Visualizing bitcoin as the "Planet Money"

[satamusic]

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/

[TiagoTiago]

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.

[Quip]

oh, good idea!

[bitcool]

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.

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.

[ItFromBit]

Hello, newbie here, this is so cool!

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

[bitcool]

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.

[TiagoTiago]

Perhaps the algo could be a space filling curve, like Z order curves or Hilbert cuver ,  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

[TiagoTiago]

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

[bitcool]

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.

[Quip]

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?

[theymos]

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:

Code:

50 in--\__100 out
50 in--/

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

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

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.