I've been developing a project called
https://drawingbitcoin.com/ over the last 2 years and I’m releasing a new major update of the site this week. The project is a live visual block explorer that allows blocks to be compartively viewed in high detail. I'm excited to share with the community. This is my first thread here about the project so will give some background.
https://drawingbitcoin.com/ started as a visual programming script I developed to explore and find interesting blocks to draw as physical artworks. I wanted a block explorer to illustrate blocks in a clean, accurate, minimal, unabstracted graphic and to also establish a scale convention so multiple blocks could be meaningful compared and contrasted with each other in high detail.
I couldn’t find the tool I wanted so I built it!
The tool takes each blocks transaction data and plots its transaction size as a circle where radius = log10 (sats per transaction). Comparative blocks fix the radius of 1 btc to a shared dimension to establish a scale between them. This allows multiple blocks to be compared and contrasted against each other. I think of it as a sort of bitcoin cartography.
I was having too much fun with the tool and released it as an online tool for everyone to use and explore blocks last year. It was (and current is) rough and ready but was a good proof of concept.
I’ve been experimenting this year with a new visual language for blocks building on this work. It will allow blocks to be explored spatially in 3D at a new level of detail I don’t think we’ve seen before. I’m going to launch this new tool on drawingbitcoin.com end of this week. I also have some interesting block streaming functions where you can randomly cycle blocks every 60 seconds allowing a sort of wandering graphic exploration of them.
Preview of the new tool (intentionally abstract!)
https://x.com/architect_btc/status/2120318361947054150/photo/1Using the tool, personally I've come across some interesting new insights within blocks. You can see the stratification of fees in early blocks, people love round numbers and fees often stepped in 10,000 fee increments. You can start to see the structure within blocks that really tells a story. Exchanges moving larges batches of similar tx’s with the same size and fee, introduction of ordinals and runes. Even the difference in vbytes size between the gensis block and block 01 as the text in the gensis block made it a bit larger (I think?). It really is fascinating to visually jump around blocks and start to see these connections.
The mission behind all of this has always been to push forward our understanding of Bitcoin by drawing it. I believe we understand the world through what we see. Bitcoin, and every new block added to the chain, is something we've never seen before. That makes visualisation an important part of how we explore and make sense of it. I hope this work inspires and encourages more visualisation by offering a new visual language and graphical tool to the space for anyone to use and explore blocks.
The updated
http://drawingbitcoin.com site goes live this Thursday at 20:00 GMT. The old site is currently live and gives a good idea of the concept.
Snapshot of the current site
https://x.com/architect_btc/status/2117248061533544548/photo/1I’ll also be launching the art works I’ve created with the help of this tool on the Friday.
This was the original focus of the project so happy for these two streams to converge and launch together.
I’ll continue to add to this thread with any updates.
Reach out if any questions on the project.
