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Introduction

Data is the driver of today’s organizations. Ignore the vast amounts of data available to you about your products, services, customers, and even competitors, and you’ll quickly fall behind. But if you embrace data and mine it like it contains valuable jewels, you could find the edge to stay ahead of your competition and keep your customers happy.

And the potential value you can find in data gets even more enticing when you incorporate blockchain technology into your organization. Blockchain is a fast-growing innovation that maintains untold pieces of information you could use to decrease costs and increase revenue. Realizing blockchain data value depends on understanding how blockchain stores data and how to get to it.

Blockchain Data Analytics For Dummies introduces readers to blockchain technology, how it stores data, how to identify and get to interesting data, and how to analyze that data to find meaningful information. You learn how to set up your own blockchain analytics lab and local blockchain to learn and practice blockchain analytics techniques. After you set up your analytics lab, you find out how to extract blockchain data and build popular analytics models to uncover your data’s hidden information.

About This Book

Blockchain technology is often described as the most important and disruptive technology of our generation. At its core, blockchain technology provides a novel way to add data to a ledger of transactions that is shared by other users whom you do not trust. Blockchain technology has the potential to change the way we conduct business at every level. And, while managing transactions between any two or more parties, any data related to the transaction gets stored on the shared ledger that can never be changed or deleted. The availability of unmodified history of transactions can be a huge advantage for organizations of all types.

Unlocking the trends or lessons in these blockchain transactions is the focus of this book. Blockchain Data Analytics For Dummies gives you the foundation of blockchain technology data storage and techniques to analyze blockchain-based data. You learn — in clear language — how to build analytics models and populate them with blockchain data.

Foolish Assumptions

I don’t make many assumptions about your experience with blockchain technology, application programming, or cryptography, but I do assume the following:

 You have a computer and access to the Internet.

 You know the basics of using your computer and the Internet, as well as how to download and install programs.

 You know how to find files on your computer’s disk and how to create folders.

 You’re new to blockchain and you aren’t an experienced software developer.

 You’re new to building data analytics models.

Icons Used in This Book

The Tip icon marks tips (duh!) and shortcuts you can use to extract blockchain data and build analytics models.

Remember icons mark the information that’s especially important to know.

The Technical Stuff icon marks information of a highly technical nature that you can normally skip over.

The Warning icon tells you to watch out! It marks important information that may save you headaches when writing your own blockchain applications.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free cheat sheet for more on blockchain technology and data analytics at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/blockchaindataanalyticsfd.

You’ll find summary information about blockchain technology, data analytics models, and extracting blockchain data. The cheat sheet is a reference to use over and over as you gain experience in extracting blockchain data and building data analytics models.

In addition, if you’d rather download the code you see in this book instead of typing it, go to http://www.dummies.com/go/blockchaindataanalyticsfd. You can download zip files for each of the projects you’ll create to develop and test data access and analytics scripts.

Where to Go from Here

The Dummies series tells you what you need to know and how to do the things you need to do to get the results you want. Readers don’t have to read the entire book to just learn about some topics. For example, if you just want to learn about extracting blockchain data, you can jump right to Chapters 5 and 6. On the other hand, if you need to set up your own blockchain analytics lab, read Chapter 4, which tells you how to do that with clear, step-by-step instructions.