technews-editor@acm.org
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2019 11:41:19 -0500
Michael del Castillo. Forbes, 4 Feb 2019, via ACM TechNews, 11 Feb 2019
Last year, a team of open source developers quietly began loading data for
the entire Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains into Google's big data analytics
platform, BigQuery. With assistance from lead developer Evgeny Medvedev,
Google's senior developer advocate for Google Cloud Allen Day created a
suite of sophisticated software to search the data. In the past year, more
than 500 projects were created using these tools, collectively known as
Blockchain ETL (extract, transform, load), designed to do everything from
predicting the price of bitcoin to analyzing wealth disparity among ether
holders. Day demonstrated Blockchain ETL by examining the so-called hard
fork, or an irrevocable split in a blockchain database, which created a new
cryptocurrency -- bitcoin cash -- from bitcoin in the summer of 2017. Using
Google's BigQuery, Day discovered bitcoin cash, rather than increasing
microtransactions, was actually being hoarded among big holders of bitcoin
cash.
https://orange.hosting.lsoft.com/trk/click%3Fref%3Dznwrbbrs9_6-1e58cx21a206x069484%26
[Google bites the bitcoin bits. PGN]