Striking Gold in Software Repositories? An Econometric Study of Cryptocurrencies on GitHub

Trockman, Asher; Tonder, Rijnard van; Vasilescu, Bogdan

doi:10.1109/msr.2019.00036

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Oliva et al [29] conducted a study of smart contracts in the Ethereum platform and found that only a small number (0.05%) of the smart contracts were actively used in most (80%) of the transactions that were sent to contracts. Trockman et al [40] investigated if there is a dynamic relation between software metrics and market capitalization for 268 cryptocurrencies using dynamic regression models and found that there was no compelling evidence of a relationship. Lucchini et al [20] found that the number of developers working on a cryptocurrency project correlates positively with its market capitalization.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attack of the Clones: Measuring the Maintainability, Originality and Security of Bitcoin 'Forks' in the Wild

Choi¹,

Choi²,

Aiken³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Since Bitcoin appeared in 2009, over 6,000 different cryptocurrency projects have followed. The cryptocurrency world may be the only technology where a massive number of competitors offer similar services yet claim unique benefits, including scalability, fast transactions, and security. But are these projects really offering unique features and significant enhancements over their competitors? To answer this question, we conducted a large-scale empirical analysis of code maintenance activities, originality and security across 592 crypto projects. We found that about half of these projects have not been updated for the last six months; over two years, about three-quarters of them disappeared, or were reported as scams or inactive. We also investigated whether 11 security vulnerabilities patched in Bitcoin were also patched in other projects. We found that about 80% of 510 C-language-based cryptocurrency projects have at least one unpatched vulnerability, and the mean time taken to fix the vulnerability is 237.8 days. Among those 510 altcoins, we found that at least 157 altcoins are likely to have been forked from Bitcoin, about a third of them containing only slight changes from the Bitcoin version from which they were forked. As case studies, we did a deep dive into 20 altcoins (e.g., Litecoin, FujiCoin, and Feathercoin) similar to the version of Bitcoin used for the fork. About half of them did not make any technically meaningful change -failing to comply with the promises (e.g., about using Proof of Stake) made in their whitepapers.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attack of the Clones: Measuring the Maintainability, Originality and Security of Bitcoin 'Forks' in the Wild

Choi¹,

Choi²,

Aiken³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Next, Trockman et al [14] investigated the relationship between active communities of developers and the price of some cryptocurrencies. The authors did not identify any compelling evidence for causality between development activity metrics and market cap [13].…”

Section: Bitcoin Price Formation Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Total amount of activity on GitHub [13], [14] Miners' Activity Total amount of computing power [12], [32] Proliferation of End Users Number of end users [19], [38]- [40]…”

Section: Developers' Activitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Subsequent researchers (e.g., [12]) developed models focused on other aspects, such as the miners' activities. Further, some researchers (e.g., [13], [14]) introduced the idea of correlating the developers' activity with the price of a cryptocurrency. All of these studies have a common line of reasoning: they study cryptocurrencies from the price perspective, with the assumption that price is the only indicator of success.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Proliferation of End Users as a Success Metric for Cryptocurrencies

Rossi¹,

Avital²,

Gleasure³

2022

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Over the last decade, numerous studies have examined the remarkable appreciation of cryptocurrencies and have typically focused on their price and the factors that predict them. In contrast, this paper argues that the success of a cryptocurrency is determined not only by its monetary value but also by the proliferation of its end users. Specifically, we hypothesize that changes in developers' and miners' activities drive the growing proliferation of a cryptocurrency's end users. Building on the Bitcoin case, we use a time-series model based on 4,285 Bitcoin daily observations to suggest that changes in the number of end users are anticipated by surges or drops in activity by the developers and miners who develop and maintain the network. We further find a limited relationship between these variables and the price of Bitcoin. These results support an alternative view of cryptocurrencies' success and highlight further research avenues in this nascent domain.

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“…Asher Trockman et al [9] studied crypto currencies by observing development efforts and software progresses, mining GitHub as software repositories. They patiently and determinedly spent a year of daily observations on more than 200 open source crypto currencies and concluded that there is no sufficient evidence for a relationship between market capitalization and daily stars, forks and other activities.…”

Section: Mining Online Communities As Software Repositoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Mining Software Repositories in Social Network

Teng¹

2020

JSW

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Mining Software Repositories can serve a variety of functions e.g. predicting future software Engineering changes, studying code coverage. Social networks bring people on various locations together and mining social networks usually aims to find people's behavior patterns. However, there are few comprehensive surveys on the intersection of mining software repositories and mining social networks due to the little emphasis on this intersection and the recent rapid popularity of social networks e.g. GitHub. In order to fill this existing gap, in the paper, an original literature survey has been conducted on 5 different kinds of social networks regarding mining software repositories since 2000. To author's best knowledge, it is the first time to conduct such a survey on mining software repositories in social network.

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Striking Gold in Software Repositories? An Econometric Study of Cryptocurrencies on GitHub

Cited by 12 publications

References 26 publications

Attack of the Clones: Measuring the Maintainability, Originality and Security of Bitcoin 'Forks' in the Wild

Attack of the Clones: Measuring the Maintainability, Originality and Security of Bitcoin 'Forks' in the Wild

The Proliferation of End Users as a Success Metric for Cryptocurrencies

A Survey of Mining Software Repositories in Social Network

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