Digging for Bitcoin Is a Labor of Love

It would have been reasonable for those attending Josh Bressers' session at last month's CypherCon - myself included -- to expect a presentation by a cryptocurrency expert. It was billed as a talk about plumbing the depths of the bitcoin blockchain. When Bressers admitted that his material grew out of a hobby, I was surprised. Still, the talk was far from disappointing.

Instead, "Spelunking the Bitcoin Blockchain" offered a glimpse of the impact that "amateurs," in the best sense of the word, ultimately have on the development of cr ypt ocur r enci es.

Similar to the way a lot of passion projects unfold, Bressers started out by going down a rabbit hole -one that is of interest to many working and playing with technology -- out of sheer curiosity.

"Being able to see the data and answer questions is very powerful," he said. "Once you start to investigate something like bitcoin, every question you answer takes you down a path with more questions and new answers I can't even imagine."

Luckily for him, Bressers didn't have to start delving into bitcoin from square one. His background with Elastic, as a member of its product security division, equipped him with the technical command to set up a continually refreshing interactive dataset of the bitcoin blockchain. Right off the bat, his queryable data portal painted a vivid picture of bitcoin's l ed ger.

"Since starting this project, I've learned quite a lot about how [bitcoin] works -- everything from how the client stores data to what the data is, how others are using bitcoin in ways the creators probably never imagined," he said. "The fact that anyone can put anything in the blockchain intrigued me, but I ended up finding many interesting things in all the data."