The possibility to analyze everyday monetary transactions is limited by the
scarcity of available data, as this kind of information is usually considered
highly sensitive. Present econophysics models are usually employed on presumed
random networks of interacting agents, and only macroscopic properties (e.g.
the resulting wealth distribution) are compared to real-world data. In this
paper, we analyze BitCoin, which is a novel digital currency system, where the
complete list of transactions is publicly available. Using this dataset, we
reconstruct the network of transactions, and extract the time and amount of
each payment. We analyze the structure of the transaction network by measuring
network characteristics over time, such as the degree distribution, degree
correlations and clustering. We find that linear preferential attachment drives
the growth of the network. We also study the dynamics taking place on the
transaction network, i.e. the flow of money. We measure temporal patterns and
the wealth accumulation. Investigating the microscopic statistics of money
movement, we find that sublinear preferential attachment governs the evolution
of the wealth distribution. We report a scaling relation between the degree and
wealth associated to individual nodes.Comment: Project website: http://www.vo.elte.hu/bitcoin/; updated after
publicatio