Block.ops - An Analysis Tool - Prices Update, New Analyses, Patches

It's been a month since my last block.ops contribution. Work over this period has mainly centred around loading data, finding work-arounds for difficult blocks, and deriving new analyses to make use of the data obtained.

In the last couple of days I also updated the fx rates calculations to include "Steem to Vests". This can be derived from the power down payments virtual operations, i.e. the conversion of Steem Power to liquid Steem. It's a nice addition as much of the information on the blockchain is expressed in Vests and this addition will allow users to convert analysis results to Steem.

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For the last year I have carried out a monthly analysis of the Steem blockchain activity by application (i.e. by the different websites and applications through which you can post to the Steem blockchain - often termed dApps).

My aim is now to build a tool that can automate such complex analyses of Steem data, providing both historic time series and rapidly updatable real-time results. In addition to the dApp analysis there are many other projects for which such a system could be useful.

This tool is Block.ops.

You can read all about block.ops (including the project aims, technology stack, roadmap and how to contribute) in the introductory post here:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@miniature-tiger/block-ops-an-analysis-tool-1537300276791

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Repository

https://github.com/miniature-tiger/block.ops

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New Features

New analyses - Earnings distribution and retention analyses

A collection of new analyses focused around user earnings. These can be combined together to produce some fairly interesting investigations.

• Earnings lists: The earnings lists aggregate user earnings for all accounts over a defined period. The earnings that can be collected are:
  - author earnings (based on author_reward virtual operations from each post and comment);
  - author earnings obtained from votes by a defined user group (to deduct bid bot effects);
  - curation earnings (based on curation_reward virtual operations from each individual vote); and
  - benefactor earnings (based on comment_benefactor_reward virtual operations).

• Earnings distributions: Conversion of the above earnings lists into distributions by separating the user count and earnings information into buckets of chosen size.

• Retention analyses: Statistics illustrating the proportion of users that remain active (by posting) one month after the earnings period. The retention statistics are also separated by bucket allowing the impact of earnings on retention to be examined.

• Development of all the above analyses for individual dApps.

An illustration of the use of the first two analyses can be found here:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@miniature-tiger/steem-analytics-distribution-of-earnings-1543522494404

An example chart pruduced in this analysis is here:

The pull request and code changes are here:
https://github.com/miniature-tiger/block.ops/pull/10

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Fx / prices update - inclusion of Steem:Vests

The previous fx rate developments allowed conversion of Vests / Steem / SBD payouts to STU. I have now updated the fx rate calculations to include "Steem to Vests". This will allow users to convert analysis results to be expressed in Steem.

The fx Steem:Vests rates are derived from the power down payment virtual operations, i.e. the conversion of Steem Power to liquid Steem when powering down. An empirical approach is applied as for the previous fx rate calculations. The power down payments within the defined period are:

• grouped into hour blocks
• filtered to conversions within the 20-40 minutes range (so the conversion is close to the 30 minute mark); and
• sorted with the largest conversion taken (to reduce the impact of rounding).

The conversion rates are then calculated and the prices collection in MongoDB updated.

The pull request and code changes are here:
https://github.com/miniature-tiger/block.ops/pull/11

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Various patches for difficult blocks

Loading the block operations data into MongoDB now works pretty smoothly. However there are still some occasional blocks which cause difficulties, mainly due to users pushing manual operations to the blockchain. I patch these issues as they come up.

The pull request and code changes are here:
https://github.com/miniature-tiger/block.ops/pull/9

Progress!

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GitHub Account

My account on github is here:
https://github.com/miniature-tiger