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Visualizing Realtime Bitcoin Transactions in ReactVR
- onggunhao 9y agoHi! Robin and I built this as a side project to learn ReactVR and Redux. Bitcoin-VR uses pure client-side javascript to visualize Bitcoin transactions in Virtual Reality. Please wait for some time for it to download as the assets are quite large! The code is open source, and free for anyone to fork. We're also really new to web development, so we welcome all criticism and avenues where we can improve!
- danboarder 9y agoNice! Is it easy in ReactVR to add a button for Google Cardboard 3D viewing on smartphones? I've played with Mozilla A-Frame and it provides this, curious if ReactVR does as well.
- FLGMwt 9y agoYup! It shows up by default, IIRC. It's a layer on top of WebVR, similar to A-Frame.
- gt_ 9y agoI like the metaphor of BTC investments as just floating the quantity into the atmosphere via hot air balloon.
- sAbakumoff 9y ago>>Designed for Chrome or Safari. I am pretty adamant that these days you gotta design for Edge as well.
- knocte 9y agoAnd Firefox! And Opera! And Brave!
- sAbakumoff 9y agoThis is not funny.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoFirefox has about 4 times the market share that Edge does. If your argument is solely about market share, the Firefox version should be supported first and categorising this person's comment as a 'joke' is unfair.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sAbakumoff 9y agoThis person also mentioned Opera which makes the whole comment a bad joke!
- afraca 9y agoI'm no frontend developer, so I'm unsure what technology actually is used by ReactVR, but according to [0] only Edge and Firefox support th e WebVR API, that was funny to find out. It worked on Firefox. [0] https://caniuse.com/#feat=webvr https://caniuse.com/#feat=webvr
- sAbakumoff 9y agoLOL, this is what I am talking about!
- wuliwong 9y agoI actually found this super confusing. I opened up the app on chrome on os-x and I could move the view around, nothing seemed broken. I don't have a VR headset attached to my mac so maybe that's where the problems arise? It seems most of these browsers support webvr with their proprietary hardware, whether it be google daydream/cardboard or edge only supporting windows mixed reality headsets. It will be interesting to see where this goes moving forward.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoSurely not for experimental demonstrations of new tech such as this. Maybe if the creator wanted to monetise or present to the widest audience, sure, but this is aimed at a sector that is 99% going to have access to Chrome or Safari.
- sAbakumoff 9y agowhere did you get this insane number? There are plenty of people who use and like windows 10 and its wonderful browser which has nothing to do with IE!
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoHardcore web developers that don't have access to either Chrome or Safari? 99% was obviously a pulled-out-of-thin-air figure, but it's surely the vast, vast majority.
- sAbakumoff 9y agowhat it has to do with web-developers? The thing the guy cobbled together is for crypto coin and VR which is now available to everyone.
- wuliwong 9y agoThe developer is showing off an experiment he made using a bleeding edge web development framework. It has loads to do with web developers.
- muxator 9y agoNever wanted a Mac. Google is too much invasive of my privacy. I simply like Firefox. Does this make me less technologically literate?
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoNo, it makes you less prepared for cross-browser development/testing, but that might totally be a non-issue depending on your line of work. Do you not even trust Google enough to run Chrome in incognito mode once in a blue moon?
- megaman22 9y agoLol, why? Nobody uses Edge unless that's the only thing allowed.
- fermuch 9y agoA lot of people use it because it's what comes installed.
- sAbakumoff 9y agoI think, you probably confuse Edge with IE. The latter is what you said, the former is the modern beautiful and powerful browser
- blinger 9y agomore people use IE than Edge
- sAbakumoff 9y agothe source?
- TheDong 9y agoArguably the best browser-stats group is http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share According to that, for the last month Edge is 2.06% and IE is 3.88%. Edge has never had more users than IE according to their numbers. Edge has lower market share than any other browser apart from the defunct "Android" one (which was replaced by something claiming to be chrome years ago iirc, so of all the actively maintained browsers recognized by that survey, Edge has by far the fewest users). If you have information to the contrary, please post it
- baud147258 9y agoI am reading this page on edge. I have also chrome on this computer and I have admin right so I could install Firefox too.
- pjc50 9y agoBut Edge is terrible. Edit: ugly font rendering (common to a lot of Metro desktop apps?), failure to save tabs state on exit (dealbreaker)
- sAbakumoff 9y agoIE is terrible, Edge is amazing!
- wafflesraccoon 9y agoGenuine question, why use Edge over Chrome/Firefox?
- sAbakumoff 9y agoGoogle's own performance benchmark shows that Microsoft Edge is faster than Chrome and Firefox.[0] [0] https://mybrowser.microsoft.com/en-US/features/performance https://mybrowser.microsoft.com/en-US/features/performance
- sAbakumoff 9y agoNot only is Microsoft Edge faster, it's better for your battery life!
- germainelol 9y agoAm I the only one that just sat there seeing BTC transactions of $1m+ and thinking "Damn, who's that guy?"
