  As the pioneer of blockchain technology, Bitcoin is the most popular
cryptocurrency to date. Given its dramatic price spikes (and crashes) along
with the never-ending news from SEC regulations to security breaches, there
seems to be a lack of understanding about the dynamics of cryptocurrencies.
These dynamics are believed to be affected by various political, security,
financial, and regulatory events. In this paper, we present an efficient
framework for holistic analysis of cryptocurrency fluctuations by introducing
the Impact-Score metric to distinguish event-induced changes from normal
variations. We have applied our framework to 16 major worldwide events and the
Bitcoin blockchain network (defined as Bitcoin transaction and users,
blockchain data, and memory pool data) from 2016-2018. The results show that a
majority of the events are correlated with substantial network changes. We
observed roughly generalizable correlations between event types (e.g. financial
events) and sub-structures of the Bitcoin blockchain network. Subgroups of
these events have strongly consistent temporal impacts on specific facets (e.g.
activity or fees) of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Furthermore, we demonstrate the
robustness of our process by correlating a majority of spikes in
network/subnetwork change with major events.
