Understanding Block and Transaction Logs of Permissionless Blockchain Networks

Abstract

Public blockchain records are widely studied in various aspects such as cryptocurrency abuse, anti-money-laundering, and monetary flow of businesses. However, the final blockchain records, usually available from block explorer services or querying locally stored data of blockchain nodes, do not provide abundant and dynamic event logs that are only visible from a live large-scale measurement. In this paper, we collect the network logs of three popular permissionless blockchains, that is, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and EOS. The discrepancy between observed events and the public block data is studied via a noble analysis model provided with the soundness of measurement. We share our key findings including a false universal assumption of previous mining-related studies and the block/transaction arrival characteristics.