  Analysis of blockchain data is useful for both scientific research and
commercial applications. We present BlockSci, an open-source software platform
for blockchain analysis. BlockSci is versatile in its support for different
blockchains and analysis tasks. It incorporates an in-memory, analytical
(rather than transactional) database, making it several hundred times faster
than existing tools. We describe BlockSci's design and present four analyses
that illustrate its capabilities.
  This is a working paper that accompanies the first public release of
BlockSci, available at https://github.com/citp/BlockSci. We seek input from the
community to further develop the software and explore other potential
applications.
