What Happens in a Bitcoin Blockchain?

(November 2018 Report)

Some time ago, my team designed and created a powerful blockchain parser. This parser analyzes every new block, every tiny transaction within it, and prepares a detailed summary of wallets receiving/sending the total amount of bitcoin exceeding a predefined value (we set it to 100btc). Blocks are found pretty quickly (every 10-15 minutes, on average), so we decided to group them in hundreds, which gives us unique insight into what happens in a blockchain on a daily basis. We see the biggest gains and losses, popular OTC traders and exchanges, big holders (whales) steadily increasing their bags, and transit wallets passing money in and out immediately. This is really a fascinating analytical perspective for various groups of crypto enthusiasts (researchers, traders, investors). 

Finally, we decided to expand our vision even further and we started to produce monthly reports. We see the total blockchain turnover during one month, the percent of transit wallets (normally about 60% of all transactions), amounts being sent one way (addresses collecting big amounts and not sending them anywhere, as well as those who sell, but never transfer in), and amounts being received and sent by all major exchanges.

 Today, I would like to share some of our findings for the November 2018 period.

What are these figures?

The TOTAL is the total turnover of the bitcoin during the analyzed period. Received is the total amount of bitcoin being received by a given number of wallets, with a number of unique wallets given in brackets. Difference is the total number of bitcoins mined during this period (miners currently receive 12.5 bitcoins for every block found).

TRANSIT is the total amount passed through transit wallets - these are wallets that received some bitcoins (in one or many transactions) and later sent all of them somewhere else (in one or few transactions), making a deposit equaling zero. We recommend subtracting this amount from the total turnover since it doesn’t affect the final balances of holders and donors. 

ONE WAY are wallets that made transactions only one way. They collected sums of bitcoins in multiple transactions and never sent out anything – we call them holders (investors or holders). And there are those who only sent their bitcoins out and never received anything – donors or big sellers. Positive difference gives us an idea that investors collected money during this period and negative difference means there was a big sale.

And finally, WORKERS are wallets that sent money in and out (making at least one incoming and one outgoing transaction), these are normal traders, exchanges, and active individuals. In a healthy blockchain, they should make up the biggest portion of the total turnover.

So, what do we see?

Not to simply repeat figures from our statistical block, here we can see that the total turnover of blockchain in November totals 20.8mln of bitcoin, with 10.7mln of unique addresses mentioned.

However, 74.5% of all transactions are not real ones – transit - and they don’t have any impact on the final balances of bitcoin owners.

We can also see that the difference between one way incoming and outgoing transactions is positive and equals 82448 bitcoins, meaning that bag-holders received and hold an impressive number of bitcoins during November when the price significantly collapsed. This amount is exactly the total sum of bitcoins mined, plus the amount of losses incurred by Workers (bitcoins transferred out from exchanges and normal traders).

Now think - was it a random price fall or a controlled one? Are those people holding thousands of bitcoins not smart enough to buy an active whose price is falling? Do they expect it to continue doing so? Or do they know something is hidden from the public and are preparing for future price changes?

Detailed list of wallets involved

For analytical purposes, we prepare detailed lists of every wallet receiving and sending more than 1000 bitcoins (on a monthly and daily basis). Unlike other tools that are only capable of catching single big transactions, we collect and sum-up all transactions for each wallet during a one-month period. In other words, if someone is collecting bitcoins, by transferring 10btc every 1-3 hours from various sources, our parser will spot the address. If someone is holding lots of bitcoins and silently selling them on a regular basis, our parser will see that too.

You can have a look at this list of 801 entries (55.6Kb) here. Don't hesitate to share your opinion by commenting this article.

When this article was about to be published, we made another, more detailed analysis by splitting the total pool of addresses into 3 address formats (separating most common addresses from multi-signature ones) and discovered even more fascinating statistics that I plan to uncover in my next article.

Commercial Offer:

We also prepared more detailed lists (for all wallets receiving/sending smaller total amounts of bitcoins), but we don’t plan to publish all of this data, however, we are ready to sell it (roughly 1000usd per detailed monthly list). For all inquiries please contact us at https://lazgroup.com/3-Contact-Us