Friday, March 27, 2015

Numisight Bitcoin Explorer Public Alpha Release

Today I am releasing a version of the tool I've been using to create the graphics you see on this website.  The Numisight Bitcoin Explorer can be downloaded from the Numisight website.

This version of the software provides the core visualization engine used in the full "Studio" version of the software.  The reporting and profile creation tools are not present a they are still under development.  You can save and load graphs as well as export as a PNG (with a watermark) any graphs you generate.  When loading an old graph please note that coins that were once unspent may now be included in a transaction.  The layout may also mutate from the saved graph because of this as the topology may change.

Using the search box you can copy in any address or transaction ID and the resulting transactions will be shown on the main canvas.  To expand a transaction you can double click the box, and to expand just the inputs and outputs you can use the context (right click) menu.  This menu also allows you to remove unwanted transactions.  Be careful however, currently I take no effort to restrict the amount of data that is shown on the canvas.  Pay attention to the number of inputs and outputs for each transaction to be sure the graph won't be overwhelming to look at.  There is a performance penalty for viewing large numbers of transactions, but usually you will encounter the usability issues of attempting to make sense of a thousand transactions before the performance penalty becomes troublesome.

For data I provide access to two public data sources (there were three, but one of them got out of the Bitcoin API game).  Bitpay Insight is the primary data provider, and BlockCypher is available on the configuration tab of the data screen.  If you use BlockCypher I recommend you provide your own API Key rather than sharing the bundled key.  Currently I only make use of the basic BlockCyper APIs, not any of the unique data sources like their library of double spend data.

The license for this version is of an evaluation license, and this version is licensed until block 400,000 is mined.  Currently this is not enforced in the software but that is something I am looking into.  If you want a more permissive license feel free to email us and we can work something out.

If you have any questions or problems, please email support.  Right now we have a Mac and Windows 64-bit version.  I'm working on getting a Linux (Ubuntu) version ready and that should be out within a week.  If these don't work for you email support and let us know what versions you may need.

For the next batch of blog posts I will be doing, I intend to release the .numisgraph files so that you can explore the transactions graphs yourself.  I may also be providing graph files that are not shown in the blog posts that are used to back up my analytic conclusions but don't add to the primary narrative.


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