AUTHOR=Kondor Dániel , Bulatovic Nikola , Stéger József , Csabai István , Vattay Gábor TITLE=The Rich Still Get Richer: Empirical Comparison of Preferential Attachment via Linking Statistics in Bitcoin and Ethereum JOURNAL=Frontiers in Blockchain VOLUME=4 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/blockchain/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2021.668510 DOI=10.3389/fbloc.2021.668510 ISSN=2624-7852 ABSTRACT=

Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions present some of the largest real-world complex networks that are publicly available for study, including a detailed picture of their time evolution. As such, they have received a considerable amount of attention from the network science community along with analyses from economic and cryptographic perspectives. Among these studies, in an analysis on the early instance of the Bitcoin network, we have shown the clear presence of the preferential attachment, or the “rich-get-richer” phenomenon. Now, we revisit this question, using a recent version of the Bitcoin network that has grown almost 100-fold since our original analysis. Furthermore, we additionally carry out a comparison with Ethereum, the second most important cryptocurrency. Our results show that preferential attachment continues to be a key factor in the evolution of both the Bitcoin and Ethereum transactoin networks. To facilitate further analysis, we publish a recent version of both transaction networks, and an efficient software implementation that is able to evaluate linking statistics necessary for learn about preferential attachment on networks with several hundred million edges.