Big Data Analytics on Bitcoin‘s first Altcoin: NameCoin

2017-10-10 --- Jörn Franke

This blog post is about analyzing the Namecoin Blockchain using different Big Data technologies based on the HadoopCryptoLedger library. Currently, this library enables you to analyze the Bitcoin blockchain and Altcoins based on Bitcoin (incl. segregated witness), such as Namecoin, Litecoin, Zcash etc., on Big Data platforms, such as Hadoop, Hive, Flink and Spark. A support for Ethereum is planned for the near future.

However, back to Namecoin and why it is interesting:

• It was one of the first Altcoin based on Bitcoin
• It supports a decentralized domain name and identity system based on blockchain technology – no central actor can censor it
• It is one of the first systems that supports merged mining/AuxPOW. Merged mining enables normal Bitcoin mining pools to mine Altcoins (such as Namecoin) without any additional effort while mining normal Bitcoins. Hence, they can make more revenue and at the same time they support Altcoins, which would be without Bitcoin mining pool support much weaker or not existing. It can be expected that many Altcoins based on Bitcoin will switch to it eventually.

HadoopCryptoLedger supported already from the beginning Altcoins based on Bitcoin. Usually it is expected that Big Data applications based on the HadoopCryptoLedger library implement the analytics they are interested in. However, sometimes we add specific functionality to make it much easier, for instance we provide the Hive UDFs to make certain analysis easier in Hive or we provide certain utility functions for MapReduce, Flink and Spark to make some things which require more detailed know how more easily available to beginners in block chain technology.

We have done this also for Namecoin by providing functionality to:

• determine the type of name operation (new, firstupdate, update)
• get more information about available domains, subdomains, ip addresses, identities

With this analysis is rather easy, because Namecoin requires you to update the information at least every 35,999 blocks (roughly between 200 to 250 days) or information are considered as expired. You just have to take simply the most recent information for a given domain or identity - it contains a full update of all information and there is no need to merge it with information from previous transactions. However, sometimes additional information are provided in so-called delegate entries and in this case you need to combine information.

Finally, we provided additional support to read blockchains based on Bitcoin and the merged mining/AuxPOW specification. You can enable it with a single configuration option. Of course, we provide examples, e.g. for Spark and Hive. Nevertheless all major Big Data platforms (including Flink) are supported. Find here what we plan next – amongst others:

• Support analytics on Ethereum
• Run analytics based on HadoopCryptoLedger in the cloud (e.g. Amazon EMR and/or Microsoft Azure) and provide real time aggregations as a simple HTML page
• … much more

Let us know via Github issues what you are interested in!