Right now, there are millions of bits of data stored on every public blockchain. Its potential value is immense. And yet, there’s not yet an easy way to view it comprehensively, which means we can’t study it, track it, or otherwise put it to good use.
This is a lost opportunity, namely because there’s so much that could be done with that data. For example, if we seed this data into a machine learning model, we could track trends that would help us prevent nefarious user behaviour — things such as piracy or drug trafficking.
Right now, we only use the blockchain for transactional purposes. We use the Bitcoin blockchain to send money from one address to another. With Ethereum’s smart contracts, individual addresses on the blockchain can call for a function on another address.
But still, the data is only being used for transactional or state-machine purposes. What we need to be thinking about is: how is that money being moved? Where is it going? Who’s doing what? And what addresses can we identify as scammers or terrorist addresses — hubs of the dark web?
Read more: http://www.blockchainadvisormag.com/2018/05/12/applying-blockchain-in-big-data/