Bitcoin Forum

Trying to make a visual representation of all bitcoins come into existence, it will be either:

  a) a 275 x 275 x 275 cube (20.8million), or
  b) a 100 x 100 x 2100 cuboid, or
  c) an earth-like sphere surface divided into 21m pieces

This Planet Money can be used to represent all wealth created by mankind, it will be nice if we can assign each bitcoin a coordinates, so you can visualize "what" you own.

Any suggestion on a good 3D image generation software?
 

By the title, I was anticipating someway we could visualize the development and use of Bitcoin in the world economy in the easiest and most efficient way possible.
Like positive affirmations, a small movie highlighting how a transition can happen.
Our thoughts create and collectively we create the world we live in- I liked the idea of agreeing where we desire to go and focus on it relentlessly with the highest good of all at heart, and so it is- is what is going to happen.

I don't get the idea of this representation in 3d though- To visualize what you earn relative to the total amount? You are going to assign one full unit of BTC, thus 21 million in total around the world- static or dynamic ?

it could demonstrate transactions as they happen based on localization of ip address? It would be an approximation, if at all possible but could be quite nice?

That is the interesting one. If you just use the land surface, each bitcoin will be represented by 7 square kilometers, about the same as the territory of Gibraltar.

It would be great if it was possible to "zoom in" and see each individual piece of "bit-dust" (the minimum amount into which a bitcoin can currently be subdivided). That would have an area of 709 square centimeters, just slightly larger than a sheet of A4 paper.

In reality 7 square km of Manhattan island is very different from 7 square km in Sahara desert, but we can use an abstraction of average land on earth.
So essentially, if somehow bitcoin-geocoordinate relationship can be established, exchanging "bit-dust" becomes equivalent to trading A4-size land titles?

bitcool, it is a brilliant idea! I really like it! :D

The analogy doesn't stretch further than being a cute graphic. Individual bitcoins don't exist in any meaningful way, nor do the individual specks of bit-dust. There is no notion of 21 million coins, numbered 1 to 21,000,000.

All we have in Bitcoin is a sequence of transactions, whose inputs and outputs are quantities of bitcoins. There's no way to "assign" those coins to a specific part of your graphic. The next time those same coins are spent, it will be with different keys.

Sure there is-- block 0 contains coins 0-49, block 1 coins 50-99, etc.

If you get sent 500 bitcoins, they can all be traced back to generation transactions, so you "own" a bunch of little pieces of land in bitcoin-world.

It will be really nice if one day I can say:

"Here is my 500 BTC, it represents all the land north of Dover, in the state of Delaware. It's easily verifiable that no one else owns this piece of land" (in bitcoin-world of course).

That will make me feel REALLY rich :)

I think it's technically possible to trace every bit-dust back to its origin, just like every gold atom should be able to be traced back to the location where it was mined. If such information is recorded.

Thank you, I stand corrected.

Now it just needs a fractal mapping from an integer to a location on the planet. That keeps nearby integers grouped together, like the XKCD Map of the Internet (http://xkcd.com/195/). Over time the map will get more and more fragmented, until eventually it really does look like dust.

Delaware is 6452 square kilometers, or 909 bitcoins. My rough visual estimate is that 35% of Delaware lies north of Dover, so you're looking at around 318 coins.

PS: If you want to own the Brooklyn Bridge too, I can sell you that for another hundred and fifty.

You can number generations that way, but once any multi-output transactions take place, any numbering is lost. "Which output got bitcoin #5"?

Here's something can be done to make it happen:

1)  Initially every bit-dust inherit this information from the coin, once a bit-crumbs get separated from the coin, it carries such information with it.

2)  All transactions should be done in a way to minimize the separation of any bit-crumbs.

3)  Logic can be added to make the bit-crumbs have a tendency to regroup back together.

In physical world, a gold atom is the minimum identifiable unit of the metal. Like a "bit-dust", if a gold atom is assigned a unique set of numbers (geocoordinates) when it is mined, no matter how many times the gold coin get melted and minted, the information will always be there.

Then the amount of information carried with a bitcoin can become HUGE, no question about it.

