  Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public
permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity
through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic
economic incentives, it permits censorship resistant public read-write access
to its append-only blockchain database without the need for any mediating
central authority. Not until its advent has such a trusted, transparent,
comprehensive and granular data set of digital economic behaviours been
available for public network analysis. In this article, by translating the
cumbersome binary data structure of the Bitcoin blockchain into a high fidelity
graph model, we demonstrate through various analyses the often overlooked
social and econometric benefits of employing such a novel open data
architecture. Specifically we show (a) how repeated patterns of transaction
behaviours can be revealed to link user activity across the blockchain; (b) how
newly mined bitcoin can be associated to demonstrate individual accumulations
of wealth; (c) through application of the naive quantity theory of money that
Bitcoin's disinflationary properties can be revealed and measured; and (d) how
the user community can develop coordinated defences against repeated denial of
service attacks on the network. All of the aforementioned being exemplary
benefits that would be lost with the closed data models of the 'private
permissioned' distributed ledger architectures that are dominating enterprise
level development due to existing blockchain issues of governance, scalability
and confidentiality.
