The Bitcoin network is a fruitful source of data concerning all sorts of problems in economics, computer science, and applied mathematics. In this post I am concerned with the the underlying dynamic complex network, about which we need to know in order to say anything meaningful about the network stability, efficiency, resilience to various forms of attack, behavior under parameter change (e.g. messing with the block frequency), and anything else you can think of.

Example: consider the "Internet" (whatever that means). We "know" that the nodes form a scale-free network where the number of nodes of degree  k  is proportional to  k^(-2.2)  or so (with a cut-off).

For the Bitcoin network, besides the degree distribution, distance and bandwidth between nodes, clustering coefficient, and so on, we need to know things like the processing power of each node (many people are not mining at all! the ones that are are not randomly distributed!) and rates at which different kinds of nodes join or leave the network. One thing we have working in our favor is that the the Bitcoin network is relatively small, therefore it should be possible to obtain some reasonable data.

Does anybody have access to such data? Does anybody want to support this sort of research?