A few weeks ago I wrote an article about a new kind of application for the bitcoin protocol, the bitcoin graph API. In this article I am going to go into a little more depth on the concept itself and how you can use it if you are interested in making applications that run on the bitcoin network. Basically we can think of a bitcoin graph as being a data feed that gives you information about transaction details and such from the bitcoin network. There are several different kinds of API’s out there that you can get started with, but I am going to talk about the most popular one at this point in time.
The most popular and most used API are calling Blockhashes. What it does is it takes a copy of the block chain and merges it into another piece of data. The different parts of the chain are called “blocks”, and each block has a specific reference to the previous block. If you want to do some quick prediction about how the value of the currencies in the world will change in the future, you can just take the top ten bits from each block, which is the maximum number of bits that can be spent in a block. This is called a “block prediction” and it is very easy to implement in your applications.
One example of a relatively simple application that runs on the bitcoin network is Akcora et al’s Akcora. This is an application that actually takes a transaction from the bitcoin network and plugs it into an online trading platform. hotgraph It also plugs into a back-room system that is used to collect and publish the information that it collects. By doing this it gives you a prediction of when the average price of a particular currency in the world will be.
This is only one example of what you can do with the Blockhashes API. The Blockhashes themselves also have several other applications as well. For example, there is a client-server architecture that is used in order to provide an accurate prediction about the transaction patterns that happen in the bitcoin network. There is also a forecasting system that utilizes the event that happens in the ecosystem between the actual users and the service providers. This allows for very precise predictions and therefore you can use this for all sorts of things.
One example of using the Blockhashes API in this way is by taking the transaction patterns that happen in the open market between buyers and sellers and then combining them with a bit of smart-contract logic. The smart contract can be written by anyone that has a programming capability and can automatically submit the correct prediction for the exchange rate to occur. Once it has submitted the correct prediction it sends the correct transaction to the corresponding output addresses. This automatically translates into the necessary changes to the existing transaction patterns on the blockchain.
In order to make this process more accurate, it is recommended that you combine two different inputs addresses. One input address corresponds to each individual buyer and seller in your data feed. The second input address corresponds to the Meta Trader Robot that you are using in order to interpret the predicted transaction patterns. The final output address is the target for your application – which will calculate the appropriate amount of change to send to the target. All of these steps combined are what makes up a valid figure of transaction graph in figure 2.