Agenda:

Blockchain is an enabling technology that has the potential to revolutionize industries from finance to healthcare to energy. As the pioneer of all blockchain technology, Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency to date. Given its dramatic price peak (and crash) and the never-ending news from SEC regulations to security breaches, there seems to be a lack of a clear understanding about the dynamics of these cryptocurrencies. These dynamics are believed to be affected by various worldwide events ranging from political, security, financial, and regulatory. In this talk, I present an efficient framework for holistic cryptocurrency fluctuation analysis, and introduce the Impact-Score metric to distinguish event-induced changes from non-event or “normal” fluctuations. We applied our framework to the Bitcoin blockchain network (defined as the collection of Bitcoin addresses, transactions, blocks, and mempool data) from 2016-2018 and observed substantial network changes associated with a majority of the events selected for analysis. In particular, we found roughly generalizable correlations between certain event types (e.g. financial events) and particular sub-structures of the Bitcoin blockchain network. Furthermore, subgroups of these events have strongly consistent temporal impacts on certain facets (e.g. activity or fees) of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Extended analysis on three events – the election of Trump, the Bitcoin-Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork, and the regulation of Bitcoin by South Korea – revealed major shifts in Bitcoin transaction value distributions and changes in blockchain indicators consistent with expected behavior.

Our Speaker is Anthony Luo

Anthony Luo is an incoming freshman at Columbia University and is currently finishing his senior year at Boise High. He has been a research assistant for the Software Engineering and Assurance Laboratory at Boise State University since 2017, co-authored two research papers submitted for publication (both under review), and given poster presentations at the Idaho Conference on Undergraduate Research 2016/2017/2018 and the Joint Mathematics Meetings 2017. He is a National Merit Finalist, 2019 Rotary Century Scholar, 2018 National AP Scholar, 2017 Research Experience in Cybersecurity fellow, and 2016 REMYS (Research Experience in Mathematics for Young Scientists) fellow. In his spare time, Anthony enjoys playing the piano and violin and serving as a regional leader for SLICEIT|ICT (International Climate Team) – a 501(3)(c) non-profit dedicated to developing low-cost climate monitoring and STEM integration.