Yesterday Google
announced it has extended the number of public blockchains which are now fully searchable using BigQuery. In February of last year,
Google loaded the data for Bitcoin and in August for Ethereum. It now includes Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Dogecoin, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, and Zcash.
Most blockchains are a log of transactions. It’s not too hard to find individual transactions, addresses and blocks using easy web tools. But if you want to run a bulk query or a conventional database query, loading the blockchain into a database will make queries faster. Public blockchains are enormous, so that’s painful. Hence Google has loaded them into a public dataset that’s automatically updated nightly. Anyone who knows how to use SQL can now query the database for a small charge.
So what?
Having a database version of a blockchain could be useful for numerous purposes. The obvious ones are running analytics or forensics on questionable users. One of the most interesting ones is the ability to analyze smart contracts.
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