Maybe you have heard of the millennium simulation once, the biggest simulation of the universe ever made. It is of great importance to do large scale simulations in modern cosmology, as new theoretical models in physics can be tested that way. It's here: http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/

I was thinking about how quickly a massive computational grid can be built using the bitcoin protocol and how to do science with it. You donate computer time and get coins in return. The computational part has to be done by the CPU, and the verification of the block chain can be Scrypt based. ASICs would not exist (if they did, modern cosmology would be really, really happy ).

A block should contain:

- The hash of the last block of course
- All transactions of the block, like other coins
- The result of one computation 'unit'. The blockchain would deal with time ordering of events, but one timeframe in the millennium simulation is already in the 100's of GB. So some kind of parrallellization should be made

Each full set blocks (so all units) would represent one unit of time. The millennium simulation only has 64 (representing almost 14 billion years!). We can do that better!

Anyone else think this is a good idea? I am a decent programmer, but would like to get this idea a bit more concrete before I jump into the C

Thanks for the input! I'm going to include some options:

- Enter an address so only transactions using that address are displayed
- Include a slider to set your own maximum amount of transactions
- Whenever a block is found, something is going to happen (but I'm not sure what yet)

I will create a better version of the code in the future (after it has a bit more features) to download. For now, you can just view the source code in your browser I use the Force feature of D3.js and the blockchain socket API to make this work.

I started on a little project to visualize the transactions in the bitcoin network. It takes the data real time from blockchain and displays them in a nice way. Check it here: http://bitcoin.interaqt.nl/

Let me know what you think! And if you have any ideas/suggestions, let me know as well. Thanks!

I updated the script to use a different visualization framework. This one looks much cooler

Thanks everyone!

SouthernTiger: You can calculate how much I earned with 15GH/s at mining.thegenesisblock.com. You actually lose money with mining on cex.io, but I managed to sell the GHS for a profit. So I made BTC with mining and BTC with selling the GHS for more than I bought it for In total about 80% profit in a week.

I started Bitcoin mining a while back with a USB block erupter to see how it all works. I got really interested into the Bitcoin network as a result of that, and have studied how the network works for a bit (how transations work, what mining really is, etc.). As a theoretical physicist and web developer I really like new technologies Now I have around 15 GH/s at cex.io (which are now just BTC waiting until the next diff increase) and invested a bit in LTC and PPC to spread the risk.

The reason I registered is that I want to take part in the BTC community a bit more. Today I had the idea to visualize the huge amount of data on blockchain.info, so I built the following page: http://bitcoin.interaqt.nl. It draws a colored circle based on the hash and transaction size for every transaction in the network realtime. I'd like to expand this project, so let me know if you have any ideas!

Thanks,
Luc