research-article

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Analysis of Arbitrary Content on Blockchain-Based Systems using BigQuery

Authors:

Marcel Gregoriadis,

Martin FlorianAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '22: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2022

Pages 478 - 487

https://doi.org/10.1145/3487553.3524628

Published: 16 August 2022 Publication History

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Abstract

Blockchain-based systems have gained immense popularity as enablers of independent asset transfers and smart contract functionality. They have also, since as early as the first Bitcoin blocks, been used for storing arbitrary contents such as texts and images. On-chain data storage functionality is useful for a variety of legitimate use cases. It does, however, also pose a systematic risk. If abused, for example by posting illegal contents on a public blockchain, data storage functionality can lead to legal consequences for operators and users that need to store and distribute the blockchain, thereby threatening the operational availability of entire blockchain ecosystems. In this paper, we develop and apply a cloud-based approach for quickly discovering and classifying content on public blockchains. Our method can be adapted to different blockchain systems and offers insights into content-related usage patterns and potential cases of abuse. We apply our method on the two most prominent public blockchain systems—Bitcoin and Ethereum—and discuss our results. To the best of our knowledge, the presented study is the first to systematically analyze non-financial content stored on the Ethereum blockchain and the first to present a side-by-side comparison between different blockchains in terms of the quality and quantity of stored data.

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Cited By

Nguyen TLe Thi H(2025)A DCA-Like Based Algorithm for the Merkle Tree Construction Problem in Ethereum Cryptocurrency SystemNumerical Computations: Theory and Algorithms10.1007/978-3-031-81241-5_31(368-375)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81241-5_31
Chen ZZhu LJiang PHe JZhang Z(2024)A Generic Blockchain-based Steganography Framework with High Capacity via Reversible GANIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621377(241-250)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621377
Wang ZFan KChao LXue R(2023)BigChain: Consolidating Blockchain Client for Scalable Analysis2023 4th International Conference on Computer, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (ICCBD+AI)10.1109/ICCBD-AI62252.2023.00044(227-231)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCBD-AI62252.2023.00044
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Analysis of Arbitrary Content on Blockchain-Based Systems using BigQuery
1. Applied computing
  1. Computer forensics
    1. Data recovery
2. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Distributed architectures
      1. Peer-to-peer architectures

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '22: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2022

April 2022

1338 pages

ISBN:9781450391306

DOI:10.1145/3487553

Editors:
Frédérique Laforest
INSA Lyon, France
,
Raphaël Troncy
EURECOM, France
,
Lionel Médini
Université Lyon 1, France
,
Ivan Herman
W3C / retired

Copyright © 2022 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

Sponsors

SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 August 2022

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WWW '22

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SIGWEB

WWW '22: The ACM Web Conference 2022

April 25 - 29, 2022

Virtual Event, Lyon, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

Nguyen TLe Thi H(2025)A DCA-Like Based Algorithm for the Merkle Tree Construction Problem in Ethereum Cryptocurrency SystemNumerical Computations: Theory and Algorithms10.1007/978-3-031-81241-5_31(368-375)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81241-5_31
Chen ZZhu LJiang PHe JZhang Z(2024)A Generic Blockchain-based Steganography Framework with High Capacity via Reversible GANIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621377(241-250)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621377
Wang ZFan KChao LXue R(2023)BigChain: Consolidating Blockchain Client for Scalable Analysis2023 4th International Conference on Computer, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (ICCBD+AI)10.1109/ICCBD-AI62252.2023.00044(227-231)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCBD-AI62252.2023.00044
Platt MOjeka SDrăgnoiu AIbelegbu OPierangeli FSedlmeir JWang Z(2023)Energy Demand Unawareness and the Popularity of Bitcoin: Evidence from NigeriaOxford Open Energy10.1093/ooenergy/oiad0122Online publication date: 10-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1093/ooenergy/oiad012

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