We created a visual analytics tool to aid in the invesitigation of the history and statistics of the Bitcoin mining business.

Project Repository - MiningVis

• V1: Time Selection view – Visual Encoding: It is a time series chart, a filter for the visualizations, and an overview of the mining statistics. – Interaction: It filters the visualizations (V2–V6) to a specific time interval by specifying a range with the calendar inputs.

• V2: Mining distribution view – Visual Encoding: This is a ribbon chart that allows detection of dominating mining pools, the rise and decline of mining pools, and finding characteristics that possibly lead to changes in ranking. – Interaction: Besides the measures, group-by, and color-by selectors, V2 provides two ways to highlight mining pools or their characteristics viz. clicking on the left side labels and drawing a brush on the ribbon chart .

• V3: Mining pool details view – Visual Encoding: We use a temporal bar chart to encode aggregated (per month) mining pool measures. – Interaction: It is controlled by selections made in V2 as they are meant as accompanying detail. Analysts can click the info icon for a text description of the pool’s characteristics. Additional interactions are tooltips for detail-in-demand.

• V4: Bitcoin statistics view – Visual Encoding: Encodes 17 different factors each as a gray temporal area chart. – Interaction: The view offers details-on-demand via a tooltip.

• V5: Bitcoin news view – Visual Encoding: We use a swarm plot to display each individual news item in a compact fashion across a timeline. – Interaction: Browse the news by hovering circles, using keyword search, and sliding to specify the number of news showing in the chart.

• V6: Cross pooling view – Visual Encoding: We used a chord diagram to display a metric related to miners crossing between pools; the total amount of miners’ rewards (default) or the total number of miner addresses. – Interaction: Analysts can hover over the flow or stacked bars to see the exact value.

• close repository
• Open a terminal window of the root directory.
• Execute the command to start the server.
• Python 2 — python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000
• Python 3 — python -m http.server 8000
• Then open a web browser at http://localhost:8000/