and All Intervals


Block propagation for both blocks (Main chain, Orphaned) for selected forks (Fig. 4 from the paper).

The raw data of all forks is listed here. For each block height with a fork, several files are listed: (1) A png that shows a comparison similar to the plots in the paper. (2) A .gp file that generates the plot using gnuplot. (3) A set of .gpd files that contain the same data as the corresponding.gp file but which is a little bit easier to process (the letter m/o after the block height indicates main chain vs orphaned, the digit indicates the id of our monitor node (0 or 1)).


@inproceedings{neudecker-fc19,
	title={Short Paper: An Empirical Analysis of Blockchain Forks in Bitcoin},
	author={Neudecker, Till and Hartenstein, Hannes},
	year = {2019}
}
If you have any questions feel free to contact us!

License

Creative Commons License
This data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.