107 | Visualizing Bitcoin with Dan McGinn

Data Stories

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This episode we have Dan McGinn from Imperial College in London on the show to talk about visualizing Bitcoin data. Dan and his colleagues have developed real-time visualizations of transactions in the “blockchain,” the public ledger used by Bitcoin to create and document transactions.

The visualizations are displayed in their Data Observatory, a beautiful, high-resolution, 64-screen distributed rendering of a cluster with a canvas of 132M pixels.

On the show we discuss Bitcoin and how it works, the visualizations Dan and his colleagues have developed, and what can be done next to visualize cryptocurrencies.

Enjoy the show!

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Data Stories is brought to you by Qlik. Are you missing out on meaningful relationships hidden in your data? Unlock the whole story with Qlik Sense through personalized visualizations and dynamic dashboards which you can download for free at qlik.de/datastories.

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Links

• Dan McGinn
• YouTube video showing the visualizations in action
• Paper: Visualizing Dynamic Bitcoin Transaction Patterns
• Financial Times: Inside Europe’s biggest data visualisation laboratory

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http://datastori.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/bitcoin.m4v

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Related episodes

• Data Visualization at Capital One with Kim Rees and Steph Hay

Chapters

1. Our sponsor: Qlik (00:00:09)

https://www.qlik.com/de-de/datastories

2. Enrico and Moritz catching up! (00:00:49)

3. Enrico's research on word clouds (00:01:33)

https://medium.com/@FILWD/taking-word-clouds-apart-alternative-designs-for-word-clouds-and-some-research-based-guidelines-df91129aa806

4. Moritz' tool for Deutsche Bahn: Peak Spotting (00:02:55)

http://truth-and-beauty.net/projects/peakspotting

5. Data Stories visualisation by Christian Laesser (00:04:06)

http://projects.datavis.club/100-data-stories/

6. Please support us on Patreon! (00:04:43)

https://www.patreon.com/datastories

7. Introducing Dan McGinn (00:05:36)

https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dmcginn/

8. Bitcoin, the blockchain, mining (00:07:20)

9. Visualizing the Blockchain (00:11:19)

10. What was the process/motivation behind the Vis? (00:13:00)

11. What did the vis look like? (00:14:38)

12. What patterns appeared in the vis? What were the findings? (00:18:50)

13. Are there ways of looking at these patterns to solve/prevent the attacks? (00:26:04)

14. Presentation space (00:27:06)

15. Interaction with the screen? (00:30:06)

16. What's next? (00:32:31)

17. How to get started visualizing crypto currencies? (00:37:26)

18. Video of the data observatory (00:38:49)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-sQ-UkvH2w

19. Our sponsor: Qlik > (00:39:23)

https://www.qlik.com/de-de/datastories