Big Data. It’s a popular buzzword that you’ve seen all over the Net the past few years. It’s a very serious billion-dollar industry now — with frontrunners from all different niche avenues of data collection and analytics. With the number of unique data sources available to these data-focused companies, the possibilities for analytics and selling that service to others seems exponential. And, with the rise of worldwide ledger-based systems like that of Bitcoin and other blockchain-based technologies, the lines are blurring between what’s kosher in extrapolating data from the public domain and what isn’t.

There are plenty of reasons to gather large amounts of information, especially in realtime. The ability to identify trends, track data from its source to its endpoint, and making inferred correlations between data points is highly sought after — especially the storing of that data for future analyses and historics, primarily in the business/financial world.

But, what about the data on the most private things we do in our everyday lives? For instance, buying things online and in stores, filling prescriptions, sending money to friends. Surely there exist financial institutions and businesses that monitor that information for security/reporting purposes? And surely they report any suspicious activities to the appropriate authorities for matters of national security (see KYC/AML).

Many regulations already exist that require this level of oversight for financial institutions, especially those in the United States. These data analytics help the government and other agencies have more oversight into a hyper-connected populous.

Fair enough.

But what about when all that information is already in the public domain, and not private? Bitcoin and its distributed public ledger system allows for the entirety of all transactions on the network a certain modicum of “pseudo-anonymity.” Every transaction you make on the network is publicly available, but your particular “wallet address” and identity is uniquely known only to you and whomever else you transact with — or the custodial wallet service you may be using, i.e. Circle or Bitreserve. But if you’re using a newly generated address from your personal home wallet to send funds, or using stealth addresses (learn more here), you are more masked from analytics-based systems that would seek to interpret and make inter-correlations in regard to your transactions.

But who’s working on those types of systems? Bitcoin Magazine had a chance to speak with Bill Gleim, C0-founder of Coinalytics, who took the time to describe Coinalytic’s realtime analytics platform in his own words:

“I realized, as an early victim of bitcoin thefts, there needed to be a better way to understand blockchain activity,” he said. “My original motivation is a mental framework where participants justifiably trust the blockchain and other cryptoledgers with which they interact, particularly in terms of privacy and security.”

What does “understand blockchain activity” mean, though? Gleim went on to explain his plans for the long-term: