Bio

Leonardo is an economic researcher at the Securities and Exchange Commission of Brazil (CVM) and is currently finishing a master’s in mathematical modeling of information at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), with the project “Asset Management and Financial Stability—A Network Approach.”

Leonardo has research interests in computational social science and data science, with focuses on agent-based modelling, network science, and machine learning for modeling and analyzing social and economic problems, specifically problems related to public policy, like regulation.

Leonardo believes the ideas from A New Kind of Science provide a valuable framework to understand the complexity of social and economic systems and for the construction of social and economic models.

Project: Exploring the Bitcoin Transaction Network

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that does not rely on a central server, or any central counterparty, to process transactions or store funds. The block chain is a transaction database implemented within the Bitcoin protocol that is shared by all nodes participating in the system, being responsible for the viability of the Bitcoin and the sustainability of the trust system. This database ensures the integrity of every transaction, and a full copy of the currency’s block chain contains every transaction ever executed in the currency. With this information, one can retrace all the transaction networks.

In this project, the objective is to obtain data from the block chain and reconstruct the network of transactions while performing analysis using Mathematica’s database, graph, network, and visualization functionalities.