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Are there any open source alternatives to Chainalysis Reactor for doing forensic analysis of a local copy of the full Bitcoin blockchain?

Geremia
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No I have not seen any open source projects similar to Chainalysis Reactor. Even explorers like OXT that are helpful in on-chain analysis are not open source.

It will be a great project if someone can create such open source tools because sometimes you need to break things to improve them. Ignoring tools used by companies like Chainalysis doesn't improve anything.

  • I'm surprised no one has written a tool to analyze the blockchain offline. There are many full-nodes out that that have the full chain stored locally. – Geremia Sep 24 '21 at 00:14
  • Problem is everyone hates people who do chain analysis. So nobody wants to waste time on a project that will be shared as a bad actor even though it will help in improving privacy. –  Sep 24 '21 at 00:16
  • But as you say, "sometimes you need to break things to improve them". – Geremia Sep 24 '21 at 00:17
  • Can't Bitcoin Core's terminal do basic blockchain analysis, such as with `-txindex` enabled? – Geremia Sep 24 '21 at 23:19
  • What kind of analysis are you looking for? –  Sep 24 '21 at 23:44
  • what blockchain explorers do: find all blocks transactions with a particular address appear in, get balance of an address, trace flow to/from an address – Geremia Sep 25 '21 at 00:11
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    You can use open source block explorers with Bitcoin Core: 1. https://github.com/mempool/mempool 2. https://github.com/Blockstream/esplora 3. https://github.com/dgarage/NBXplorer –  Sep 25 '21 at 00:39
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BlockSci might be relevant, though "As of November 2020", it "is no longer actively maintained".

Abstract of a paper by one of its devs:

Analysis of blockchain data is useful for both scientific research and commercial applications. We present BlockSci, an open-source software platform for blockchain analysis. BlockSci is versatile in its support for different blockchains and analysis tasks. It incorporates an in-memory, analytical (rather than transactional) database, making it orders of magnitudes faster than using general-purpose graph databases. We describe BlockSci's design and present four analyses that illustrate its capabilities, shedding light on the security, privacy, and economics of cryptocurrencies.

Geremia
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RedGrittyBrick
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