- opportune 9y agoI noticed that and I have absolutely no idea how there are so many huge transactions. The peak of the drugs-from-the-internet era looked like child's play compared to this. The only rational explanations I can think of are either money laundering, institutional investors, or very wealthy people buying bitcoin as an insurance strategy. I do feel bad for the people who are buying into the "digital gold" narrative at this point in time. I hope none of these big buyers are just regular joe's with sub-7-figure net worths who are just being irresponsible with their money due to the "hype"
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoThe BTC market cap is nearly worth $300 billion, naturally there will be "large" transactions like that in something that big. Just Coinbase moving something to / from their cold storage is probably worth tens of millions in USD. And of course there's a lot of rich people and businesses that make larger transactions. A million doesn't feel like that much money anymore for billionaires. That's like spending $1 if you've got $100 in your wallet.
- ejolto 9y ago> That's like spending $1 if you've got $100 in your wallet. You are off by an order of magnitude.
- opportune 9y agoYep it's $1 to $1000 Furthermore I highly doubt that it's mostly billionaires with >$1m USD holdings of BTC. There simply aren't enough to sustain this level of transactions.
- jackpeterfletch 9y ago
- sschueller 9y agoNice, but I think fish would be more appropriate :) (Yes, I know a whale is not a fish)
- Diggsey 9y agoActually, you can call whales fish (it's not like there's a common ancestor of all fish of which whales aren't a descendent) they just also happen to be mammals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish
- oscilloscope 9y agoAnother classic, BitListen: http://www.bitlisten.com/ http://www.bitlisten.com/
- almostdigital 9y agoAnd https://realtimebitcoin.info https://realtimebitcoin.info
- SuddsMcDuff 9y agoMy personal favourite: http://btc4me.com/bitcoin/bitcoin-traffic/ http://btc4me.com/bitcoin/bitcoin-traffic/
- toss1 9y agoMy favorite: http://fiatleak.com/ http://fiatleak.com/
- nicoleczhu 9y agoWould be interesting to see some more data viz on the blimps. Are these individuals or funds - very curious
- _red 9y agoIts says balloons<1BTC and blimps>1BTC....however that appears wrong, looks like it should be 100BTC as conditional.
- onggunhao 9y agoOops!! Fixed it! Thanks for pointing it out to us https://github.com/bitcoin-vr/bitcoin-vr/pull/84 https://github.com/bitcoin-vr/bitcoin-vr/pull/84 PS: We set the param of 1 BTC when we built the first version a few weeks ago. Then came the massive surge in transactions and prices... we had to change the info panels to accomodate a lot more digits (esp for the USD price). Kinda crazy how the parameters changed within such a short period of time
- no-such-address 9y agoVisualizing: You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. VIS guy
- paulgb 9y agoI think it means communicating data visually, which this does. What do you think it means?
- bengotow 9y agoMaybe you thought it'd be an infographic? This is totally a valid visualization as far as I'm concerned. It packages and communicates data visually that would otherwise be difficult to see. It doesn't abstract up from the data with summary graphics, but it uses a time axis to give you a deeper understanding of the nature of the data. It even uses balloons, which I think may be the author suggesting a "bubble". So look, it even communicates a message. [Disclaimer: not a VIS guy]
- ChristianGeek 9y agoThis is a textbook (dictionary) example of visualization.
- dang 9y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive dismissals to HN. If you know more, please teach us by adding relevant information. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but then it's better not to post. Either way, please drop the swipes, and for bonus points we can leave out the internet clichés as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- no-such-address 9y agoYour criticisms of my comment are fair, but you are also defending an animation of hot air balloon that somehow describe attributes of cryptocurrency transactions. There's nothing wrong about making visualizations that look interesting and appealing, but do the most salient features of this display actually encode the data? Or was it designed mostly to convey a subjective view about Bitcoin? Didn't Tufte call designs like this building a "Duck"? https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00040Z https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
- jimrandomh 9y agoNote that the transaction sizes, in most cases, do not represent amounts of money moving between parties. The reason for this is because of how Bitcoin transactions are structured. Suppose you have 5.0BTC at an address, and you want to send 0.1BTC to someone else. The transaction that gets recorded to the blockchain has an input of 5.0BTC, an output of 0.1BTC going to the recipient, and an output of 4.9BTC going to a "change address" which is also yours. But if you don't know anything about the addresses then there's no way to tell, by looking at the blockchain, which address is the recipient and which is the change. (Also, the very biggest transactions represent exchanges and other deposit-holding institutions moving coins from new deposits to cold storage and from cold storage to their hot wallets to service withdrawals.)
- g09980 9y agoDid not know this. Is there a technical reason it works like this? In Ethereum, for example, if you're sending 0.1 ETH, you will just send that amount (no change address).
- masonicb00m 9y agoThis design makes it simple to prevent double spending. You just check that the transaction inputs are in the set of unspent transactions (UTXOs).
- jimrandomh 9y agoIt gives better anonymity that way. If unspent change went back to the same address, people would be more inclined to reuse the same address over time, which makes it easier for someone looking at the blockchain to identify who's paying who.
- masonicb00m 9y agoThis visualization is broken. I can’t see the moon.