Quantifying Event Impact on the Bitcoin Blockchain

Abstract

As the pioneer of blockchain technology, Bitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency to date. Given its dramatic price swings along with constant news and events, the dynamics of cryptocurrencies are difficult to quantify. These dynamics are believed to be affected by various political, security, financial, and regulatory events. This paper presents the Impact-Score metric, an efficient framework that attempts to quantify the impact of events on the Bitcoin blockchain. We have applied our framework to 16 major worldwide events and the Bitcoin blockchain network (defined as Bitcoin transaction and users, blockchain data, and memory pool data) from 2016-2018. The results show that the majority of the events are correlated with quantifiable changes in the Bitcoin blockchain and network. We also observed correlations between event types (e.g. financial events) and event subtypes on certain Bitcoin blockchain network temporal features.