unterstein / reddcoin-graph

Creating a community graph out of the ReddCoin Twitter Tipbot usage

Whats this?

The crypto currency Reddcoin is a social currency that makes digital currency easy for the general public. Reddcoin achieves this by integrating a digital currency platform seamlessly with all major social networks to make the process of sending and receiving money fun and rewarding for everyone.

One of the best things are the tip bots, for example the Twitter Bot! You can easily tweet something like this:

@tipreddcoin +tip @unterstein 50 RDD

Sending this tweet will transfer 50 Reddcoin from your personal tip bot wallet to the receiver's tip bot wallet. You need to transfer some coins to your personal tip bot wallet before you start :). It makes it incredibly easy to appreciate other user and give feedback to other users.

But this is just one bot of this currency. There are bots for facebook, reddit and also a chrome plugin ❤ Most activity is on reddit.

This is a highly connected and social activity and you can extract this activity to a graph and a graph database, like Neo4j. You work with a flexible network structure of nodes and relationships rather than static tables as you would do in a traditional database. With this technology it is possible to model your data as graph, which fits this tipping behavior very well and the graph makes it really easy to query your data and don't bother about joins or other complex operations of a SQL-like database. You can learn more on the Neo4j website.

The graph

If you follow the path of code in this repository, you will see that this project basically contains two elements.

1. A program to get all tweets by the Redcoin Twitter bot and stores them locally
2. A program that takes this data and transforms it into a connected graph, where users are nodes and tips are edges.

If you go to your Neo4j browser, you can see a graph similar to this one:

With the Neo4j browser you can easily browse the connections between users, tips and others users. You can pick a starting node and navigate further from this starting point. But you could also run more advanced queries against this data store.

About the example data: I ran the script before christmas, so there is no data of 2018 included :-/

For example you could query (it's called cypher in the Neo4j world) which users sends the most tips in the data set.

MATCH (sender: User)-[r:TIPS]->() return sender.name, count(r) as c order by c desc;

Or you could query which users receives the most tips in the data set.

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->(receiver: User) return receiver.name, count(r) as c order by c desc;

Or you could query how much tips are in the data set and you see over 12.000 tips.

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->() return count(r)

Or you could query how much Reddcoins were tipped overall, which is 63942358 Reddcoins. Based on the current exchange rate of roughly 0.008 Dollar per Reddcoin, this is over $500.000. This is pretty amazing for a tip bot on twitter! 🎉

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->() return sum(r.amount)

You can see, that Monday and Friday are the most popular days for tips.

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->() return r.dayOfWeek, count(r) as c order by c desc;

2014 was by far the most popular year of this tip bot.

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->() return r.year, count(r) as c order by c desc;

September, August and October are the most popular month of tipping. Maybe because it is cold outisde and you can spend more time on Twitter ;-).

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->() return r.month, count(r) as c order by c desc;

There is no clear pattern on tips based on the day of the month.

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->() return r.day, count(r) as c order by c desc;

The most popular hours of the day are 15-19 o'clock UTC. This is 16-20 o'clock CET, 7-11 o'clock west coast or 10-14 o'clock east coast.

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->() return r.hour, count(r) as c order by c desc;

And the most popular date were 2014-9-15, 2014-9-13, 2014-9-14 and 2014-9-11 with over 1000 tips on these 4 days only.

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->() return r.date, count(r) as c order by c desc;

But the most popular date in terms of tip amount are 2014-5-6, 2014-3-1, 2014-12-21 with each over 2 Million Reddcoins tipped per day. If we research the exchange rate of RDD to USD on 2014-5-6, we see an exchange price of 0.000022 Dollar per Reddcoin. So this day had a total amount of around $50 based on the past exchange rate. With the current exchange rate this would be over $18.000.

MATCH ()-[r:TIPS]->() return r.date, sum(r.amount) as c order by c desc;

Some users are tipping themselves. I personally don't know, why you would like to do this, but this creates nice graphs though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

MATCH (u)-[:TIPS]->(u) return u;

We can also query the highest tips. You can see very high tips. But you can also see high tips to charity organizations like Alzheimer's Assoc., Water.org or StopTicsToday.

MATCH (s: User)-[t:TIPS]->(r: User) return s.name as sender, t.amount as c, t.date, r.name as receiver order by c desc;

Even more is possible

It is possible to do even more advanced and sophisticated cyphers with the Neo4j data store. For example the research about the panama papers was done with Neo4j, see this article. In this setup the user searched for patterns, which you can easily model with the cypher query language.

How to get this started?

Do you want to run your analysis on your own? This is no problem! You can decide if you want to go with the provided data set, that is attached in the file data.cypher and import this in your existing Neo4j database, or you can run the twitter importer on your own to have the latest tweets in your analisys.

Install Neo4j

Go to the download page and download a binary suitable for your platform.

Import the provided data set to your Neo4j instance

Open the file data.cypher and copy the content to your clipboard. Point the web browser of you choise to http://localhost:7474 and open the Neo4j browser. Paste the content of your clipboard to the text field at the top of the browser and hit the run button. Get a nice cup of coffee while your data is imported. You can start with a fresh data set and a fresh cup of coffee when you arrive back at your computer ☕

Run the twitter importer on your own

To run the twitter importer, please follow the instructions below 👇

Build the project

You can simply run mvn clean package which builds a jar file which is located in the target directory.

Run the project

To run the twitter importer, you need to run the following command (with your twitter credentials) in this folder:

java -cp ./target/reddcoin-graph-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar io.github.unterstein.TwitterImport $customerKey $customerSecret $accessToken $accessTokenSecret

To run the Neo4j exporter, you need to run the following command (with your Neo4j credentials) in this folder:

java -cp ./target/reddcoin-graph-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar io.github.unterstein.Neo4jExporter $neo4jUri $neo4jUser $neo4jPassword