The emergence of bitcoin is just one more signal that society has fully moved into the digital age.

Technology has changed the way that we do just about everything in our lives, including the ways we consume data and information.

The days of pencil-pushing to gather and analyse data are numbered, and new tools have made gathering, sorting, analysing and visualising enormous amounts of data easier than ever.

Bitcoin, of course, lends itself perfectly to these quantitatively-focused metric tools.

Few things about the digital currency are subjective, and even though nobody knows for certain what drives bitcoin’s price changes, plenty of people have tried their hand at using technical analysis to predict price trends.

Luckily for us, there’s no shortage of companies working with data to paint a picture of the ever-changing bitcoin ecosystem.

These websites provide information on pricing, trading, market capitalisations, blockchain statistics and more.

Here are nine of the most helpful bitcoin data resources:

Coinometrics

prides itself on its “institutional-level bitcoin data and research”, and the company’s analyses of volatility, price dispersion and currency flows have a refreshingly proprietary feel.

For bitcoiners eager to spend their BTC at brick-and-mortar businesses, Coinmap is a godsend. The site has a minimalist design, but is well populated with information on hundreds of retailers that accept bitcoin at their physical store locations.

Perhaps the most well known resource for analysing the block chain, Blockchain.info has basic information on a number of metrics like market capitalisation, transaction volume, hash rate and more.

In addition to these stats, users can look up every bitcoin transaction on the block chain by searching a bitcoin address to trace where the coins came from and how much BTC is stored at any particular wallet address.

A user favorite for pricing information, bitcoincharts.com offers a comprehensive look at the digital currency network, with a focus on technical analysis of price trends. The site offers a number of customisations for viewing price charts, and the long term view offers a nice perspective on the currency's price history.

Bitcoin isn’t the only player in the digital currency space. There are a number of altcoins gathering momentum in the industry, and while none rival bitcoin’s $7.7bn market cap, CoinMarketCap keeps an up-to-date record of the market capitalisation of some 462 digital currencies.

Bitnodes

is in development for a very specific pupose: to estimate and visualise the size of the bitcoin network. Powered by the Bitcoin Foundation, the site’s tools gather data on all the nodes running the bitcoin protocol version 70001.

For those yearning for a more visually focused analysis of bitcoin transactions, Wizbit fits the bill perfectly. The site shows all transactions and newly mined blocks in realtime on an eye-catching spinning globe.

Blockr.io

is another block chain-focused site that offers data on the block chains of currencies like bitcoin, litecoin, peercoin and more. The site’s “block explorer” has plenty of data on recent blocks, block difficulty, and estimates of future block difficulty, among other things.

Of course we’re inclined to point out that CoinDesk is not only the world leader in bitcoin news, but also an industry-leading source for data and information on topics like price, venture capital investments and a number of bitcoin network statistics.

Our bitcoin ATM map recently launched as a tool to visualize the ever-growing number of bitcoin ATMs around the world and to provide information for those looking to find a bitcoin ATM nearby.

Data analysis image via Shutterstock