A quick check with HAL9000 shows you already sold Brooklyn Bridge to someone else, you are caught red-handed.  >:(

The Bitcoin protocol only prevents double-spending. It doesn't say anything about double-selling.

Actually, it doesn't need to be. Each "bit-dust" can be represented by a 16-digit number (e.g. 20,000,000.000 000 01)
Numbers end with zero means they are blocks of "consecutive dusts"
The sequence-to-geocoordinate mapping can be a global lookup table stored anywhere in the system.

Looks like there's a ray of hope after all.

thanks, I am glad some one like it.

The Brooklyn Bridge you have (or I should say you had) IS the bitcoin, remember?  ;D  so technically, you were just trying to swap some bitcoin-world real estate, which doesn't make sense b/c all real estate was created equal in that world.

That's easy-- if #5 is the lowest ordinal piece of dust, then it goes to the first txout.  Etc.

It's all arbitrary but deterministic, and all recorded in the block chain, so you could define rules to trace every .0000000001-of-a-bitcoin forward through transactions.

To me there are two fundamentally different approaches to digital currency: ownership-based and abstraction-of-tangible-goods.

The truth in bitcoin is that, there's no coin, there's only bitOwned, bitLedger, or bitEnvelop.... Bitcoin cannot exist without an address, while an address can exist with zero "coin" in it.

I've been thinking about gold standard in digital age -- be it gold/silver/diamond/carbon/land/whatever standard -- for a long time, but never realized the solution can be so simple and elegant. 

I would love to see this made.

i pledge 0.01btc to this :)

btw Planet Money is a nice NPR podcast, been listening for some time, check it out at  http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/ (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/)

Once the coin to geocordinate algorithm has been figured out, i imagine it shouldn't be difficult to use Google Earth overlays to visualize the data.

oh, good idea!

That will be a very intuitive and appealing concept to ordinary people. I still prefer treating all earth's surface equally, instead of trying to figure out which is land, which is ocean.

But to support this algorithm, it will require some fundamental changes and it will increase the complexity of the system. Using real world analogy, in current bitcoin system there's a gold "pool" with 21 million ounces gold in there, each btc address is a warehouse receipt against this pool, it only tells you how much you own but not what particular gold ounce/bullion you own. 

To track every 1E-8 ounce of gold, more information need to be added to each transaction, new mechanisms are needed, such as uniqueness ownership validation, bitdust ID clumping and consolidation etc. There will be a global database recording the ownership of all "bitdust" in existence.

Besides for the purpose of visualization, I am still trying to figure out what other benefit this feature can bring about. Otherwise it may actually be a step backward. In today's world, financial institutions transact billions dollars each day without needing to know the serial numbers on those phantom dollar bills.

Hello, newbie here, this is so cool!

Have you thought about using Marble?
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Marble/GeoGraphicsViewOverview

that will be one useful tool to use for mapping bitdust IDs to geocoordinates. but since all those existing bitcoins in circulation do not carry ID info, I don't expect this to become feasible anytime soon.

Perhaps the algo could be a space filling curve, like  Z order curves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_%28curve%29) or  Hilbert cuver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve) ,  to map between the coin data (One dimensional? Doesn't matter, the curves can be used to map an N dimensions array into a 1 dimensions array and vice versa) and the latitude/longitude coordinates (two dimensional)

http://corte.si/posts/code/hilbert/portrait/index.html
http://corte.si/projects/geohilbert/index.html
http://corte.si/posts/code/hilbert/portrait/hilbert-hilbert-small.png (http://corte.si/posts/code/hilbert/portrait/hilbert-hilbert-fullsize.png)

Wait, there is no way to know which coins are the ones you got, you only know the amount? Balls, without serial numbers on them there is no data to use to transform into points on the surface of Earth :(

Unfortunately, that's what I have been trying to say.
Maybe bitcoin v2 will have this feature added.

I could've sworn that there was a way of uniquely identifying coins.

EDIT: Would it be possible to trace each coin backwards along the blockchain to it's point of origin, and then plot their positions based on the time they were generated?

You can't unambiguously resolve multiple inputs:

The only solution is to arbitrarily choose some ordering scheme, as Gavin suggested: