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The Bitcoin Blockchain Visualized in 3D
- H8crilA 7y agoYeah, yeah, Bitcoin valuation makes no sense. But it is a beautiful realisation of the Cyberpunk dreams of freedom.
- jayd16 7y agoIts a beautiful visualization at least.
- maitredusoi 7y agoWhen bitcoin self create art piece ;)
- keymone 7y agoValuation of what does make sense though? Other than A=A, all valuations are artificial.
- _ph_ 7y agoMost valuations make sense as they are tied to the intrinsic value of things. A potatoe will feed you for a while. The value can vary - a potatoe farmer won't be hungry, so the value is to learn a living, a hungry person will value a potatoe very high. The price at each step in the chain between the farmer and the hungry person is determined by a lot of factors - distance and the scarcity vs. need at each point. Same as real estate - the market value will vary, but is cornered by the fact that each piece of land only exists once. With Bitcoins the value is only set by an artificial demand. There is nothing left over, if demand stops. You can't eat a Bitcoin. There is no limitation on creating new cryptocurrencies. It is like the million dollar homepage. It was once valued with a million dollars but I doubt, anyone would pay any significant amount for those pixels now. Why? Well, yes, there is only one million dollar homepage, but if there was any demand, you could create a similar page for a few dollars of effort.
- ignaloidas 7y agoYou can't eat a dollar too. Intrinsic value of a dollar is smaller than a piece of paper, as it's not even that good for taking notes. It's valuation is the same: based on artificial demand.
- _ph_ 7y agoThe point of the dollar is, that it is backed by the United States of America. By the government the Federal Reserver Bank as the front line of setting and defending the value of the dollar. And by the whole US industry, which is trading their goods in dollars. That is the reason why modern currencies are generally valued vs. the gross domestic product of countries.
- ignaloidas 7y agoYeah, I'm pretty sure that Federal Reserve hasn't been really backing the dollar. The gold is there, sure, but it isn't connected in any way with the value of dollar. The Federal Reserve surely doesn't have enough goods to back all of the dollars in circulation. The fact that US industry is trading by dollars doesn't change the matter. There are quite a few businesses that trade by bitcoin.
- _ph_ 7y agoThe dollar has not been backed by gold for a long time. It is backed by the Federal Reserve bank by the political power of the US and of course by the GDP of the US. Like with gold prices, there is quite some flexibility in the value of a currency, but that flexibility is contained in certain intervals because of the influence and the acting of the Federal Reserve bank. As long as the US doesn't default, the dollar has a value.
- ignaloidas 7y agoIt is not backed. I cannot exchange dollars into political US power or GDP of US.
- H8crilA 7y agoThe closest "normal" thing to Bitcoin is commodities, since it's a non-performing asset. It's also deflationary since its total supply is fixed (somewhat like gold, of which not much more can be mined at reasonable prices). But it does not behave like any other commodity - it's much more volatile. It may start to calm down at some point.
- keymone 7y agosure, my point was that "value" is artificial concept in itself. if there was no intelligent life - what in the universe would have "value"?
- piracy1 7y agoOP, did you make this?
- travbrack 7y agoReminds me of a dramatized GUI from CSI or a hacking sequence in a movie.
- skohan 7y agoEnhance!
- lpellis 7y agoThis looks like something from Tron, trippy. The height of the block is the amount of BTC, there are some huge (thousands of BTC) transactions happening. On a semi related note, I built a 3D visualization (globe) to see where these blocks are geographically mined. https://coinminingstats.com/globe https://coinminingstats.com/globe
- lowercased 7y agoI see you've bought in to the 'earth is a globe' conspiracy :) What's the tech behind that visualization?
- lpellis 7y agoI'm using https://threejs.org/ https://threejs.org/ for the webgl stuff, the tricky part was figuring out how to map the coordinates to change the country highlighting. Ended up having to write a custom shader which was quite the learning curve :)
- skohan 7y agoVery snappy site, nice work! What front-end technologies did you use to build it? I guess you're synching data to local storage and then querying it to get those quick page loads?
- lpellis 7y agoIts a vue.js site that I host statically on Netlify, with django backend on heroku that pulls all the data. The trick to get things to load quickly is caching the data on https://www.keycdn.com/ https://www.keycdn.com/ (with the right headers you can set it up that the CDN queries the slow pages in the background and serves the cached ones meanwhile to keep things near real-time). I might do a writeup about that it took me a while to figure out.
- skohan 7y agoI would happily read such a write-up.
- 6nf 7y agoI enjoyed this a lot, thank you :)
- kbumsik 7y ago"It's a UNIX system! I know this." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URVS4H7vrdU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URVS4H7vrdU
- akuji1993 7y agoIt tells me there are only 30.000 transactions? In the last block? Because that number seems very small compared to the hype that surrounds Bitcoin if that is "All Transactions of all time"
- ignaloidas 7y agoThis doesn't represent Lightning network, which is used for smaller, quicker transactions later synced onto the main Bitcoin chain by transferring only the differences between the nodes to save on transaction fees.
- umanwizard 7y agoIt's more honest to say "intended to be used for". The LN has been promised as the solution to Bitcoin's scaling woes for years, but somehow never seems to catch on.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- grubles 7y agoThe Lightning Network actually has seen parabolic growth since it started in Q1 2018 -- with roughly 40,000 payment channels opened and ~1000 BTC total capacity. https://p2sh.info/dashboard/db/lightning-network?orgId=1&from=now-2y&to=now https://p2sh.info/dashboard/db/lightning-network?orgId=1&fro...
- ilaksh 7y agoI didn't know LN was a real thing I could use. What app or whatever do I get for a wallet? And what places or sites accept LN? Or it works with any btc transaction?
- ric2b 7y agoThe simplest way is to use the Eclair wallet on Android. The receiver needs to support it, I've used: - https://joltfun.com/ https://joltfun.com/ - Buy games with LN at low prices - https://www.bitrefill.com/ https://www.bitrefill.com/ - Buy gift cards for many shops. This lets you make purchases on shops that don't accept Bitcoin. There's also moon, which I haven't used but lets you buy from Amazon with LN: - https://paywithmoon.com/ https://paywithmoon.com/
- novalis78 7y agoSaw this live in Miami at IOHK’s conference. They had a VR version setup for the public. A beautiful interactive tech art rendering that visualizes the “living creature” an active blockchain resembles.
- jtms 7y agoWell this is just awesome! Glad to see IOHK is putting some of that Cardano loot to use in fun ways :)
- electrotype 7y agoNow let's see something similar but for a private coin such as Monero! :-P
- bsanalyst 7y agoIt's impossible :P
- flixic 7y agoGreat illustration of disparity between transaction values. Massive majority of transactions are below 0.1 BTC. And then almost every block includes a transaction of a few thousand BTC. I'd love to see something like this for Visa network.
- ir77 7y agoAll his effort and the site is completely unusable on mobile Safari and barely/confusingly usable on mobile Firefox - I gave up about 20 seconds into it. what’s the point of all the nerdiness if it’s unusable.
- loblollyboy 7y agoWow, cool. I'm not going to try and get it but I appreciate the aesthetics
- momentmaker 7y agomycelium network ;)
- swamy_g 7y agoThe music sounds like the intro music from Tarkovsky's Stalker. Edit: Link for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgocncu6MBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgocncu6MBw
- eagletusk 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_projection More isometric than 3D ...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cookingrobot 7y agoThere are a lot of big bars in there, like 4000Btc transactions. Does anyone have a sense of whether those usually represent private buying/selling of coins, or are they exchanges like Coinbase cashing in/out, lightning network, etc? What's the story of these massive trades?