Inscription and Metadata Analysis on the Steem Blockchain

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Well, let’s start with inscriptions. Inscriptions are basically like little notes that you can attach to your transactions on the Steem blockchain. They allow you to add extra information to your transaction without having to clutter up the main data field. For example, if you want to write a blog post and include some metadata (like tags or categories) about it, you could create an inscription that includes all of this info.

Now, how we analyze these inscriptions. First, we need to extract them from the blockchain data using a script or command like so:

#!/bin/bash
set -e # This command ensures that the script will stop running if any errors occur.

# Define input and output directories
input_dir="path/to/blockchain/data" # This variable stores the path to the directory containing the blockchain data.
output_dir="path/to/extracted/inscriptions" # This variable stores the path to the directory where the extracted inscriptions will be saved.

# Loop through each block in the data directory
for file in "$input_dir"/*.dat; do # This for loop iterates through each file in the input directory with the .dat extension.
    # Extract inscription data from the current block using a command like so:
    # (Note that this is just an example and may vary depending on your specific use case)
    # sed -n 's/^.*\(02[[:xdigit:]]*\).*$/\1/p' "$file" | awk '{print $3}' > "${output_dir}/$(basename "$file" .dat)_inscriptions.txt"
    # The above command uses the sed and awk commands to extract inscription data from the current block and save it to a file in the output directory.
    # The basename command is used to remove the .dat extension from the file name and add "_inscriptions.txt" to the end.
    # The $3 in the awk command specifies that the third column of data should be extracted.
    # The > symbol redirects the output to the specified file.
    
    # Repeat for each block in the data directory
done

This script uses sed and awk to extract specific fields from the blockchain data, which can then be saved as separate files (one per block) in a new output directory. The `sed -n ‘s/^.*\(02[[:xdigit:]]*\).*$/\1/p’` command is used to match and extract any hexadecimal strings that start with “02” from the beginning of each line, while the `awk ‘{print $3}’` command is used to print only the third field (which should contain our inscription data) for each matching line.

Once we have extracted all of this data, we can then analyze it using various tools and techniques to gain insights into how people are using the Steem blockchain and what kind of content they’re creating on it. For example, we might use a tool like Python or R to perform statistical analysis on the metadata associated with each inscription (like the number of tags used per post), or we might use machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and trends that could help us better understand how people are using this technology.

Inscriptions, metadata, and all sorts of other fancy blockchain stuff explained in simple terms. Hopefully this helps demystify some of the more technical aspects of Steem for those who might be new to this space.

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