What you’ll learn
- The transparency of cryptocurrency
- How to access the information within a transaction
- The anatomy of a Bitcoin transaction – bit by bit
- What this information can tell us
An essential aspect of cryptocurrency’s value proposition is transparency.
All Bitcoin transactions, for example, are public, traceable, and permanently stored on a public ledger – the bitcoin blockchain – and can be seen by anyone with an internet connection.
Though Bitcoin requires no personal information, the ability to follow each and every transaction – of which there are over 400,000 every day – is in stark contrast to how existing payment systems work.
We only know what Visa or Mastercard tell us about their networks, whereas anyone with a reasonable grounding in data science can query every aspect of Bitcoin’s permissionless blockchain, look at specific trandaction detail, overall usage and health.
The continued increase in cryptocurrency usage has meant that the ability to mine blockchain usage has become commercially valuable.
An entire blockchain analysis industry now provides tools for businesses and governments to monitor and enforce AML and other criminal activities, counter to the arguments that crypto somehow operates outside the law.
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