  Blockchain represents a technology for establishing a shared, immutable
version of the truth between a network of participants that do not trust one
another, and therefore has the potential to disrupt any financial or other
industries that rely on third-parties to establish trust. Recent trends in
computing including: prevalence of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS); easy
access to High Performance Computing (HPC i.e. 'The Cloud'); and increasingly
advanced analytics capabilities such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and
Machine Learning (ML) allow for rapidly prototyping applications for analysis
of trends in the emergence of Blockchain technology. A scaleable
proof-of-concept pipeline that lays the groundwork for analysis of multiple
streams of semi-structured data posted on social media is demonstrated.
Preliminary analysis and performance metrics are presented and discussed.
Future work is described that will scale the system to cloud-based, real-time,
analysis of multiple data streams, with Information Extraction (IE) (ex.
sentiment analysis) and Machine Learning capability.
