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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

The coin flow graph is terrific: http://wizsec.jp/images/theft_flow.svg

Is this type of visualization common in Bitcoin? Is it a tool anyone can easily use?

Edit, let me restate my question. "Is there a tool that generates Sankey diagrams from blockchain data that is easy to use?"

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The graph itself is d3: https://bost.ocks.org/mike/sankey/

I vaguely recalled seeing these in practice somewhere before - it was ntopng netflow visualisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntopng#/media/File:Ntopng.png

These might get you about half way there:

https://github.com/znort987/blockparser

https://web.archive.org/web/20161027122545/http://compbio.cs...

These are called Sankey diagrams.

Actually more specific is 'alluvial diagram' [1] since the style emphasizes a 'flow' character.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alluvial_diagram

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankey_diagram

I read this as Snakey and it still works :)

This is relatively easy to do since all bitcoin traffic is transparent and open for easy tracking. You can probably do this in gnuplot.

Anyone who has the blockchain downloaded can run their own analysis algorithms on it - it's already there for you to see.

I imagine the difficult part is to group transactions and addresses into understandable entities. A good tool could certainly make incremental diagrams that help improving that grouping though.

You sound like the poster dismissing DropBox's idea saying it could be manually done easily.

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