Note 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.)

Did 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).

It 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.

This design makes it simple to prevent double spending. You just check that the transaction inputs are in the set of unspent transactions (UTXOs).

Another classic, BitListen: http://www.bitlisten.com/

And https://realtimebitcoin.info

My personal favourite: http://btc4me.com/bitcoin/bitcoin-traffic/

My favorite:

http://fiatleak.com/

Am I the only one that just sat there seeing BTC transactions of $1m+ and thinking "Damn, who's that guy?"

I 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"

The 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.

Theoretical market cap.

Its estimated that at least 40% of the coins are lost.

> That's like spending $1 if you've got $100 in your wallet.

You are off by an order of magnitude.

Yep 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.

Why, exactly, is everyone purchasing crypto-"currencies"? I abandoned bitcoin over 5 years ago because it was just blackmarket barter... now the Chinese use it to bypass state regulations while Russian ransomware holds computers hostage for bitcoin.

What is the volume of legal purchases versus speculative and blackmarket transactions? Why do people have any confidence in these digital assets?

To start (to answer your first question), if you’d held on to the bitcoins you had 5 years ago, they’d have increased in value well over a thousand-fold. So definitely speculation.

I think bitcoin's value really boils down to being a quasi-legal forex medium - bypassing international sanctions and state regulations.

That is a reasonable argument to hold coins if the expectation is increased adoption. However, when sales are restricted for illegally bypassing sanctions (eg US) or enabling capital flight (eg China), we will see the market fall to near-zero because bitcoin is not a currency.

What is a currency?

A universally recognized asset for exchanging goods and services within a nation. For example, everything for sale in America can be purchased with dollars. That is a key distinction - currencies have strength because they are nationally recognized.

If every nation banned trading Australian dollars, they would still hold value in Australia... and there are millions of people working to ensure AUD continues to hold value and confidence outside of Australia.

If every nation banned trading bitcoin, they would be worthless... in fact, they would be worthless if only a couple key nations banned the coins.

Let's do a thought experiment. What do you think would have happened if the US government had decided against the financial bailouts in 2008? Do you think the value of the USD would have a) increased or b) decreased. Bonus points if you can tell me why this is relevant to your points.

Why would you think it was a single person?

Many of the large transactions are likely payment processors moving bitcoins into and out of exchanges, not any individual. Or mining rig operators cashing out to finance their power bills (and I'm talking the big mining operations, not someone's one or two miners in their apartment).

Sometimes it’s just exchanges moving their assets around

Hi! 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!

Nice! 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.

Yup! It shows up by default, IIRC.

It's a layer on top of WebVR, similar to A-Frame.

I like the metaphor of BTC investments as just floating the quantity into the atmosphere via hot air balloon.

This visualization is broken. I can’t see the moon.

Its says balloons<1BTC and blimps>1BTC....however that appears wrong, looks like it should be 100BTC as conditional.

Oops!! Fixed it! Thanks for pointing it out to us

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

Nice, but I think fish would be more appropriate :) (Yes, I know a whale is not a fish)

Actually, 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

Would be interesting to see some more data viz on the blimps. Are these individuals or funds - very curious

Visualizing: You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. VIS guy

Please 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

I think it means communicating data visually, which this does. What do you think it means?

Maybe 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]

This is a textbook (dictionary) example of visualization.

Your 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=...

>>Designed for Chrome or Safari.

I am pretty adamant that these days you gotta design for Edge as well.

Surely 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.

Never wanted a Mac. Google is too much invasive of my privacy. I simply like Firefox. Does this make me less technologically literate?

No, 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?

Even if I start Chrome in incognito mode, it still contacts google analytics on startup.

where 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!

Hardcore 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.

what 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.

The developer is showing off an experiment he made using a bleeding edge web development framework. It has loads to do with web developers.

I'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

I 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.

LOL, this is what I am talking about!

And Firefox! And Opera! And Brave!

This is not funny.

Firefox 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.

This person also mentioned Opera which makes the whole comment a bad joke!

But Edge is terrible.

Edit: ugly font rendering (common to a lot of Metro desktop apps?), failure to save tabs state on exit (dealbreaker)

IE is terrible, Edge is amazing!

Genuine question, why use Edge over Chrome/Firefox?

Google's own performance benchmark shows that Microsoft Edge is faster than Chrome and Firefox.[0]

[0] https://mybrowser.microsoft.com/en-US/features/performance

Not only is Microsoft Edge faster, it's better for your battery life!

Lol, why? Nobody uses Edge unless that's the only thing allowed.

I am reading this page on edge. I have also chrome on this computer and I have admin right so I could install Firefox too.

Firefox doesn't require admin rights to install fyi. It will install to your user environment, and not the system just fine.

A lot of people use it because it's what comes installed.

I think, you probably confuse Edge with IE. The latter is what you said, the former is the modern beautiful and powerful browser

more people use IE than Edge

the source?

Arguably the best browser-stats group is 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